In 2000, Australia hopped on the SCREAM bandwagon with the slasher-film-within-a-film slasher CUT, on Blu-ray from Umbrella Entertainment.

Twelve years after the disastrous production of the slasher film "Hot Blooded" was cut short by the murder of director Hillary Jacobs (singer Kylie Minogue) by the actor playing the film's killer "Scarman", college film student Raffy Carruthers (Jessica Napier) wants to finish the film despite the warnings of her film professor Lossman (Geoff Revell, WOLF CREEK) who had been a production assistant on the film. He does not believe in the curse of the film that took the life of the previous director who tried to finish it or the producer mysteriously electrocuted in the editing room; he just thinks slasher films are trash. Believing that a “horror film can be just as political as PRISCILLA or THE PIANO!" – two of Australia's bigger international exports from the period – Raffy's would-be producer friend Hester (Sarah Kants) manages to track down the rights to the producer's widow (Phyllis Burford, GALLIPOLI) who invests in their production since she can only collect on her late husband's share of the film if it is finished due to a contract clause. Her career circling the drain on soap operas in Los Angeles, actress Vanessa (Molly Ringwald, SIXTEEN CANDLES), who survived the original production and killed the killer, agrees to return to Australia to play the mother of her original character who gets killed in the final unfilmed scene. With Lossman and a small crew of fellow students – including pining cinematographer Damien (Sam Lewis), make-up artist Cassie (Erika Walters), and Scarman performer Bobby (Simon Bossell, LOVELESS) – Raffy and Vanessa head back to the isolated country house location to finish the film. Little do they know that the film archive projectionist who had been a suspect in the murder of the replacement director has also been murdered, and someone in the Scarman mask has started stalking members of the production and is just as eager to finish the film and the final kill.

Shot during a time when Australian horror films were few and far between, the Ozploitation boom having been followed by an indie/prestige film phase in which the country started courting Cannes and the Oscars with films like THE PIANO and ONCE WERE WARRIORS, CUT is less indebted to Wes Craven's recursive slasher SCREAM than the string of films that followed it like I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER or more closely THE FEAR: HALLOWEEN NIGHT, and the plot twists here seem more starved for novelty than truly innovative. While the younger cast falters in underwritten roles (Napier's Raffy is the least interesting character despite her obsession with the film and backstory), Ringwald gives dimension to a diva actress character truly haunted by her experience, and her scenes with Revell are the best parts of the film (actually achieving the kind of sweetness the SCREAM series tried to do repeatedly with the Courtney Cox and David Arquette characters). The gore effects were an early credit by Make-up Effects Group, who have worked on several large Hollywood productions lensed in Australia like THE MATRIX and THE WOLVERINE, and are of a high standard but some scenes may either have been sacrificed for an Australian MA 15+ rating and an American-friendly R-rating like a bit involving a log splitter. Production values are slick but, twenty years later, CUT may fail to distinguish itself from the rest of the pack the way it did when it first came out.

Released directly to DVD stateside by Trimark (later Artisan Entertainment and then Lionsgate), CUT comes to Blu-ray from Umbrella in a 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer of a 4K scan. The results are frequently gorgeous thanks to the level of production and the color timing has thankfully not been modernized, retaining the sometimes lush saturated colors of the period rather than the more now more common subdued and blue-leaning revisionist timing. The make-up effects hold up well and it is nice to see more detail in the Scarman mask than on DVD. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo rendering of the early Dolby Digital track is impressively dynamic with score cues, offscreen noises, and directional sound effects well-utilized. Optional English SDH subtitles are also included.