It’s generally agreed that the golden age of slasher movies lasted from 1978 and 1984 – although there’s an argument to be made that the introduction of supernatural stalkers such as Freddy Krueger and Chucky carried it on as far as 1989 before it’s decline was too great to sustain. On the flip side, the next age of the slasher flick arrived in 1996 with Scream, but only four years later we found the sub-genre to be spluttering out like a defeated horror villian in the final reel thanks to a raft of uninspired rip offs. In fact, the moment when I could well and truly tell that the writing (in blood, of course) was on the wall was when I settled down to watch Urban Legends: Final Cut.
Not only was 2000 a year where we got the similarly lackluster Sceam 3, but other, more inventive movies such as Final Destination and Ginger Snaps raised their heads to put new, less irritating protagonists in harms way that didn’t simply use a masked maniac. And sitting at the top of that outdated pile was the Urban Legend sequel.
Amy Mayfield is a student who is struggling to come up with her final thesis film at the prestigious film school of Alpine University and even though she doesn’t want to follow her famous father into documentary work, she is also clueless as to what work of fiction she’s finally going to settle on. However, after a chat with a familiar looking security guard about the urban legend based killing spree that occurred at her previous job, Amy figures that she’s finally found the subject matter she’s been looking for and starts hammering out her script.
Of course, this means bringing in the motley group of friends who will work as her crew including aspiring actress Sandra; pretentious cameraman Simon; dorky special effects guys Dirk and Stan and various others but a pall is thrown over the production when various issues rear their heads. Rival filmmaker Toby accuses her of plagiarism, fellow wonderkind student Travis takes his own life after his masterpiece scores a C – and there was something else, wasn’t there….? Oh yeah, a masked killer is roaming the university, murdering members of Amy’s crew one by one for reasons yet unknown.
At first the killer keeps their vicious work a secret, but after Amy figures out that her friends are getting cut from her production in the harshest ways possible, she strives to figure out the identity of the murderer with help from Travis’ twin brother, Trevor, but with a healthy amount of hungry film students and condescending scholars to choose from, their suspect list is longer than the negative of Cleopatra. Curiously choosing not to call the police, even though they suspect people have been out and out killed, Amy and Trevor have to figure out how to end this string of carnage before the murderous lens of this mask wearing psycho focuses on them.
One of the major issues with the original Urban Legend was that other than being a slasher movie, it really was ripping off Scream mercilessly despite swapping out a knowledge of scary movies in favour of urban tales of misfortune. The whodunit structure was similar, the victims had the same snarky attitude as the denizens of Woodboro and it even felt like it was shot the same as it went through some very familiar motions with only a fraction of the wit. However, as Scream 2 took its survivors to university to take film theory, Urban Legends’ second go round also goes a similar route by forcing us to spend time in the company of a teeth-grindingly insipid group of young filmmakers as they mouth off about Truffault and wear black turtlenecks. The result is probably one of the oddest entries in the late 90s/early 00s cannon of stalk and slash flicks as the film seems to have delusions of grandeur as it constantly and clumsily references filmmaking legends in a brazen attempt to make a silly slasher film seem smarter.
To be fair, you can tell that composer and editor John Ottman is trying his hardest in his directorial debut to invoke as many of his cinematic heroes as he can and as a result, his Hitchcock worship gives Urban Legends: Final Cut almost an American, neo-giallo sort of feel as he uses a lot of close ups of eyes and screaming mouths to drive his points home. However, while Ottman can cut ’em and he sure can score ’em, despite his best efforts shooting ’em seems to be out of his wheelhouse as you’re kept utterly confused as to the tone he’s aiming for. At times, we get a typically snarky, modern slasher, but at others, Ottman pushes the story into such extremes it sometimes feels like he’s trying to turn everything into something that just stops short of parody and the script (co-written by none other than Scott Derrickson) it just isnt smart enough to carry it off, especially when it has the brass balls/audacity to put the theme from Hitchcock’s Half Hour over the end credits.
Further driving home that its attempts to satirize filmmaking aren’t as sharp or fun as it thinks it is, we have to suffer yet another cast of infuriating and irritating characters that refuse to elict sympathy, even when they’re begging for their life in the face of death. Jennifer Morrison is a passable final girl and Eva Mendes manages to escape with most of her dignity intact, but when it comes to most of the male characters, I actually had great difficultly telling all these identikit white boys apart and when you find that one of them is actually playing the twin of his dead brother, you can just fucking forget about it.
However, no matter what plans you have to make your slasher stand out from the crowd, you at least have to try and make some of those kills stand out, right? However, this is where Final Cut truly lets itself down for a variety of reasons with the first problem being the killer. I’ve noted my opinions on the first film kitting out its antagonist in a hooded parker jacket, but the sequel actually manages to make this seem as iconic as a white Shatner mask when it trots out its serial murderer in a fencing face guard of all things. Worse yet, only one of the kills featured (the best one, coincidently) is actually based on an urban legend, with it revolving around the stealing of a kidney and the dumping of the victim in a bath of ice. The rest end up being clumsily staged with minimal blood which is fairly unacceptable when you factor in how annoying the majority of the characters are and while I wish no harm to befall the actual actors, having Anthony Anderson’s cackling effects guy dispatched by an unspectacular electrocution just isn’t good enough.
While it’s ambition must be acknowledged, Urban Legends: Final Cut tends to fail on almost every conceivable level, choosing to regularly praise cinematic genius while content to be an unfunny joke. The first Urban Legend wasn’t much cop either, but at least it had a coherent vision that didn’t get sidetracked by namedropping better filmmakers and botching its kills.
Scrub the set and kill the lights, we’re moving on.
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