DIRECTED BY: John Ottman WRITTEN BY: Paul Harris Boardman and Paul Harris Boardman CAST: Jennifer Morrison, Matthew Davis, Hart Bochner, Loretta Devine
MPAA: Rated R for violence/gore, language and some sexuality
RATING: 1/10
"Have you ever heard the one about a movie so bad that it made a guy run out of the theatre screaming?"
Obviously the producers at Columbia Tristar did not think that we suffered enough from the first installment, and so to finish us utterly, they have now released "Urban Legends: Final Cut".
This is another "Scream"-like feature, consisting merely from the recycled materials of rip-offs from the most pointless movies of all time. Amy (Jennifer Morrison) is a film student who is attending a film school filled with uninspired film students who do not have a clue about what to do. But just as she reaches the halfway mark of her final semester at prestigious University's film program -- where each year's best thesis production takes the coveted Hitchcock Prize, a virtual one-way ticket to Hollywood success -- she has a chance encounter with campus security guard Reese (Loretta Devine), whose tale of a series of murders based on urban legends at another university inspires Amy to try her hand at a fictional thriller organized along similar lines. Soon enough, fake -- and real -- blood starts to flow, and Amy is being chased around by scary killer, while her cast and crew get slain, one by one. Is the culprit the original Urban Legends murderer, just some random psycho,! a member of the faculty, one of her competitors for the Hitchcock, or is there something even more stupid going on?
This is another one of those tiring, pointless teen slasher flicks: neither scary, funny, or interesting. It simply lacks the ability and the story to entertain. The body counts and screams continue to grow, as the weak level of intelligence sinks rapidly. In fact watching films like that after having watched "Scary Movie" is impossible keeping a serious face. Several times I tried to prevent myself from laughing, without succeeding. And then I realized that practically the whole theatre was laughing.
It's the same thing that has been told and told and told over and over again as if it was the revelation of the century. How many times must we tolerate the same clichés that have haunted the slasher genre since its birth? It has been so many films about masked killers that most of us have developed an allergy for them. They are the most stupid, meaningless, predictable and soulless films in existence. However, director John Ottman manages to make "Urban Legends: Final Cut" into one of the worst achievements of this godforsaken genre. What was done with a sense of redemption for past failures and irony in "Scream", Ottman takes seriously. For that reason alone, it is worth a look, just to realize how bad a movie can be. It's tough to find comparisons for such an achievement, and we have to dig in ancient history to find a movie that would match its intellect. Even movies like "Lost in Space" and "Mission to Mars" seem spectacular in its shadow. We have not seen such waste of t! ime and resources since "Showgirls" (1995).
No matter how hard I tried to find positive elements in this so called production, I came up with nothing, except the way the killer was dressed. Here I feel that I have to compliment the costume designers Trysha Bakker and Marie-Sylvie Deveu, that have wisely replaced the well known Scream-mask with a very elegant fencing mask. Jennifer Morrison ("Stir of Echoes") is all right, and the other actors' best achievement is keeping a straight face when pronouncing the words from the script.
In fact the only thing that is terrifying about this film (with the exception of its screenplay) is its portray of film schools. If these graduates will be the directors of the future, then Hollywood's golden days are over. Rumors are already spreading through the internet that Columbia Tristar is already developing a third installment. Let's just hope and pray that it's just an urban legend.
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