Netflix has released a new horror movie that landed at number 2 on its top 10 list the day after Halloween, and unlike some of Netflix's actually pretty good original horror movies, TIme Cut is…extremely bad.

If you want to know whether “Time Cut” is worth watching or not, the answer is overwhelmingly no. It's very bad. Trust me. Or critics. Or audience. Here is the summary:

“A teenager in 2024 accidentally travels to 2003, just days before a masked killer murders her sister. Can she change the past without destroying the future?”

It's a strange concept, as it's clearly a film aimed at teenagers, many of whom weren't even born in 2003, and for many of them was Like me in high school in 2003, I find this too juvenile, and besides, it's a terrible, half-hearted attempt at recreating 2003. You can throw in some Uggs and iPods, but the vibe isn't there. It just feels wrong.

The film has a dismal 14% on Rotten Tomatoes, almost as low as we see for Netflix originals, and an equally poor audience rating of 40% and a 5/10 on IMDB. The film feels like one of those “algorithmic” Netflix movies where they bring in actors from other popular projects to see if it works. In this case, that's Outer Banks' Madison Bailey, Ginny and Georgia's Antonia Gentry, and Locke and Key's Griffin Gluck. As if it was just so blatantly transparent that this was done by a focus group trying to recruit actors from their most popular teen series and try to bring this concept to fruition. That is not the case.

Here are some reviews of Time Cut:

• AV Club – “It's a fleeting stab at a sleepy slasher that's far more interested in being a rewound 2000s comedy that meets somewhere in the unenthusiastic middle.”
• TheWrap – “The time travel stuff is used for funny jokes for a few minutes, and then the movie shows no interest whatsoever in all the worms it's uncanned.” It's a whole lot of “what ifs” and not much “What would happen then?”
• Guardian – “There's far too much focus on the minutiae of time travel, as if we expect or want a film like this to be rooted in any actual science, and… there's a laziness in the handling of the basic slasher beats.”

It's difficult to make attention-grabbing horror films in a crowded environment. It's hard to make time travel films that are somewhat coherent. It may be next to impossible to combine them, and this film doesn't seem to have had much of a chance. Skip it and watch the much better movie “Woman of the Hour,” which is still #1 and on Netflix’s top 10 list with a score of 90%.

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