Time Cut Parent Guide

Summer (Antonia Gentry) was brutally killed by a serial killer in 2003, and her younger sister Lucy (Madison Bailey) never even met her. But Summer left her mark on the family, and Lucy believes that her parents chose to have her as compensation for their loss. It seems like nothing can change things for Lucy now – until she stumbles across a time machine. She activates it by mistake, and finds herself in 2003, just days before Summer’s death. Lucy knows that changing things in the past could destroy the future – but how can she stand by and let someone die?

Time Cut is a dismal offering to drop on horror fans a day before Halloween. If films operated by the time-honored rules of trick-or-treat, Netflix would be getting egged tonight. Lucy introduces herself and the film in a rambling, self-absorbed narration which feels like the actress was accidentally handed a page of disorganized character notes instead of the script, and it’s basically downhill from there.

As slasher movies go, the content is pretty mild, but you can see how the gore could be problematic. Unsurprisingly, the film genre named for grisly murder needs some grisly murder. This film has all the genre tropes (and then some), but it never really delivers much in the way of chills. There’s hardly any blood, and really limited on-screen violence, at least compared to other slashers. People are still getting stabbed here and there, but I’ve seen more visceral injuries in superhero flicks. There are also no scares, no real tension, nothing to make this trek through the petty personal lives of 17-year-olds worth the inanity.

The worst injury here was to the audience. I started this movie with a headache, and now it feels like someone’s trying to install a red-hot golf ball behind my left eye. I can’t pin all of that on the movie, but since it’s here and profoundly irritating, I’m inclined to blame it anyway. It’s an unutterably dreadful combination of bland and annoying, and I wouldn’t wish that on any of our readers.