For Millennials, Time Cut opens with perhaps the scariest cinematic moment of the year. For here is a slasher dealing in nostalgia for a bygone era, a time so long ago that you can now pointedly revive its fashion and music and cultural references as a wink-nudge counterpoint to the present day. That particular era? 2003. Time really does come for us all.
While the text card “April 13 2003” is likely to invoke more terror than anything else in the film, Time Cut remains a cheap and just-about-cheerful-enough 91-minute romp, with one or two interesting ideas among all the throwback references. This is the latest in the burgeoning ‘slash-up’ genre, taking the masked-killer horror trope and smashing it into another subgenre – and it comes with a script co-penned by one of the pioneers of the movement, Michael Kennedy, who co-wrote body-swap slasher Freaky, and the festive It’s A Wonderful Knife. Curiously, it also bears an almost identical premise to last year’s Halloween streamer Totally Killer (no Kennedy involvement). There, Kiernan Shipka was time-travelled back to the ’80s to confront the Sweet 16 Killer; here, Madison Bailey is blasted back to 2003, given a chance to save the older sister she never knew from the blade of the Sweetly Slasher.
Sleepover horror fun for younger Gen Zs.
As with Wonderful Knife, there’s an undercurrent of grief to the fun and frivolity – Bailey’s Lucy has grown up seeing her parents’ world eroded by the death of their daughter Summer (Antonia Gentry), herself living in the shadow of the sister she never met. Lucy’s trip to 2003 not only offers a chance to save Summer – it allows the pair to actually spend time together, and there are heartfelt moments in seeing them bond. And in the final reel, the film raises interesting emotional paradoxes as the stakes of Lucy’s meddling become clear. Elsewhere, the holier-than-Swiss-cheese script is peppered with solid time-travel gags. “Should I invest in BlackBerry?” someone asks Lucy when they discover she’s from the future. She has tangible proof that she really has time-travelled: her iPhone, packed with infinite apps and Face ID unlocking. “This must be a million bucks,” gasps nerdy kid Quinn (Griffin Gluck) incredulously.
What Time Cut lacks is blood, and real scares. This is sleepover horror fun for younger Gen Zs, hardly aiming for nightmares – but you’ll wish it had Freaky’s abundant guts. One escalator-based kill could have been an all-timer, if the film didn’t refuse to get gory with it. The Sweetly Slasher mask, too, is utterly generic (and painfully identical to the one from Totally Killer). What it does have is a hit-packed soundtrack – a moment of pathos set to Vanessa Carlton’s ‘A Thousand Miles’; a ’00s makeover set to Wheatus hit ‘Teenage Dirtbag’; a splash of Avril Lavigne – and someone getting stabbed in the neck with a broken CD. Sometimes, that’s just about enough.