Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 19, 2000, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It’s less a qualitative than a practical criticism to say that the people behind Urban Legends: Final Cut appear to have never gone to film school. Alpine University, the setting for this slasher sequel, is a place where a cinema student can come up with a concept, have it approved, finish a shooting script and be into production in about a week or so. And where one of her classmates can stage an airplane disaster sequence worthy of a Joel Silver movie. The latter might just be plausible at a school like USC (from which director John Ottman and writers Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman did indeed graduate), but Alpine has been established as a smaller, rural campus—the sort of place where, say, the heroine can be attacked by a killer in a hi-tech sound studio, and have nowhere to flee except some dark, misty woods.
It’s that sort of illogical behavior that really undermines Urban Legends, which is superficially entertaining for a while but (one setpiece aside) never generates the chills it’s going for. As too often happens in this subgenre, the characters do really dumb things for the sake of keeping the story going, which is especially disappointing in the case of lead Amy (Jennifer Morrison). She’s established as a bright and determined young woman, and Morrison (the ghost in Stir of Echoes) imbues her with guts and good sense. Thus it’s a shame when the script forces her to behave like the mindless would-be victims of countless cheaper stalker films past.
Another problem is that all the best-known urban legends were used up in the original, leaving this film to work off some that are either obscure or just seem made up, and eventually it abandons that focus altogether. The one exception is a setpiece that takes off from the old kidney-theft rumor, a gory and frightening scene played to the hilt by director Ottman. A protégé of Bryan Singer, Ottman demonstrates some stylish promise, but either doesn’t have or doesn’t exercise the discipline to make the script’s contrivances convincing. In addition, too many of the supporting characters are overdrawn, from returning security guard Reese (Loretta Devine), whose Pam Grier fixation curdles into burlesque, to a couple of nerdy burgeoning makeup FX artists. (Note to future genre filmmakers: You don’t exactly put yourself in your target audience’s good graces when you portray horror fans as geeks.)
By this point in the post-Scream slasher genre, if a movie like this isn’t going to make a truly visceral impression (and Urban Legends is too jokey for that), it at least needs a unique gimmick to distinguish itself. In this case, the first Urban dealt with the titular phenomena more cleverly, while Scream 3 had sharper satire of the film world. And from the “it’s only a movie” opening to the villain’s climactic “why I did it” monologue, these are Legends we’ve seen too often before.
