Cutting Class

Cutting Class is an inventively subversive and self-confidently absurd paraphrase of slasher flicks that remains misunderstood to this day. It is downright surprising that some find this film to be a "standard slasher movie” “without any ambition to make worn-out clichés interesting”. Cutting Class cannot work for viewers who enjoy the sadistic, fictional believability and explicitness of horror, because these attributes were not at all important for its makers. On the contrary, they deliberately play not only with the clichés of slasher flicks, but also with the very essence of the subgenre. The screenplay revels in piling up false clues and delights in skilfully concealing the killer’s identity from viewers until the very end. Part of the wicked game with genre conventions comprises the individual characters, who are turned up to eleven in terms of their formulaic rendering to the point of parody. This is true not only of the characters that make up the teaching staff, but especially of all of the main characters. The central female protagonist is a full-on slasher-flick Mary Sue, while Brad Pitt, with his characteristic early swagger and ostentatious body language, embodies the ultimate arrogant high-school prick. Cutting Class doesn’t go the route of literal cleverness like Scream or Behind the Mask, as it doesn’t pay homage to its genre and doesn’t want to save it. Rather, it takes a brash approach to the genre and its audience with the awareness that it can get away with anything, because as long as it pretends to be a slasher movie, the producers will throw money at it and the video rental shops will put it on display. However, it isn’t satisfied with blatant parody, instead preferring to snidely balance on the edge of being a functional, though absurdly unhinged, contribution to the genre. The film’s Achilles’ heel consists in the fact that it relies on the audience’s intelligence. On the other hand, if it doesn’t occur to you that the film doesn’t take itself entirely seriously when watching the running joke with the heroine’s father or the spectacular and overly elaborate climax in the school workshop, then you simply cannot be helped. (2021.11.08)