Urban Legends: Final Cut

Paramount Pictures and Icon Productions,
VHS, DVD, 2000, Rated R, 1 hr. 40 min.

It takes a lot for me to intensely dislike a movie, but I managed to with this one. A sequel to the 1998 horror hit Urban Legend, this film centers on Amy Manfield (Jennifer Morrison), a college film student at Alpine University, trying to create a movie idea to submit for the "Hitchcock Award", an honor that virtually guarantees the winner a film career. A chance meeting with college security guard Reese (Lorreta Devine), the only cast member from the original film in this sequel, gives Amy the idea of filming a movie based on urban legends. From there, even a simpleton can guess the rest of the plot. As Amy films her movie, various members of her cast and crew are murdered, leaving Amy to uncover whether the murderer is a psycho serial killer or a student hoping to eliminate competition for the Hitchcock Award.

I had high hopes for this movie because director John Ottman is the editor of one of my favorite movies, Usual Suspects. I can't believe he went from an intelligent movie like that to this movie, which is so bad in so many ways.

Let's start with the cast. Often, even if the plot of a movie is bad it is sometimes tolerable because of a charismatic cast. Not the case here. This movie is filled with B-actors (hello Joey, excuse me, Joseph Lawrence) who can't act their way out of a paper bag. I actually wanted more killings so that I wouldn't have to watch the horrible. Mannequin-like acting.

And speaking of killings, the killings in the movie were very gory, but seemed too contrived and gory for the sake of being gory, rather than being scary or gross. Fake blood in and of itself is not scary and becomes comical when flying about through the air.

Throughout the whole movie you are never in suspense and never care who gets killed or how. You are never surprised when someone does get killed and not at all shocked at the identity of the killer.

I did get a kick out of a cameo by model/actress Jacinda Barrett, former cast member of MTV's The Real World when it was based in London. Although there was no reason for her small part and it did not fit in with the rest of the movie, her line telling about living in "the real world" was funny (but lost on those who have never seen her Real World episodes).

The best part of the movie happens as the credits roll (or was it that I was just so thankful that it was over that I would have liked anything at that point…), but you won't understand unless you've seen the first Urban Legend.

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http://www.spe.sony.com/movies/urbanlegends/

Reviewed by: Hauntmistress  4/02/2001