Cut
It's hard to scream without a tongue
A group of film students decide to complete Hot Blooded a low-budget slasher shelved twelve years earlier when the film’s director (Kylie Minogue) was murdered by the film’s villain. Ignoring the fact that every subsequent attempt to complete this film has resulted in someone getting killed, the teenagers drive off to The Spooky House where it all began and start filming.
Surprisingly enough, someone in the killer’s mask and costume starts killing off the kids…
The main problem, for me, with Cut is that the makers of the film seem to have decided to make an eighties style slasher flick without really thinking about what they are trying to achieve. The result is a bizarre piece of nonsens that attempts to both parody and pay homage to the genre and one which fails to do either. There are a couple of funny lines and a couple of genuinely shocking scenes, but not enough of either to lift the film out of the mire of it’s formulaic origins.
The other thing that really lets this film down is it’s complete lack of suspense. Granted, as soon as the teenagers arrive at The Spooky HouseTM we know what’s going to happen. And by the time we’d established that the phone line had been disconnected and that they were so far from civilisation that no mobile phones could get a signal, it was pretty clear who was going to survive and who wasn’t. But there still needs to be some level of tension - not in terms of how it will end, but in terms of what will happen next. And over and over again, this tension was simply not generated.
The villain of the film - Scarman - suffers from a complete lack of charisma. Apart from one scene where he stares out of a cinema screen at his next victims, there is simply nothing there. There is no attempt to come up with moives, or even any suspense about who he really is… he’s just evil. Sorry guys, but this simply doesn’t cut it - there has to be a little more than that before we start to care.
The same goes for the teenagers… are they supposed to be slasher fodder or are we supposed to be interested in them. Because, if we’re supposed to be interested, there needs to be a few bits of plot thrown out to catch our interest in the first place. A few badly written lines of dialogue do not amount to a character.
The (anti-)climax of the film is predictable and dull. By this point I had completely stopped caring about what was happening and was taking bets on who would come back from the dead and save The Feisty HeroineTM from the killer and how much plot would have to be ignored in order to get to the set-up for The Inevitable SequelTM.
In short, Cut is a bad slasher film which has a little too much self-awareness to be a parody of itself and not quite enough self-awareness to parody it’s gentre. It’s a shame that the makers didn’t simply go with Hot Blooded - that could have been a much more fun film.
On the other hand, it does have Kylie in it.
Wednesday 04 Apr 2001 | Paul Pritchard | Horror
