URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT (2000)

URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT (2000)

Tagline: This Fall, Legends, Never, Die.

(Horror, Mystery, That Girl That Takes A Bite Of Her Chicken Sandwich) [R]

Help! I just woke up in a tub of ice, and-!
    Don't tell me; Your kidney's gone...

In this one, we get a new batch of killings based on urban legends. This time at Alpine University revolving around a group of film students trying to come up with projects for their grade. Amy Mayfield is trying to find out what is going on because it’s the cast for her film that is being targeted. 

One thing I have to say about this thing is that it’s quite a bit more gnarly than the original. The next that thing stuck with me was that Jennifer Morrison (STAR TREK) kind of came across as a rent-a-Julia Stiles in this movie, but she actually ended up with an amazing career and became a fantastic actress over the years. Her career eclipsed Julia’s as much as I like her. As it turns out I overlooked a lot of things the first time I watched this and one. One of them was a scene where Amy is shooting a scene with a murdered dog where the mirror reads “Humans can lick too”. URBAN LEGENDS: BLOODY MARY has a sequence where this actually happens only not in a film. It feels like this film just dives right back into idea we saw in the first one, but the urban legends are mostly new, they just feel familiar because they are literally urban legends most people who were coherent in the 80s and 90s remember well. 

Casting wise I thought it was a fantastic idea to bring back Loretta Devine (URBAN LEGEND) as Reese. It kind of ties the two films together more than just using the same basic principle. Eva Mendes (GHOSTRIDER) plays a pretty small role in this as Vanessa Valdeon but crushes it. As a tip, if you can ever cast Eva, just do it. Don’t pass go, don’t collect $200, just hire her. This is a better role for Joey Lawrence than SWIM was, but I wouldn’t say he’s great as Graham. Jessica Cauffiel is decent playing Sandra. Her other big horror film was VALENTINE which she shot right after this. I usually find Anthony Anderson (SCREAM 4) delightful in most of his stuff. He’s decent here but had too little screen time. Hart Bochner and Matthew Davis both have roles in this, but their performances are outmatched by pretty much everyone else in this. 

The pacing in this one is pretty good, but the score and soundtrack are really lacking when compared to the original. Apparently, they wanted Alpine University to have a bell tower so badly that they spent $150,000 dollars to build one and stuck a paper Mache bell inside. For comparison, I bought my house in 2001, a year after this film was made, for $89,000. This isn’t the only movie to feature a killer wearing a fencing mask, in the 80s we had fencing masked killer in GRADUATION DAY. This one cost $14 million to make and did well worldwide box office-wise raking in $38 million. The series wouldn’t continue until 5 years later. I can only guess that flopped on streaming services because the series was never heard from again and it wasn’t released theatrically at all. 

A horror movie trope that I kind of get annoyed with is the awesome sequence that turns out to be a dream or is somehow fake. Clearly, the A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET films are an exception, but if it has nothing to do with the plot, I really can’t stand it when they do that. I bring it up because that happens twice in this thing. 

Overall this one is pretty decent and the nice little tie-ins to the original are fun and effective. Having said that, Jennifer Morrison and Loretta Devine have to carry a lot of this movie on their backs. Not because no one can act, but because the vast majority of the dialog is given to them while the other characters are really never developed. 

URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT gets a 5 out of 7. It’s better than pretty solid but doesn’t hit the level reached in the original. I do wish the marketing was better. Having a giant tagline taking up more than half your posters almost never looks good. 

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