Control Nathan Rabin #211 Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000)
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2000’s Urban Legends: Final Cut hit theaters just four years after the release of 1996’s Scream and only two years after the release of 1998’s Urban Legend. Yet even then it was apparent that the self-referential, endlessly winking post-modern horror movie boom kicked off by Wes Craven’s surprise blockbuster had hit a dead end creatively.
It didn’t didn’t take long for Scream knock-offs to wear out their welcome just as the wave of similarly referential, movie-mad Tarantino-derived action movies that followed in the wake of Pulp Fiction quickly became a cinematic plague, a scourge upon the otherwise noble realm of direct-to-video crime movies.
These sub-genres became almost immediately tiresome for pretty much the same reason: as movies about movies about movies they were completely divorced from anything approximating real life and genuine human emotion.
Without the craft, personality or soul Quentin Tarantino brought to Pulp Fiction or the wit and artistry of Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven gave Scream and then Scream 2, these painfully derivative wannabes were about nothing at all, empty exercises in style and cinematic self-cannibalization.
Empty and self-cannibalizing sure describe Urban Legends: Final Cut, which took a premise that was already wildly derivative of Scream and rendered it even more of a shameless knock-off by making its protagonist a film student traumatized by the grisly murders of classmates helping her make a student film about a serial killer who kills their victims in the style of popular urban legends.
You may recall that’s also the premise of the original Urban Legend, although in this case I am using the word “original” very loosely. The sense that everything in Urban Legends: Final Cut is a pale imitation of something superior is only strengthened by the fact that star Jennifer Morrison looks so much like Julia Stiles and has such a Julia Stiles vibe that throughout the film I kept thinking of her as Julia No-Stiles.
In Urban Legends: Final Cut Julia No-Stiles plays Amy Mayfield, the ambitious daughter of a prominent documentarian who hopes to go into the family business with the help of a degree from the top film school in the country.
The competition for the school’s top prize, the career-making Hitchcock Award, is nothing less than murder: literally. Amy can’t help but notice that a lot of her classmates are dying horrible deaths, sometimes in the style of popular urban legends, but nobody else seems particularly concerned.
But which of the poorly-developed types and sentient red herrings is responsible for the bloodshed? Could it be Graham Manning (Joseph Lawrence), the wealthy and powerful son of a Hollywood big shot? Or us it sexy lesbian Vanessa Valdeon (Eva Mendes)? Is Toby Belcher (Anson Mount), a paranoid aspiring auteur enraged that Amy is making a short film in the same genre as his own to blame?
Seemingly everyone could be guilty because they have no real role to play in the proceedings otherwise. Heaven knows there’s nothing in the way of characterization going on here. The sequel’s stock characters would need to be beefed up considerably just to qualify as one-dimensional stereotypes.
Urban Legends-The Final Cut opens with a campy sequence where a pair of horny passengers on an airplane get back from joining the Mile High Club in an airplane bathroom to discover that everyone else on the plane has been viciously murdered, including the pilots.
I’ve heard of Snakes on a plane but slashers on a plane? Talk about a killer flight! What feels unmistakably like a sequence from a terrible student film turns out to be just that but the film’s opening fake-out would mean more if everything else in the movie didn’t feel so purposefully, intentionally fake.
The same is true of Amy’s many nightmares, which similarly broadcast their artificiality to the heavens. Urban Legends: Final Cut is a Russian nesting doll of a movie with nothing but air at its hollow core.
Academy-Award winner and frequent Bryan Singer collaborator John Ottman didn’t just direct Urban Legends: Final Cut. Like a considerably less talented young John Carpenter he wrote the score and edited it as well.
Ottman did a perfectly respectable job on all three fronts. Urban Legends: Final Cut looks and sounds good and moves along at an agreeable pace but it also feels like a glorified demo reel whose real purpose is to show what its director might be able to do if he had a real film with real characters with real emotions.
Urban Legends: Final Cut concludes anti-climatically with the revelation that the killer isn’t a student at all but rather a revenge and success-crazed professor played by iconic Die Hard douchebag and PCU director Hart Bochner.
In that respect the underwhelming horror sequel is less a whodunit than a “Who cares?”
Ah, but I am not writing about Urban Legends: Final Cut out of morbid curiosity. No, I am writing about it because it ends with Bochner’s killer in a psychiatric institution where his nurse is played by Rebecca Gayheart in a winking nod to her role as the killer in Urban Legend.
After ripping off lots of great horror movies and some not so legendary fright fare Urban Legends: Final Cut concludes with a loving nod to a horror movie it understandably holds in higher regard than just about anyone else would: its predecessor.
Gayheart pushes Bochner’s wheelchair down the mental hospital hallway to the accompaniment of the iconic opening theme of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Urban Legends: The Final Cut gives Gayheart the star treatment. In this world at least she’s a horror icon, a famous monster, a notable alum of a movie that was a big success commercially if not creatively or critically.
You know what? It works. If I might give her the very faintest of praise, Gayheart’s cameo is the best thing about Urban Legends: Final Cut. It might not have made me laugh but it brought a smile to my face, which is more than can be said about anything else in this stinker.
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