Netflix has put out a new horror movie that has landed at #2 in its top 10 list the day after Halloween, and unlike some actually pretty good Netflix original horror films, Time Cut is…extremely bad.
If you want to know whether or not Time Cut is worth watching, the answer is overwhelmingly no. It is very bad. Trust me. Or critics. Or audiences. Here’s the synopsis:
“A teen in 2024 accidentally time-travels to 2003, days before a masked killer murders her sister. Can she change the past without destroying the future?”
It’s a strange concept as this is clearly a movie aimed at teens where many of them weren’t even born in 2003, and people that were in high school in 2003, like me, think this looks too juvenile and also, is a terrible, half-hearted attempt at recreating 2003. You can throw in some Uggs and iPods but the vibes aren’t there. It just feels all wrong.
The film has a dismal 14% on Rotten Tomatoes, as close to as low as we see Netflix originals go, and an also-bad 40% audience score and a 5/10 on IMDB. The film feels like one of those “algorithmic” Netflix movies where they throw in actors from other popular projects and see if it works. In this case, that is Outer Banks’ Madison Bailey, Ginny and Georgia’s Antonia Gentry and Locke and Key’s Griffin Gluck. Like it’s just so obviously transparent that this was made by a focus group attempting to grab actors from its most popular teen-focused series and attempt to make this concept work. It does not.
Here are some of the critic reviews about Time Cut:
- AV Club – “It’s a glancing blow of a snoozy slasher far more interested in being a 2000s rewound comedy, meeting somewhere in the unenthusiastic middle.”
- TheWrap – “The time travel stuff is mined for funny jokes for a few minutes and then the film shows zero interest in all the worms it’s uncanned. It’s a whole lot of ‘what ifs’ and not a lot of ‘then whats.’”
- Guardian – “There’s far too much focus on the particulars of time travel, as if we expect or want a film like this to be rooted in any actual science, and… there’s a laziness to how it handles the simple slasher beats.”
It’s hard to make attention-grabbing horror movies in a crowded field. It’s hard to make time travel movies that are remotely coherent. It may be close to impossible to combine them, and this movie feels like it didn’t really have a chance. Skip it and watch the much better film, Woman of the Hour, still at #1 and with a 90% score on Netflix’s top 10 list.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
