It’s a trio of flicks featuring gay, lesbian, and queer characters in a variety of subgenres.
TIME CUT (2024)
Apparently, Time Cut first went into production like two years before Totally Killer even existed, but then the filmmaking process slowed. As a result, Totally Killer was released first and Time Cut feels like a rip-off. Don’t let that stop you from watching it, because it stands on its own in the time travel slasher subgenre.
For starters, it’s going to be trippy for some people to comprehend that it has been twenty years since the early 2000s. The film reminds us with pop culture references, mention of there being no social media or smart phones, and a soundtrack including hits by Fat Joe, Vanessa Carlton, Hilary Duff, Avril Lavigne, and Michelle Branch. And considering one of the main characters is a lesbian, most notable is the reminder of how far queer rights have come in the past twenty years, even though they are now most likely going to swiftly slide backwards.
Anyway, twenty years ago there was a rash of teen murders. Since then, the town has fallen on hard times (there’s really no explanation for that outcome) and our main girl happens to be the sister of one of the original victims…who was murdered before the main girl was even born.
That aspect is what makes this movie pretty poignant. When the main girl finds and triggers a time machine in the very location where her sister was murdered, she is transported back to just days before the murders took place.
She rather quickly befriends a kid who totally buys that she’s from the future, and soon after she meets her late sister, and it’s kind of sad. Not only that they never got the chance to know each other, but also how her sister’s death changed their parents by the time she was born.
The slasher part is highly focused on the main girl and her new friends trying to stop the murders from happening. There are chase scenes, suspense, and some brutal kills, plus a fresh twist as the group is hunted by and tries to thwart the masked, knife-wielding killer. However, the plot really will test your patience when it comes to swallowing how it incorporates the whole space-time continuum issue.
CLICKBAIT: UNFOLLOWED (2024)
A movie in which we are immediately introduced to a bunch of obnoxious influencers had me thinking I was going to hate it, but this shit turned out to be a blast. And the opening credits featuring super detailed, gory clips of a facelift let me know right away that it was also going to get ugly.
So these influencers are invited to a mansion for a sort of influencer version of Big Brother. We get:
Peach—the queer lead character (yay!)
An insecure, chubby girl with glasses
A hippy chick
A pretty boy
A douchebag dude
A stage mom and the tween son she’s trying to make famous
Best of all is the hostess of the show, who appears on a screen in the living room and looks like a Real Housewife of Mar-a-Lago. She is camptastic. Or should I say camplastic.
There are immediate tensions between cast members, and it only escalates once they discover what happens to them when they lose one of the online challenges in which they must participate as “guards” in masks watch over them…and dispose of them.
Amazingly, as the competitions and killings start, the characters become more likable and give pretty damn good, funny performances. Not to mention, our queer lead makes a great final gay boy, and also makes this film an honorary addition to the homo horror movies page.
Don’t expect anything frightening, because this is more like a Saw movie with a sense of humor.
THE EXORCISM OF SAINT PATRICK (2024)
In direct contrast to the happy, final gay in Clickbait: Unfollowed, this one is yet another in this new wave of queer trauma porn, and at a time like this when things are going to most likely get worse for queer folk in the U.S., this is so not what we need. Be warned that it can be a very triggering movie for those who had difficult upbringings. As I’ve said before, this is exactly why I write gay positive, sex positive, humorous homo horror in which gays are living their best lives and fighting monsters…not psychotic religious extremists.
The first fifty minutes feature a very intimate and cruel conversion therapy program between a teen boy and a priest, alone at a cabin in the woods. The performances are excellent, and this feels like a high-quality production, not a low budget indie.
The “exorcism” is not the usual possession concept—it’s at first about exorcising the homosexuality out of the teen, and later takes on a double meaning. It’s also a detailed and disturbing presentation of the mentally torturous conversion process. I don’t know if you’re going to want to sit through fifty minutes of that to get to the supernatural revenge part in the final act.
Sooooo…the kid eventually commits suicide because he can’t take it. The priest disposes of the body and plans to cover it up by telling the (equally despicable) parents that the kid ran away.
The dead body then appears to him as a glowing red mass, and the movie immediately and temporarily turns into a genuine horror film as the priest is haunted by the dead boy. This opens a Pandora’s box, and he is then visited by the ghosts of gay conversion therapy past, which becomes more of a soul-searching story culminating in a very unsatisfactory revenge killing. Sigh. I really feel like some of these queer trauma porn movies are perhaps a cathartic release for the creators with little thought about the audience.
My advice to filmmakers would be that if you’re going to make a movie about a tortured gay kid dying and then coming back from the dead for revenge, don’t make the part where he’s tortured run longer than the payback segment.
