John Ottman, in his directorial debut, brings violence and gore to the big screen in “Urban Legends: Final Cut.” The horror film stars Jennifer Morrison (Stir of Echoes), Loretta Devine (Urban Legends), Anson Mount (What Happened to Tully), Joseph Lawrence (Tequila Body Shots) and Matthew Davis in his feature film debut.
The plot involves student filmmakers at Alpine University who are competing for the college’s prestigious Hitchcock Award for the year’s best thesis film. One filmmaker, Amy (Jennifer Morrison) is having a particularly hard time completing her thesis film. Her film is about the contemporary tall tales known as “Urban Legends.” Someone is killing off all of the cast members. She must untangle this web of violence before she too becomes an urban legend.
This film was all too familiar to me. I am glad that this was a free movie premiere, because I would have been extremely upset after paying to see this. It seems that we have come to an era in the making of horror films where the setting is on college or high school campuses with young students as the stars. The same thing keeps happening over and over again. You can only see the girl running into the forest or going the wrong way on the stairs so many times before it becomes annoying. “Urban Legends: Final Cut” does not stray from this type of film.
If this sounds familiar to anyone else, it is because we have seen this before. This is one of those movies that you are trying to guess who the killer is throughout the movie. Sound familiar again? Remember “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer?” “Urban Legends: Final Cut” does not come up with any different aspects from these other films. They all have the same background story to them. The “Scream” series was one set of sequels that pulled off the suspense well, but enough already said.
I am not a big horror film buff myself; in fact I will be the first to tell you that I jump every time the knife swinging killer comes into the picture and slashes away at someone. I did not find this true for “Urban Legends: Final Cut.” There is really nothing surprising about the film. The typical and repetitive scary music followed by a scene of bloody gore are what we have come to expect in these so called “horror films.” Typical and repetitive are the key words here. The element of surprise is no longer there.
The only thing about this movie that I found a little bit interesting was the comedic performances by the actors. I laughed in this movie more than I clutched to my chair in utter horror. Being that this was a horror film I had expected the exact opposite.
If you want to see a horror flick, I would suggest that you simply go out to the local movie store and rent an older horror movie. Any one of the “Friday the 13th” movies or “Halloween” movies would be a good bet. If you want to see the same horror films that we have been seeing in the last few years go ahead and waste your money..
Rating: D=dissapointment, and this is only because I laughed at some one-liners.
Noah Dye is a journalism major and a film minor.
He can be reached by E-mail at: [email protected]
