Summary
Resident Evil is a new film from Zach Cregger, the director behind Weapons, one of the best horror movies of 2025. Based on the long-running Resident Evil video game series, the movie has gotten rave reviews, with a tremendously impressive 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes with well over 100 critics reporting in. That makes Resident Evil one of the best-reviewed zombie movies of all times…but it’s not the best-reviewed zombie movie of all time. That honor goes to another… One Cut of the Dead is the best zombie movie ever made At least according to critics One Cut of the Dead is a Japanese zombie movie from 2017. Written, directed, and edited by Shin’ichirō Ueda, it opens on a film set, where a ragtag crew is shooting a zombie movie called True Fear. The director, Takayuki Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu), badly wants this to go well, so he’s found a way to spice things up: he’s raised actual zombies and hasn’t told the cast about it, hoping their fear will come off as genuine if their lives are actually in danger. We watch this scenario play out in bloody, brutal fashion in a long, unbroken take that lasts for 37 minutes. This first section of the movie is entertaining enough, not to mention technically impressive. But after that, One Cut From the Dead reveals itself to be deeper than it first appears. Without spoiling too much, there’s a metatextual element to the movie that gets underway in the second section, and shifts into overdrive in the third. In the first section, there are weird moments that almost feel like mistakes, including close-ups that are held for too long, and strange interludes where the characters make small talk even as they’re stalked by flesh-eating zombies. In the third act, all of this is revealed to be part of a master plan, and it’s hilarious to watch it unfold. One Cut of the Dead is technically a horror film, but it’s also a comedy, and a very funny one. In the end, it ends up being a love letter to independent filmmaking; the whole thing cost ¥3 million to make, or about 27.93 in Japan and 50,000 in North America, so it never broke out stateside. Unfortunately, the movie isn’t currently available to stream on major services like Netflix or Prime Video, although you can watch it on the horror-centric streaming service Shudder. If you don’t have that, you can always rent or buy One Cut of the Dead on Prime Video or Apple TV. Zombies everywhere Resident Evil and One Cut of the Dead have something else in common: they both run roughly 90 minutes, so they won’t take up too much of your time. That makes sense, since they’re both comedies at heart; a good comedian knows to that brevity is important. If you want even more zombie fun after seeing these two classics-in-the-making, you have lots of options.