Welcome to Knockout Horror. Now this is more like it! After a month of checking out decent horror movies with our 2024 31 Days of Halloween feature. I had forgotten all about just how awful some horror movies can be. Thankfully, Hannah Macpherson’s Time Cut is here to remind me.
This movie follows the story of Lucy (Madison Bailey) and her sister Summer (Antonia Gentry). Lucy, who just so happens to be a genius high school student with aspirations of working for NASA, accidentally stumbles upon a time machine. Yes, really!
After playing around with it, she suddenly finds herself back in the dark ages of 2003. Rather than spend her time discovering how we coped back then without iPhones and… well, just iPhones really.. She, instead, sets about preventing the murder of the sister she has never met at the hands of a violent killer.
So Utterly Ridiculous
This is, without question, one of the dumbest plots for a horror movie in years. This girl, legitimately, finds a time machine in an abandoned barn and just so happens to stumble into 2003. The year her aforementioned sister was murdered. That’s a pretty huge coincidence if you ask me but that’s the way the story goes so let’s play along. This is Back to the Future meets I Know What You Did Last Summer but with less fun than the former and less cleavage than the latter.
Lucy heads to her high school and is completely amazed by just how different of a time 2003 was. She then sets about meeting her sister (something, something butterfly effect) and preventing her imminent killing. Some extremely dull time travel stuff happens, some even duller slasher stuff happens and I wonder why I even bothered thinking that a Netflix horror could be anything other than awful. I really need to remind myself of movies like Choose or Die when I even think about watching low budget movies on this platform.
Why 2003?
It’s difficult to not criticise the time travel aspect of Time Cut. Movies like Back to the Future really put a lot of effort into recreating the past eras they depict. Time accurate vehicles, clothes, hair styles etc. Time Cut doesn’t manage any of that. According to Macpherson, the only notable thing about 2003 was the music and some of the fashion. This doesn’t even feel like a different place in time. The cyclical nature of fashion means the things that were in back in 2003 are in again now. Cargo pants, loose fitting jeans, flared jeans, crop tops etc.
Lucy rolls up into 2003 wearing clothes that I remember people wearing back then. Only for a confused Summer to address her outfit choice in a scene that can only be described as nonsensical. The way 2003 is depicted is not going to be remotely recognisable for Millennials. Macpherson looks to be pushing 40, maybe older, so it is something of a surprise that the era is presented, here, as if she never lived in it.
Characters are amazed by Lucy’s iPhone, a device that would appear on the market just a few years later and was talked about from late 2006. Touch screen phones were a thing from the early 2000s. I remember the Sony Ericsson P800 being just one example. PDAs had been a pretty big deal for awhile in the 2000s. This stuff wasn’t that remarkable or unbelievable. Screen quality, yes, but the concept of having the internet in your pocket, not at all.
Instead of touching on the era in a nuanced manner. Reflecting some of the realities of life in a post 9/11, post Columbine, world. Macpherson decides to simply blast “Teenage Dirtbag” and Vanessa Carlton’s “Thousand Miles” at the viewer. Songs from 2000 and 2001 respectively. As if those were the only things that defined that era. Weird.
The Least of this Movie’s Problems
With that being said, the lazy, and poorly represented, time travel aspect is the least of this movie’s issues. This is a film with a whole bunch of problems. For one, direction is remedial, at best. I have watched a lot of ultra low budget horror from inexperienced directors over the years and Time Cut shares many of the problems you would expect to see in those films. Awkward camera cuts, jarring, abrupt, scene transitions affording the movie a feeling of inconsistency and lack of flow, terrible scripting, poorly motivated actors. It’s just a mess, the shiny veneer of high quality cameras can’t hide how cheap this movie feels.
Acting is a major issue, as is casting. The are all actors in their mid to late 20s playing teens and that is very noticeable. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the actors were competent but that just isn’t the case. Madison Bailey, as Lucy, has one of the flattest and most low effort, fatigued, deliveries I have seen in horror for quite a long time. She seems disconnected, disinterested, and plain bored for most of the movie. Her body language and enunciation suggest a person who isn’t comfortable in front of the camera. My fiancée and I frequently had trouble understanding what she was saying.
Just Not Scary
Antonia Gentry, as Summer, is slightly better but still pretty bad. She does feel a tiny bit more energetic than the utterly lethargic Bailey, though. Griffin Gluck, as Quinn, does try quite hard and does a nice job with some of the more comedic moments. A little twist hits at the end that forces him to mix things up a bit and he feels a lot less competent. A lot of that is down to the terrible script, however. The dialogue is, at times, laughably bad.
Worst of all, this movie simply isn’t scary. It doesn’t even have some of the slasher jump scares and interesting kills that can make bad movies of this type somewhat watchable. There’s a distinctly PG feeling to the entire thing. From the scenes of violence right down to the ending.
It is clear Macpherson was unwilling to take any risks at all when it comes to Time Cut. This is about as tame as horror can possibly get. Almost to the level of feeling like an episode of Goosebumps. That feeling is reinforced with the killer reveal later on. The movie is ruthlessly predictable until it isn’t. You will be left baffled and wondering how the hell the writer managed to come up with something so completely ridiculous.
Should You Watch Time Cut?
I actually think there is a market for this movie. I think young teens and non-horror fans might enjoy it. It’s so damn saccharin and sweet that it is unlikely to offend. If Hallmark made slasher movies, they would feel a lot like this. For actual horror fans, however, there isn’t anything to recommend. The premise is interesting but its been done recently with Totally Killer and done much better. Acting is terrible, direction is very poor, scripting is awful and, above all else, it’s not scary. No decent kills, a dull plot, very little to enjoy.
