“For what it’s worth? I really love this song.”
Story: The Band Suicide Disease vanished in 2024. They had a show at the Stone Pony lined up. Plus, Avenge Sevenfold and Panic! At the Disco wanted them to open for them. Not too shabby. But lead singer Jay wants to do a music video, even though they’re broke. So when a guy called Mr. Director says he’ll shoot a video for them, for free? Why not grab the girlfriends, and head out to the middle of nowhere on desperation alone?
Scares: None. Just some spooky vibes.
Splat Factor: A decent amount of blood, bruises, and some cool burn FX.
Subgenre: Satanic-ish (Heavy On The Ish) Slashers
Year Released: 2024
Remake, Sequel or OG (Original Ghoul)?: Original. But you’ll have flashbacks to earlier condemned building horrors.
Trick or Treat?: Cut has a cool premise, a talented lead villain, and a game cast. But it squanders it all with lazy plotting and shallow script writing.
With this story being about a band that vanished, found footage would have been a better way to go. And I say that as someone who’s kinda over that genre. Still, the cinematography is better than it has a right to be for such a dull story.
The cast tries their best with what they’re given, but the choppy editing and underdeveloped scenes that neither show nor tell. Cut‘s writer/director Don Capria has some experience with short films and videos, but flounder in his first feature length film. The band lost a friend a year before the story begins. How? Why? We don’t find out until the end of the film. So that death is an anecdote that leads nowhere, until it’s suddenly important. But with the lack of build-up? I didn’t care.
What Cut tries to do is make the climactic reveal of the film a shocker. Instead, the lack of any time spent fleshing out these characters and their apparently troubled history leaves the story uninteresting. Plus there are “spooky” satanic images smash cut in between scenes that don’t go anywhere. It’s ultimately an annoying red herring, promising something the film never delivers.
Cut‘ll scratch the horror itch, thanks to a few interesting kills. It’s not bad for a low budget horror, but the hints of what could have been haunt the story more than Mr. Director ever could. Hopefully Capria will grow as a creator; there are seeds scattered throughout Cut that hint at a writer with interesting ideas. He just needs time and experience to develop them into something really good. But it is good to see the talented Louis Lombardi ham it up as Mr. Director.
Score: 2.5 out of 5 pumpkins.
