For It Is Man's Number

It's blindingly obvious that Netflix decided to offer up Time Cut to those who already enjoyed Totally Killer on Amazon Prime Video. Whereas that film had a young woman ending up back in the 1980s, where she may be able to stop the slasher who killed her mother, this film has a young woman ending up back in the early 2000s, where she may be able to stop the slasher who killed her sister. Do you already notice one of the big problems this might have in comparison to the film it most closely emulates? Yeah, someone time-travelling to the early 2000s just isn't as ripe for comedy as someone time-travelling to the 1980s. Although, to be fair, Time Cut isn't necessarily selling itself as a comedy. It's just a shame that it fails to sell itself as anything else, completely failing as a slasher, a sci-fi movie, and a thriller.

Madison Bailey plays Lucy Field, a high school student who feels that her life is overshadowed by the killings that devastated their town over twenty years ago, creating a wound that has never fully healed for her parents and others. Stumbling on to a time machine in a nearby hay barn, as you do, Lucy ends up back in 2003, where she meets her sister, Summer (Antonia Gentry), one of the victims of the killer all those years ago. Lucy wants to change the past, but that could also end up jeopardising her own existence. Thankfully, she has a young scientifically-minded man named Quinn (Griffin Gluck) ready to help her, but there's not too much to worry about when this time-travel movie decides to establish some rules that allow it to essentially do whatever it takes to get to the preferred ending of writers Michael Kennedy and Hannah Macpherson.

Macpherson also takes on the directing duties here, having crowd-funded some of her feature debut just over a decade ago before then spending most of her time working on shorts and TV shows (with the exception of something called Sickhouse and a film that slotted alongside others in the Into The Dark series). She may well have a lot of talent, but she's seriously hampered here by the clumsy writing from Kennedy, who also has the story credit. Kennedy likes to mix slashers with different high-concept ideas, having also written Freaky, It's A Wonderful Knife, and Heart Eyes, but I would suspect that you'd enjoy all of those films ahead of this one. Whether they succeed completely or not, they all have a stronger sense of commitment to the main concept. Time Cut feels like something made with extreme reluctance, like a school project written by teens who were keen on the whole idea when they started it, but then soon realised just how disinterested they were as they were forced to do more research and up their word count.

The sad thing is that the cast are generally very good. Bailey is a fantastic lead, making me wish I had more reason to be invested in her plight, and Gentry is absolutely fine as the potentially-doomed Summer. Gluck is enjoyable as Quinn, so good that he makes it easier to accept just how quickly he believes the wild truth as told to him by Lucy. There are others who do well, but the film works best when it shows the central trio trying to find their way to catching a killer and figuring out the butterfly effect of that. 

Sadly, there's nothing here to make it worth recommending to others. As I said in the opening paragraph, this doesn't work as a slasher, nor a sci-fi movie, nor a thriller or mystery. It's just there, disappointingly determined to make the end of the film feel strangely inconsequential, despite at least one big change to the lives of our leads. Avoid.

3/10

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I was slightly predisposed to disliking Elevator Game before I saw it because I saw the words "based on actual events"on the poster for it. While that's true, in terms of the silly social media trend of pressing elevator buttons in a certain order in the belief that you will see some other world or summon some spirit, or both, it's a work of fiction that only uses a small amount of truth as a starting point. It happens, and has been happening for decades now, but I am still allowed to be irritated when it's such a tenuous use of the phrase.

Anyway, the very simple plot is that a group of people who make videos debunking urban legends end up being asked to record themselves taking part in the elevator game. Viewers know this may not end well, having seen one young woman face a horrible fate at the very start of the film, but there's over an hour of the film dedicated to showing us the group participating in the game and dealing with the consequences of it.

Made by the people who delivered the slightly disappointing The Creatures Were Stirring (Rebekah McKendry directing, while her husband, David Ian McKendry, is tasked with joining Travis Seppala in the writing department), BUT also gave us the pretty great Glorious, Elevator Game isn't terrible, but it's missing some care and skill to make it any good.

While the game itself seems silly to someone like me (i.e. someone not interested in jumping on to any social media trend like a lemming), that wouldn't have been a problem if the rest of the film had made up for the dubious starting point with some enjoyable set-pieces and decent characters. There are some scares here that aren't too bad, for all they feel like weak imitations of scares from much better movies, but the characters and tone are never as strong as required (especially noticeable when someone walks into a restaurant to claim as much salt as possible in order to prepare some kind of protection).

Nobody onscreen is doing bad work, and I'll take a moment here to namecheck Gino Anania, Alec Carlos, Nazariy Demkowicz, Madison MacIsaac, Verity Marks, Liam Stewart-Kanigan, and Megan Best, they're unable to develop anything beyond the weakest of characterisations. No one character really stands out until you see who is being left for the final scenes, and I suspect most viewers will struggle, as I did, to be invested in the outcome of this. Ultimately . . . it's a film about people finding out after having fucked around. Which is enough to make me enjoy the few gore gags and shrug for the rest of the runtime.

I am sure that McKendry has the ability to make another properly good horror one day, but this isn't it. In fact, it feels like a big step backward when compared to the wonderful strangeness of her previous feature.

4/10

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