To the delight of their bullying megalomaniac director, the cast and crew of a blood-soaked horror find themselves attacked by real zombies. Or so we think during the uninterrupted 37-minute take that opens Ueda Shinichiro’s superadrenalized zom-com, which then reveals its actual story in flashback. In reality, what we’ve just seen is a live TV broadcast persistently threatened by wild mishaps and behind-the-camera attrition, caused, among other reasons, by the onset of explosive diarrhea in the sound department. How this hapless band of low-budget hacks manages to keep its jerrybuilt assembly from falling apart provides the film with its second, even more impressive layer of ingenuity. We certainly find ourselves wondering, on multiple occasions, “How did they do that?” But the whole thing is so relentlessly antic that a second viewing might seem more exhausting than illuminating.

Published September, 2018