URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT Yep, it's ass. I know, I know. Well, I wanted to rent ONE obvious-teen-crap movie this week, and it was either this or Lover's Lane. At least the Scream movies had the nominal hook of having the same heroes/victims return for movie after movie, whereas traditionally, slasher series have revolved instead around their villains. The Urban Legend movies keep neither their killers nor their heroes/victims, just the killer's high-concept methods. And the first movie actually ran out of urban legends to imitate, and started making up its own, like the guy who swallowed drain cleaner. Neat premise, but the execution was too dumb to even be pedestrian. How are they going to sustain a sequel? The answer, of course, is that they don't. Urban Legends: Final Cut ends up just a shade better than its predecessor, if only because it would have required concentrated effort to make it worse. To its credit, Urban Legends: Final Cut starts out okay, first with a scene (obviously storytelling from one of the movie's characters) which is so over-the-top silly that the girl actually has her foot right in the toilet. Soon enough, two scenes come up which gave me further hope: a grisly murder featuring the ol' "woke up in a bathtub full of ice and my kidney's missing", and......snow! There's some snow in this movie! A thousand hails to snow. They say that "snow movies don't sell"...and they're right, because half of America are a bunch of goddamn pussies who'd sooner die of year-round heatstroke than have to deal with a part of life we like to call SEASONS, and yes, it's been quite well demonstrated over the years that they're so afraid of winter that they run screaming from any movie which threatens to show them so much as a fucking snowflake. Of course, after that one scene, we don't see any snow any more. It's almost all downhill after that. The next urban legend we see is the killer making a "snuff movie" when he slashes up a coed . All we see here is that it's screened to the other students who think it's fiction. Wouldn't it have been creepier (and more urban legend-y) if it had ended up on ebay? Great ideas, I've got a lot of great goddamn ideas, well, better than the ideas here anyway. Oh yeah, the plot. Okay. Film school, and one student (name escapes me), inspired by a security guard (the only carryover from the first film except for a throwaway gag at the end), decides to, well, make the first Urban Legend movie as her thesis. And then...guess what. Sounds simple enough, but there's a problem. Everybody in this movie looks exactly the same. Everybody is blandly attractive, and everybody is blandly attractive in exactly the same way. So when we get to the first murder (the kidney chick), for the entire setup and payoff, I thought it was the same girl who was obviously being set up to survive to the end. This problem would be repeated with the young men, one of which even commits suicide and has his twin show up (!) and keep asking our heroine not to go to the cops, because, uh, he once had some run-ins with the cops, or something. So not only can I not tell who the hell is who, but we've got a fucking twin running around and by the end of the movie we aren't sure if he's the twin or the first guy aaaaarrrrghghghgh!!! The only students who look different from the rest are the Latino-looking girl, and the long-haired guy whose only purpose here is to make the most tragically stupid people in the audience think "Ooh, THIS guy must be the killer!" Anyway, this killer wears a rain slicker. Go figure – the first movie was set in the fall but the killer wore a parka. Now that this is set in winter (at least for that one scene), we've got the killer wearing FALL attire. Anyway, he also covers his face with....a fencing mask! I am irresistibly reminded of the robot/corpses in The Black Hole. Now, I've never fenced, but I've been told a few times that those things are damn near impossible to see out of. In a well-lit room. This killer seems to have no problem running around dark rooms with this thing on. AND, in no fewer than two scenes, he's wearing a disguise OVER his disguise. How long does it take this guy to get ready in the mornings? At least this time, the killer is not a 6'6" hulking monster who turns out to be Rebecca Gayheart. (oh, did I spoil the first movie for you? Boo fucking hoo.) As was entirely expected, this movie runs out of urban legends to imitate in very short order. There's the kidney thing, and the snuff movie, those are all well and good. Then there's something about a travelling carnival which kidnaps kids and puts their dead bodies on display. Huh? Some sort of "screams at midnight" thing where a guy is beaten to death while his screams are drowned out by people filming a "screaming" scene. 'scuse me? The direction by composer-by-day John Ottman is, after that amusingly over-the-top intro, hopelessly obvious; when it's not telegraphing exactly where the shocks are going to come from, it's beating us over the head with what he must think of as "style" (like the scene where the girl's jogging, and everything her friends have said to her in the past few days come back to haunt her). Apparently unacquainted with the laws of physics, Ottman has a guy flying back about fifteen feet THROUGH A WALL (a prop wall, but still, it's a fucking wall!) after being shot with a handgun. This is not a very big handgun. I liked the light cutting through air from the projector in the "snuff movie" scene, though. Well, at least it picks up a bit at the ending, with a neat scene involving a lot of prop guns, and yes, I was quite thankful that the big killer didn't turn out to be some skinny chick. And that throwaway gag at the end is pretty good, even though it's beaten to blood-dripping death by the end of the credits. About as bad as I'd expected. Remember, I see these movies so you don't have to. Don't let my sacrifice be in vain. BACK TO THE U's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE