The triumphant return of the slasher movie, a subgenre that had been mostly dead and buried for far too long, arrived with key caveats. Those that were now being made were either part of a legacy franchise (updates to Scream or Halloween or next year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer) or were hinged on a goofy gimmick. We had time loops (the Happy Death Day series), time travel (Totally Killer), timeline jumping (the excellent Fear Street trilogy), alternate realities (It’s a Wonderful Knife) or body swapping (the underrated Freaky), brash genre-bending variations that all seemed a little reticent to rely solely on the base pleasures of the formula.
What had seemed inventive at the outset has started to become predictably repetitive, as evidenced by Netflix’s ho-hum teen offering Time Cut, a film that almost feels like the Scary Movie parody of this recent trend. To be fair to those behind it, it was filmed back in 2021 (it has that familiar, 10-person crowd Covid movie vibe) but even if its conceit were fresher, there’s not enough else here to merit that prized Halloween viewing slot. Keep scrolling.
