A young woman wakes up in a locked room in a derelict house in the middle of nowhere, her arm cut, with no memory of how she got there. Who abducted her and why? Then she wakes up later and another young woman, also cut, is with her - what’s going on?!
I can see why Mike Richardson and Todd Herman’s Cut is largely unknown, even to fans of Dark Horse’s catalogue - it’s a perfectly fine vampire horror story that’s neither bad nor good, doesn’t add anything new or exciting to the genre and is very forgettable. But it’s still perfectly fine for what it is.
The womens’ backstories were fairly dull, the monster design is a dorkier version of DC’s Man-Bat (minus the air of Kirk Langstrom’s tragic backstory surrounding it) and the whole story is very surface-level - what you see is what you get. There’s no subtext, nothing thoughtful or cerebral or even new going on - it’s just a straightforward horror story.
And that’s also its strength. It’s breezy, compelling and Richardson sets up just the right amount of intrigue at each moment in the story so that I was never bored - here’s the time for this beat, now’s the time for this beat, and so on. Grounding it in a single location was a good choice - a fine example of less is more - and kudos to him for spinning the story out as long as he did with these limitations. Todd Herman’s art is similarly unremarkable but suitably serviceable like the script - think a poor man’s Ben Stenbeck.
Reading Cut reminded me of similar recent middle-of-the-road horror movie experiences: The Conjuring is a solid spooky house movie, IT 2017 is a solid creepy clown movie - and Cut is a solid mystery/vampire story. Expect nothing more than a decent horror comic that mildly entertains and Cut will deliver.
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