I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

Movies So Bad They Make You Say "In Heaven's Name Who Paid For This Crap?"

Cut (2000) Australia

Okay this is a movie about making a movie that keeps getting its people killed. Unfortunately those people are not the ones who put this horrible Aussie throwaway together... On the minus side, it's a foreign film, meaning their version of scary is... off. On the plus side they have Molly Ringwald - umm, wait... This is, thankfully, NOT a found footage, hand held OMG what happened to everyone type of movie. Unfortunately it's much dumber than those. I mean this movie was SO stupid that whoever made the wiki page about it just kind of... forgot to complete the synopsis. It's written out and then after about 1/3 through just... stops. That. Is. Hilarious! That's why it's called a comedy/horror movie - cause nothing else about it is the slightest bit funny. Especially the part where I tried to find pictures for this stinker - put 'cut' into Google images and you'll get dozens of pictures of large companies that have  'cut' people, factories, jobs. That's scarier than any movie.

Quiet! Oh, you're dead. That's quiet enough...

Our basic premise: twelve years before they were making a horror film called Hot Blooded (which I thought a lot better title than Cut) which was your basic psycho slasher in a mask going after all the young people movie. They were almost done - but the director, Hilary Jacobs (a you've GOT to be kidding is THAT who that was? performance by Kylie Minogue) gets fed up with the ineptitude of her slasher. Later after they break he confronts her for humiliating him and as she's telling him how awful he is he uses the movie prop garden shears first to cut his own finger off (if you ask why I'll slap you, I'm not kidding around) and then to cut out her tongue (oh well, didn't like much her singing anyway). He then goes after the ingenue, Vanessa (Molly what-the-hell-happened-to-you Ringwald) but she manages to electrocute him.

Molly's breasts got better exposure than she did...

So now we're twelve years ahead in some Australian film school. The teacher wants his class to do something - artsy. They, being teenagers, want to do a slasher film. In fact they want to do THE slasher film - Hot Blooded. One determined director-to-be Raffy knows about the film's history (the teacher just got finished telling them all the blood-curdling stories about it - he had been the P.A. man during the filming) and contacts Vanessa who agrees to come back and finish the film mostly for the fame of returning to the movie that almost killed her - hoping it will boost her sadly sagging 'B' movie career (didn't help her OR Molly). They manage to get the original film footage, even though it is urban legend that whenever it shows, someone ends up dead. The class watches it - except for a practical joke, all are okay. They pack up and prepare to go to the original site of the movie to finish it - this time Vanessa will be playing her own mother (ouch that's gotta hurt - it'd only been 12 years). They don't know it but the man running the projector is hidden in a small room, having been disemboweled. Urban legend goes on...

Now THIS was classic 'cause... sorry, this is Nightbreed...

We get an endless (and I do mean endless, I don't care if they say it only was 82/98 minutes (what the hell - are they trying to count metric or something) it felt like an eternity). Because you know how this goes - yes, there's a real killer. Yes, immediately people start dying one by one (some adults as well as the usual grad students). Our only twist? It's not some dissatisfied crank who doesn't want the movie made. What this movie is trying to go for is that the inept original actor was soooo pissed that when he died, he BECAME the character and comes alive whenever it's played. Riiiight.

So it's shriek, dodge, parry, thrust, run, die.... shriek, dodge, parry, thrust, run, die... keep repeating until you fill up 82 (or 98) minutes. As a kind of side point we are told that Raffy wants this movie finished 'cause Hilary Jacobs was her mother (duh). If this was the case, why didn't the psycho spirit killer go after her first? Oh yeah, 'cause then the movie would be 10 minutes long.

Oh yeah, we had THIS...

Vanessa still shows herself to be a tough broad, still managing not to get killed by this celluloid nightmare. Okay Molly did a halfway decent job with the script she was given, I'll give her that much. And looks better at her age than I ever did so... I'll just shut up.

So he's celluloid basically right? Somebody finally gets the bright idea that destroying the original copy of Hot Blooded will do him in and at the end we get some halfway decent effects of his steady, uh, melting, as the reels are burned. At the end, he kind of pools and bubbles on the ground until he's just goo. Goo from what exactly? Should we have called Ghostbusters? Anyway, this torture flick (for us) is over....

Oh no little grasshopper - you know they can't end a film until there's a twist. See there was ANOTHER copy of the film (that only had one copy). Now only the original was supposed to bring the goo man out, right? Oh, but that wouldn't be any fun. In New York a film class is 'lucky' enough to have gotten hold of the 'only' copy of Hot Blooded and after hearing all the 'urban legends' associated with the film it starts... and we see goo man poised behind the teacher with his garden shears (good, cause she should get it first).