Cut

Posted by Bloody Disgusting Staff on October 22, 2004 @ 12:00am

In ?Cut?, a desperate agent is trying to persuade his has-been soap star Vanessa (Molly Ringwald) to take the lead role in an upcoming Aussie horror flick. He then goes into a spiel about how ?Scream? made Courtney Cox an international superstar. ?Yeah,? replies Vanessa, ?but she was already a millionaire.? Does this dialogue of choice sound familiar?

While ?Cut? borders on ?Scream?s? mockery and wittier-than-witty self-referential chatter, this Australian import is more faithful to all those early 80s exploitation flicks then to ?I Know What You Did Last Summer?. If the bottom-of-the-barrel cheapness of movies like ?I Spit on Your Grave? or ?The Burning? don?t sound even vaguely customary to you, than ?Cut? maybe the one to skip on video rental night. For us who relish in titles such as ?I Dismember Mama?, ?Cut? could be a treasure to behold.

The plot is essentially ?Scream 3? revisited with a pack of film students engaging in finishing a long-lost 80s horror film called ?Hot Blooded?. During original production, the witchy director (a wonderfully campy Kylie Minogue, pop goddess) was slain by the film?s madman star. The movie?s backers stopped filming, chucked the reels of film aside, and Vanessa, who played the screaming victim, was reduced to daytime TV. Now the spunky students (lead by director Jessica Napier), finally nabbing Vanessa back into production, are ready to roll. Until they start dropping like flies thanks to a psycho in a very disturbing mask and wielding a pair of hedging sheers (the first time I remember a villain using this item since Cropsy in ?Burning?).

Bloody, funny, and gritty, ?Cut? isn?t very pretty, or even stylish, but the attitude and feel of love for the material at hand gives off a nice ambience for the hardcore gorehound. Director Kimble Rendall and writer Dave Warner were obviously inspired by ?Scream?, but you can clearly see the love of trash classics of yester-year. In a sass of worship and creativity, ?Cut? is a cut above the regular Hollywoodized horror of today.