CUT (M). (Mushroom Pictures/Beyond/Globe/UIP) Director: Kimble Rendall Stars: Jessica Napier, Molly Ringwald, Simon Bossell, Sarah Kants, Stephen Curry, Kylie Minogue Running time: 78 minutes.
Scream meets The Blair Witch Project?
The first film from Michael Gudinski's newly formed Mushroom Pictures, Cut is a lightweight and terribly cheesy Australian attempt to produce a slick horror/comedy in the same vein as Scream. It works beautifully - up to a point!
A group of film students attempt to complete work on Hot Blooded, a notorious horror film that was never finished after the original director was murdered twelve years earlier. Previous attempts to complete this seemingly cursed horror masterpiece have been quickly abandoned when key players have been brutally murdered. Undeterred by the film's reputation, an eager young aspiring director (Jessica Napier, from Black Rock, etc) assembles her small crew and sets out to complete the film. She even lures the original star (Molly Ringwald) to return to Australia to reprise her role and face up to her fears. But once again a mysterious masked psycho begins his bloody work, butchering the attractive young cast and crew in spectacular and sometimes comical fashion.
Although not as cinema literate nor as clever as Scream and its ilk, Cut is an enjoyable enough parody of the teen slasher genre, and features plenty of grisly deaths. Admittedly, Cut is derivative and formulaic stuff, but it does have a healthy sense of irreverence that allows it to poke fun at its familiar clichés. The influence of everything from Halloween through to more recent slasher flicks is obvious in the staging of the film.
First time director Kimble Rendall (from The Hoodoo Gurus) maintains a reasonably fast pace throughout, and lays on the gore pretty thickly. However, the dialogue is quite trite, and some of the performances leave a lot to be desired. There are also some appalling continuity gaffes - in one scene a woman is impaled, face down, on a garden tap, but in the very next scene she is seen lying face up!
The casting of Ringwald, '80's cinema icon and veteran of John Hughes' teen comedies, as a has-been starlet anxious to resurrect her stalled career, should have provided first time script writer Dave Warner (from '80's band The Suburbs) with plenty of clever in-jokes, but he has let the opportunity pass. Kylie Minogue plays a small cameo in the film, but, like Drew Barrymore in the original Scream, is despatched within the first ten minutes.
On the positive side, Cut has gone into profit already, even before it has been released, purely on the strength of overseas pre-sales. While this may not mean much to the average film goer, it at least ensures that Mushroom Pictures will continue to produce entertaining and unashamedly commercial films for some time yet. God knows, the local industry needs more purely entertaining films like this rather than the sort of pretentious, well made and earnest art house fare that is critically acclaimed but shunned by paying audiences.
**1/2 greg king http://www.netau.com.au/gregking
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