Someone has a whole lot of explaining to do.
As we told you yesterday morning, the Japanese festival hit One Cut of the Dead popped up for streaming on Amazon Prime out of nowhere, which caught us by surprise as we had been waiting for distribution news here in the States. Needless to say, the movie dropping on Amazon totally out of the blue was strange, and as it turns out, it was actually quite illegal.
Third Window Films clarified last night, “The Amazon and Amazon UK Prime version of One Cut of the Dead is an unauthorized bootleg release of the film. As the film’s world sales agent and distributor, we didn’t put it on there and it shouldn’t be there.”
Subsequently, One Cut of the Dead was pulled from Amazon Prime’s streaming service, but not before countless horror fans were able to watch the hotly anticipated film free of charge.
“No apology or real explanation from Amazon,” Third Window Films tweeted. “Considering the financial and legal implications that’s a pretty poor show. Sort yourselves out, Amazon.”
How did a film get illegally uploaded to Amazon, and approved for streaming on the service? This is unprecedented craziness, and at this point, your guess is as good as ours.
“For those who do legally want to watch One Cut of the Dead, it opens in UK cinemas from Jan 4 and out on Blu-ray and DVD from Jan 28,” Third Window Films notes.
Meagan Navarro reviewed One Cut of the Dead for us out of the Fantasia Film Festival earlier this year, writing that it “charms with surprising zombie comedy.”
In the film, things go badly for a hack director and film crew shooting a low budget zombie movie in an abandoned WWII Japanese facility, when they are attacked by real zombies.
