PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com "We Put the SIN in Cinema"
Usually, Hollywood will only make sequels of films that make a ton of money. Urban Legends grossed an inauspicious $38 million when it was released on the far superior heels of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Almost exactly two years later, its sequel – Urban Legends: Final Cut (or UL2) – hits the screen with a lamer story and much fewer stars than its predecessor.
Before we get into the content of the movie, let's look at the title. Although it's an attempted clever play on words, Final Cut makes the sequel seem like it's simply an unedited version of the first film. And don't think for a second Final Cut implies that it will be the last film in the series. We've been fooled before. Remember Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter? It was followed up by Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Later, we saw Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, but there's still another sequel in the works.
Ditto for A Nightmare on Elm Street, which promised Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, but then came back with New Nightmare. In the future, we can probably expect titles like I Finally Forgot What You Did That Summer followed by I Just Remembered What You Did, Like, Seven Summers Ago. Or The Slasher VI: We Swear to Christ It's the Last One and The Slasher VII: We're Broke, and We're Back!
UL2 is set at Alpine University's film school, which apparently specializes in churning out horror film directors (this is the only truly frightening idea in the entire picture). The professor advises his students that the screenplays for their final projects are due, which is odd, because some of them have already completed their films. Amy Mayfield (Jennifer Morrison, Stir of Echoes), the daughter of an Oscar winning documentary filmmaker, pitches the professor an idea of filming the story of a serial killer that slays his victims to popular urban legends. The same urban legend killings that occurred in first film
So UL2 is a sequel about a making a movie about what happened in the sequel's antecedent. Confused? You shouldn't be. You've already seen the exact same thing in Scream 2 and Scream 3. UL2 is full of scenes featuring film props and sets that create a blurry line between the movie and the movie within the movie.
The common belief among the surviving characters is that the killer is a crazy film student bumping off his competition for the school's prestigious Hitchcock Award (in addition to Hitch, UL2 has the audacity to sully the names of François Truffaut and Pam Grier). The knife-wielding maniac dresses in black and wears either a fencing mask, or a large kitchen strainer. It's hard to tell.
The only returning character from the first film (save a surprise cameo right before the closing credits) is the campus security guard played by Loretta Devine (Introducing Dorothy Dandridge). UL2 also features Joey Lawrence from Blossom, although he prefers to go by `Joseph' now. Yeah, I guess you need to be taken more seriously when you make films like this.
UL2 is the directorial debut of John Ottman, who edited and created the score for Bryan Singer's (X-Men) first three films (he also scored and edited this film). The script was written by Hellraiser 5 scribes, Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson. Ironically, Ottman, Boardman and Derrickson were classmates at the USC School of Cinema-Television. I wonder where they got the idea for this film?
There was a strange bar scene in UL2 where a female student, played by Real World London star Jacinda Barrett, tells a fellow college senior, `Next year, you'll be in the real world.' I have no idea if this was intentional, or just a bizarre coincidence. It doesn't really matter, since UL2 is largely a waste of time and money. You'd be better off reading about urban legends on Snopes.
1:40 - R for violence/gore, adult language and brief nudity and sexual content
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