Urban Legends: Final Cut Movie Review

Words I thought I’d never write: the sequel to Urban Legend lacks the grace, wit, and power of the original.

Put the gun to my head, pull the trigger, and put me out of my misery. Better yet, put the horror genre out of its misery. When you’ve finished watching Urban Legends: Final Cut, you’ll share my same grim point of view thanks to the horrible acting, terrible script, and ridiculous directing which has become all too common today.

Urban Legends: Final Cut is a smorgasbord of stolen movie ideas (mainly from The Blair Witch Project and Scream): Fabulous people with perfect teeth and skin, one creepy film school, and a dog eating a freshly removed kidney from one of the movie’s hapless victims. Urban Legends delivers a story about a bunch of film students working on their thesis films to win the coveted “Hitchcock Award” which guarantees the winner a director deal in Hollywood.

One female filmmaker (Jennifer Morrison, the freaky dead girl from Stir of Echoes) writes a fiction script based on a serial killer who kills his victims according to “urban legend” tales. Suddenly, her entire crew starts getting bumped off with urban-legendary homicides, but the bodies are always missing and she is often the only witness to the killings. The killer wears a fencing mask and a long black overcoat, looking like a scorned Olympian out to avenge his defeat in Sydney. Why this is scary is never explained.

Of course, the golden rule of sequels is that there must be least one recurring character for continuity’s sake. Urban Legends has one minor, recurring character from the original who we never cared about anyway (the security guard, of all people). The other central problem is that this character has already seen the urban legend killings once before, but she’s utterly clueless about what’s going on around her. Call it suspension of disbelief.

This film is also a prime example of how horror films are now completely dead in the water. The last decent horror film was The Blair Witch Project, and that seemed more like a snuff film than fiction. The stalking killer with crazy motivation has become a tired cliché, as everyone seems to have forgotten: Real horror is not about what is seen but about what is unknown.

Mr. Hitchcock taught us that.



Legends never die, and neither do bad movies.