[Fantasia 2020 Review] Special Actors is a Decent if Flawed Follow-Up to One Cut of the Dead

In a way, you have to feel bad for writer/director Shinichiro Ueda. He came out swinging with the incredibly low budget One Cut of the Dead and established himself as a unique, inventive and frenetic voice in comedy. Chances are, no matter how good his follow-up would be, it’d be held to the same expectations. Do something similar and you’re treading water. Go a completely different route and those expecting the same kind of meta-twists will be disappointed. So going into Special Actors, I found myself at a similar impasse. It’s nowhere near as singularly inventive as One Cut of the Dead was and it’s similarly less impactful, but Ueda’s sophomore feature is still amiable and entertaining. 

Like One Cut of the Dead, we open on an actor who is having an incredibly tough time with a very intense director. This time, the actor is Kazuto (Kazuto Osawa) and he’s auditioning for a role. Unfortunately, he’s also incredibly timid and faints when a male authority figure makes him nervous or stresses him out…and that’s what happens when the director gets in his face. It then happens again when a brusque medic tries to take care of him. At his doctor’s office, he begs to be cured.

At home, he retreats into his comfort food: a VHS copy of an old Z-grade movie called Rescueman. In the incredibly poorly dubbed film, Rescueman uses telekinesis and a mix of bad martial arts and swinging hips that’d give Elvis a run for his money to make the bad guys float, cough up explosions of blood and turn into propelled weapons. He mimics the moves and whispers the lines from his couch while scrunching his boob-ball, a stress ball he uses to reduce his tension because, in his own words, “I read boobs can help calm you down.”

Rent’s late, he’s been given to the end of the month to find a new job (you can’t have a guard who faints at the presence of violence) and he just watched a drunkard assault a young couple before getting his ass handed back to him. Kazuto almost faints but when the couple leaves he realizes the drunkard is his brother Hiroki (Hiroki Kono), who Kazuto hasn’t seen since their mother’s funeral five or six year prior. Turns out Hiroki works for an Improv Anywhere-like acting studio called Special Actors and the man half of the accosted couple paid Hiroki to tussle to earn points with the woman. 

From forming long lines at stores to laughing at movies to crying at a CEO’s funeral, the Special Actors stage scenes that they practice to perfection. Hiroki pulls Kazuto into the acting troupe and after a few montages, a woman approaches the group with a tricky proposition. Her sister has been brainwashed by a UFO Cult and is planning on handing over the family inn to the cult very shortly. And so brothers Kazuto and Hiroki, along with the entire Special Actors troupe, must come up with a way to infiltrate a cult that worships a cosmic alien deity named Lord Gazeus before its 8,396,825,800th birthday celebration!

Just as I compared One Cut of the Dead to the play/movie Noises Off! in order to explain the similarities, a certain late ‘90s thriller seems to be the thematic pull for Ueda’s Special Actors. What works really well for Ueda’s madcap comedy is that way it plays with reality and reelity. It seems to exist in this hyperreal world where a troupe of actors can try to pull off a heist by using the power of acting. The cult, meanwhile, adds to the zaniness of the situation with its dogma and otherworldly deity. Led by a mute Master Tamaru who communicates Lord Gazeus’s teachings to his father through telepathy all the way from Gazeus’s home on the planet Musubiru, the cult sells memorabilia and shirts in a makeshift gift shop. The troupe meanwhile has the same kind of energy Ueda employed with his One Cut cast and each member gets a moment to shine as ridiculous situation leads to ridiculous situation. 

After a very entertaining and funny opening section, the middle kind of slows as the Special Actors plan out their infiltration. Some sections of it work hilariously well, such as the inner workings of the Special Actors, which includes a scriptwriter and acting coach in order to storyboard their situations. The lengths the troupe goes to craft meaningful interactions, planning out each and every moment of their scenes is entertaining in the extreme lengths they go. Think a more zany Family Romance, LLC. As complications and new information changes Kauto’s perspective of the cult, the focus turns into a heist film.

What works really well is the way the script pits the cult and the acting troupe against each other. Obviously, the cult is quickly established as being a more nefarious version of the Special Actors, as it’s about greedy leaders raking their members over the financial coals and crafting their own set pieces. Watching the two sides try to take control of the situation and the lengths the Special Actors go to over-act the cult is entertaining, even though it goes on a bit too long.

The finale pulls everything together and while the denouement that brought a smile to my face and actually got me a little emotional, it feels a little forced. It’s an amiable film about amiable people doing amiable things. While the stakes are low, the staged sequences entertain particularly one big climactic moment that had me chuckling and cheering in spite of myself. It’s a slight film that treads in very familiar territories and you’ll probably know where it’s going…but it’s a fun trip regardless.