24. Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000, Otman)
By Eivind Langdal
24th November 2009

...includes spoilers to Urban Legend

Put me on the stand, because I can bear witness to have seen a horror film that not only references Alfred Hitchcock, but also Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. What, really? Oh yes, I kid you not. Well, what kind of movie is that? That, my friend, is Urban Legends: Final Cut, the sequel to the post-Scream slasher success Urban Legend, which saw a killer terrorize a college campus by staging murders according to various urban legends. Now, terror begins anew, as a young film student named Amy decides to make a thesis project film about a similar killer.

Amy thinks the events on the college campus is just an urban legend, and the movie seems to tease its audience by making us doubt if those events actually happened, or if it indeed is an urban legend. That doubt is quickly erased as the Pam Grier-loving security guard from the first film (played by Loretta Devine) makes her return here. She doesn’t tell Amy that the events actually happened, but she tells the audience. Amy wants to make the film so she can win the school’s esteemed Hitchcock Award, which grants not only a stipend of $15.000, but also a free ticket to Hollywood. Of course, competition is hot, and when people start to turn up dead, Amy suspects someone might be willing to kill to win the award.

But who is the killer? As this is a slasher, there is a large cast and plenty of suspects, among them two special effects guys who worship George Lucas, a talentless blonde actress who wouldn’t recognize good acting if it stabbed her with a knife (pun very much intended), a mysterious European DP who takes his job very seriously, a rivaling film director, and a lesbian played by Eva Mendez (yes, you heard that right). The use of a large cast that conceals a killer is a standard slasher convention, and one person is as likely a suspect as the next. If you want to guess who it is, don’t use logic. Just take a wild guess.

What’s interesting about this film is that it doesn’t reprise the cast from the first film, despite the fact that two major characters and the killer survived. This might seem to some that the actors in the first film didn’t find the script interesting enough to return to a second film, but I’m not so sure that is the case. The script here is neither better nor worse than the first film, and while I’m sure Jared Leto didn’t need to do this film, I actually find it to be the better that he didn’t. Not because he was bad (because he wasn’t), but because the sequel builds on the original film in an interesting way that wouldn’t have worked with too many of the actors having recurring roles. It’s rare to see a horror sequel that finds such a simple, but effective way to build on its original.

Urban Legends: Final Cut was directed, edited and scored by John Ottman, whom you might or might not know as the editor and score-creator of The Usual Suspects. That was also a film about a mysterious killer, but if you’re expecting a work on that level, you will be seriously disappointed. While Jennifer Morrison (Dr. Cameron from House M.D.) is more than watchable as Amy, and Loretta Devine brings some well-needed comic relief to her recurring security guard character, the film itself is stiff as a corpse, and when you look back at it after its finished, you begin to notice a lot of things that simply doesn’t add up. Why, for instance, is the scene with the bathtub there? It adds nothing to the film. It is literally so unimportant to the film that you could actually remove it completely and no one would know it was missing. Sure, it’s scary on paper and contains a very interesting urban legend, but would it have been so hard to attach it to the plot?

Still, you know me; I’m sucker for a slasher, even if it is a bad one, so I’m not going to be too harsh on this film. Don’t think that means that you will find me re-watching any of the first two Friday the 13th movies any time soon, though. If Urban Legends: Final Cut is stiff as a corpse, those movies are just corpses (that should rest peacefully in their graves). Yes, Urban Legends: Final Cut is never even remotely scary, but it is a fun watch that provides an ending worthy of the first film. Still, worthy of either Hitchcock, Truffaut, Godard or Welles it is not.