Takayuki HamatsuTomokazu YamaguchiHarumi ShuhamaYuzuki Akiyama
One Cut of the Dead Spin-Off: In Hollywood
Also known as: Kamera wo Tomeru Na! Spin-Off: Hollywood Daisakusen!
Medium: TV
Year: 2019
Director: Yuya Nakaizumi
Writer: Shinichiro Ueda
Actor: Takayuki Hamatsu, Yuzuki Akiyama, Sakina Asamori, Nozomi de Lencquesaing, Takuya Fujimura, Charles Glover, Ayana Goda, Manabu Hosoi, Hiroshi Ichihara, Kazuaki Nagaya, Harumi Shuhama, Yoshiko Takehara, Tomokazu Yamaguchi, Shuntaro Yamazaki, Miki Yoshida, Shin'ichiro Osawa
Keywords: horror, zombies
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Format: 56 minutes
Url: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10188260/
Website category: J-zombies
Review date: 13 March 2025
One Cut of the Dead Spin-Off In Hollywood
The original 2017 One Cut of the Dead is funny and clever, but this 2019 sequel I couldn't be bothered with. In Hollywood? Really? If I wanted to watch a Hollywood film, I'd watch one made by Americans. That's the trivial reason why it took me months to get around to watching this sequel, but it's not my chief problem with it.
The formula's the same as last time, except much shorter. (Original = 96 minutes. Sequel = 56 minutes. I think it was made for TV, whereas the original was a movie.) They've also ditched the triple nesting of a film within a film within a film. Just two layers this time. Part 1 = a bad zombie movie. Part 2 = going behind the scenes to see it being made. Unfortunately, this time "part 1" managed to be bad in uninteresting ways. It starts with the heroine of the original's film-within-a-film having moved to an "America" where only two actors are American and everyone else is Japanese with a blonde wig and a variable English accent. (Why so many blondes? The USA isn't Sweden.)
Our heroine (Chinatsu) is working as a waitress, but she's lost her voice from shock. A waiter reassures her that she's safe. No zombies here. Nothing to worry about! Soon, though, there's a suspicious news announcement from an antique radio that looks like something from the 1920s and might be a jukebox. Six minutes into the film, out of nowhere, the diner's full of zombies! Next, we get:
1. Blonde wigs falling off.
2. Randomly having a machine-gun. "Take that, fucking zombies."
3. An annoying American actor who briefly impersonates Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver and can't even manage overblown melodrama. He can, though, understand Japanese, despite apparently being a perfectly normal American in (ahem) America. He and Chinatsu can have a mixed English-Japanese conversation with no misunderstandings.
4. "I can't go with you," says Chinatsu, deciding to stay with the zombies. "I have to save Tommy." Eh? We last saw Tommy being bitten by a zombie, but...
5. "I found the zombie medicine so I only turned halfway."
6. Harumi charges on set out of nowhere, doing her zombie-repelling tai chi or whatever that was. Yes, I quite liked her in the first film, but she's not even supposed to be in this film they're making.
7. Randomly producing a sword.
This terrible "movie" only lasts 17 minutes. That's not even a TV episode. Anyway, I realise that the basic premise is that the filmmakers are flying by the seat of their pants and constantly on the brink of disaster, but what they've produced here was too obviously stupid to be of any interest.
The rest of the film... no, sorry, they'd lost me. But I was allergic to the "American stuff in a Japanese film" thing, so feel free to ignore me and give it a whirl anyway. The first film's still great, at least.