‘Time Cut’ Review (Netflix)
Stars: Antonia Gentry, Megan Best, Madison Bailey, Graham Ashmore, Griffin Gluck | Written by Hannah Macpherson, Michael Kennedy | Directed by Hannah Macpherson
If the plot of Time Cut sounds a bit familiar, it should, Totally Killer covered much of the same ground not that long ago. But despite being released second, Time Cut was actually filmed a year before Totally Killer was announced. Maybe it should have used its time machine to get to our screens first.
The film begins in 2003 in Sweetly, Minnesota, where a killer known as The Sweetly Slasher has been targeting the local teens. Summer’s (Antonia Gentry; Ginny & Georgia, Candy Jar) best friend Emmy (Megan Best; Dark Harvest, Elevator Game) was one of the victims, and she’s forced herself to come to the party honouring her and the other victims.
Unfortunately, the party gets some uninvited guests in the form of the police and The Sweetly Slasher himself. In the confusion, Summer ends up becoming a victim herself.
In 2024, Lucy (Madison Bailey; Black Lightning, The Painter) has gone with her parents to a memorial for Summer, the sister she never knew. While they’re there, she stumbles across a working time machine hidden in the barn where her sister was killed. She somehow activates it and finds herself back in 2003, a few days before the killings. She resolves to save her sister, paradoxes and consequences be damned.
Director Hannah Macpherson (Sickhouse, T@gged) and co-writer Michael Kennedy (It’s a Wonderful Knife, Freaky) don’t spend much time pondering the implications of this, or give Lucy a realistic reaction to it either. Instead, she races to the high school where asks the younger version of Mr. Higgins (Graham Ashmore; Tales From the Hood 3, The Forbidden Room), her science teacher and the obligatory nerd, Quinn (Griffin Gluck; Locke & Key, The Real Bros of Simi Valley: The Movie) their opinion of time travel. She eventually confides her secret to Quinn, who, of course, believes her, especially after she shows him her cell phone.
Time Cut tries to open on a serious note, with Lucy musing about the effects the murders had on the town, her parents and her life, but it feels shallow instead. Unfortunately, it never really gets any better as it juggles a slasher plot line along with a science fiction one involving the time machine, and avoiding the complications Lucy’s trip, and insistence on saving her sister, can cause.
As a slasher, Time Cut is much too tame and generic with bland, bloodless kills and a thoroughly unremarkable killer. The kills don’t even get a decent buildup, there’s no suspense, even scenes of our heroes creeping through a dark museum fail to work as the obvious attempts at jump scares fall flat.
The time travel angle is actually treated even less interestingly. Quinn, who’s a super genius, built it, but it ran out of the rare elements it needs to operate. The only source of a replacement supply? The facility that Lucy and Summer’s father works at. How’s that for an improbable coincidence? Worst of all, the whole idea of changing the future gets tossed out the window when they decide that saving Emmy isn’t changing the future, it’s just “giving it a makeover”.
I will give Kennedy and Macpherson credit for coming up with an interesting, if improbable, choice for the killer and an inventive final confrontation. But that’s really about all Time Cut has going for it. It fails as a horror film and as a science fiction film. There are a couple of moments where it looks like it might go somewhere interesting, such as when Lucy asks her parents in 2003 if they want another child, and they reply in the negative, but it backs away from these ideas almost as soon as they present them.
Overall, Time Cut is a collection of wasted ideas and potential, and unless you really want to hear Avril Lavigne sing “Complicated” it wastes its 2003 setting as well. Time Cut may have actually done it first, but Totally Killer is still a cut above it.
*½ 1.5/5
Time Cut is available to stream on Netflix.
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