"Urban Legends: Final Cut"

This film-school sendup -- filled with slicing, dicing, electrocuting and bludgeoning -- can't see the schlock for the celluloid.

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

Sep 28, 2000 | "You stole my fucking genre!" a competitive student filmmaker snarls to a classmate in "Urban Legends: Final Cut." But a scholar who loves horror enough to devote his academic career to it should know better than to cry foul at the creation of another gorefest -- the slasher picture, after all, is an American institution. At least the creators of the season's least necessary follow-up aren't so proprietary, liberally splattering the screen with references to just about every thriller that ever preceded it.

This quasi-sequel to the 1998 hit is knowingly subtitled "Final Cut," an obligatory reference to the long, pointy phallic symbols of which movie killers are so fond, but also to the lingo of filmmaking itself. As in any proper urban legend, reality and rumor dance around each other in dangerous ways.

This time out, the setting is the Orson Welles Film School of Alpine University. The characters from the first movie are absent, with the exception of Loretta Devine, back as the Pam Grier-worshipping security guard Reese. She's so tough, she tacks the word "ass" onto everything she says, which sure-ass proves she's badass.

Spunky young wannabe auteur Amy Mayfield (Jennifer Morrison) is vying for her school's prestigious Hitchcock award, an honor bestowed annually on the student film with the highest body count. (Maybe calling it the Jason Vorhees award didn't have the same cachet.)

Amy thinks she's hit upon a novel concept for her thesis -- a serial killer who acts out urban legends -- and, amazingly, her professors react to her idea with the enthusiasm of ciniastes with no knowledge of what's been going on at the box office the last five years.

The faculty may be in love with the project, but not everybody is. In a radical case of campus schadenfreude, somebody keeps killing off the cast and crew of Amy's movie, causing not just mayhem and carnage but a whole bunch of scheduling and staffing nightmares. Amy may have aspirations of becoming Lars Von Trier, but she's looking more and more like Jamie Lee Curtis.

Having exhausted all the juicy, gory myths in the previous film, "Final Cut" has to settle for second-string urban legends. There's a new spin on the ever-popular amateur kidney-removal story, but it's followed by a bunch of woefully standard maniac-with-a-weapon tableaux.

Unsatisfyingly, there's only the barest relationship to the "I heard it from a friend of a friend" scenarios one might expect from both a film and a film-inside-a-film that bear the moniker of "Urban Legends." One awaits the next entry in the series, in which horrific crimes are committed in the name of Craig Shergold and the Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe.

Next Page: Many red herrings among the student body

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