"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Urban Legends: Final Cut

In 1995, those of you who were living in the free world first discovered a talented young group of filmmakers who seemed to come out of nowhere with the phenomenally popular crime movie The Usual Suspects. I don’t think anybody thought the movie was profound, but it was a fun novelty, obviously made by a couple of film school whiz kids. If something with this much attention to detail and audience manipulation is their first movie (well, not counting the god awful Public Access, which at the time had only played film festivals) – what will they be doing, say, five years from now?

Well let’s see. Director Bryan Singer made the nerd community feel cool for a while with his acclaimed movie version of X-Men. Script Writer Christopher McQuarrie, who actually won on Oscar award for Usual Suspects, made his directing debut with the halfway-there-to-great-Badass-picture Way of the Gun. And now editor/composer John Ottman is taking his shot by directing (and editing and composing) Urban Legends: Final Cut.

But I mean, that’s nothing to brag about.

Urban Legends: Final CutBefore we go on let me just say that this review contains spoilers. So if you don’t want to know that at the end it turns out their professor is the killer because he’s trying to kill off the cast and crew of a student film that he is trying to take credit for in order to launch his Hollywood career, then read no further.

Now this is a movie with a premise that sounds interesting. The premise is supposed to be that there is somebody killing based on urban legends. So it’s sort of like Theater of Blood you got killings based on Shakespeare, Dr. Phibes you got killing based on the seven plagues, Seven you got the seven deadly sins, and etc. Now here’s the same type of deal, but urban legends.

But then when you really think about it, I mean what kind of killings are you supposed to do? You can’t kill somebody based on spider eggs in bubble gum. You can’t give them a huge rat and convince them it’s a chihuaha, and then kill them. And if you break their neck and say yeah, this is based on the one about how the kid from the Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial broke his neck doing a neckspin – I mean, that would just be stupid.

So they don’t really use the premise. The film student in the movie uses it for her student film. And they keep talking about what a good premise it is. But the actual killer, he only does it once, when he kidnaps a girl and she wakes up in a bathtub full of ice and finds out she had her kidney removed. But then when you find out it’s a film professor trying to kill of the cast and crew of a student film that he is trying to take credit for in order to launch his Hollywood career, you wonder what the hell he was going for with that kidney thing.

So here’s what the movie is about. There’s this girl who looks and acts exactly like Felicity. She is the director of this urban legend movie. There are other film students directing other movies and they are all in competition for an award their school offers called The Hitchcock award. And they keep dying. And then Felicity meets the twin brother of the guy who committed suicide, but she can’t tell anyone because he has a shady past, but he doesn’t think it was suicide and they try to find out who killed him, and etc.

Along the way of course they introduce many different red herring type suspects. Guys who you are supposed to think is the killer. Most of them are the other film students, and then there’s a long haired weird kid with bad facial hair who hangs around the campus. At one point they even have this kid’s long hair hanging out of the back of the killer’s fencing mask. So you go, “I knew it! It’s that long haired kid!” And then it turns out to be wrong.

Now listen to me John Ottman. You can’t do that. That’s cheating. That’s poor sportsmanship. That’s filmatism for pussies. Are we really supposed to believe that this 45 year old film professor is running around with a long hair wig on and a fencing mask over it? It’s ridiculous. Get the fuck out of here.

I think the movie is supposed to be sort of a teen Hitchock thriller. But mostly what that means is they play the Alfred Hitchcock music during the end credits. There is one filmatistic device which would be at home in a Hitchcock movie that I kind of liked – Felicity thinks about all the different suspects, and it shows their faces superimposing over the fencing mask. That was nice. But other than that, the Hitchcock references are just saying the word Hitchcock alot. “He was a shoo-in for the HITCHCOCK award. He really wanted the HITCHCOCK award. That’s the HITCH. He wanted the HITCHCOCK award is what he wanted.”

The first killing is done with a handheld video camera, and it seems like a sure reference to the opening shot of Michael Powell’s landmark thriller Peeping Tom. But when recounting it later, the killer doesn’t even get his own reference. He defends his shaky camerawork by calling it “cinema very-tay”.

I mean, this movie is pretty fucking bad. But maybe there is something going on under the surface here. Maybe Ottman is trying to make an argument about the story’s setting, the generic american film school, that can only be made stylistically. If you went to film school, and you satirize film school in your movie, you can’t exactly do a good job. Otherwise you’re undermining your argument.

Because I’m guessing the individuals responsible for this picture really went to film school, so they must know what it’s like. If film school really is how it’s portrayed in Urban Legends: Final Cut then no fucking wonder we keep getting movies like Urban Legends: Final Cut. All the professors ever say is “mise-en-scene”, “cinema very-tay” and “the next Spielberg.” These three phrases are their soul contribution to the filmic education of these idiot kids.

There’s one scene where the professor is making a speech to the school to announce that one of their most promising students just committed suicide. And then he goes, “In Truffaut’s [whatever], he states…” blah blah blah. The only thing that would be more asinine would be if he started talking about Truffaut while he killed people. Which would be a pretty fucking good idea for a movie, now that I think about it.

And that just reminds me, there is alot of wasted potential here. If they can’t do the urban legend killings, they should at least go all the way with the film nerd killings. Let’s see the killer record a commentary track for the video of his murder. Let’s see him start quoting from the translated essays of Luis Bunuel while he kills people, and blaming his actions on postmodernism and the age of irony and his student’s lack of appreciation for John Ford westerns.

But it doesn’t go that far. I’m not gonna say the movie’s not funny, because it is a funny kind of dumb. But come on John Ottman, you can do better than this garbage. Let’s see some hustle, sport.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2000 at 7:43 am and is filed under Horror, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

14 Responses to “Urban Legends: Final Cut”

  1. Good ideas, Vern. I remember getting a kick out of this sequel when I first saw it. I did go to film school and I can attest to you it is really like that and that IS why we get movies like this. I mean, how many great filmmakers actually came out of film school? Scorsese did, right? I think Lucas? I know Ratner did and I’m not even knocking Ratner but it’s just you only hear about film school in a few bios yet there are thousands of students graduating every year.

    So yeah, as a film school grad with a sense of humor, I dug it and have never watched it again in 10 years.

  2. Well, on the one hand there is nothing, NOTHING, in this movie that comes close to rivalling the original “Urban Legend”‘s babysitter-microwave-pop rocks trifecta kill. Seriously, if I had to choose a best “elaborate” kill ever in the entire horror genre, that would be it.

    On the other hand, at the moment of “reveal”, Ottman has the camera zoom into the shocked face of… a film-prop alien. Which is almost worth seeing the movie for in itself.

    So I’d give this one a definite “maybe”. FTopel, how on earth did you come to be commenting on it this late on? Recently re-seen it?

  3. Discovered Vern’s site after reading Seagology and Yippee-Ki Yay. Slowly making my way through the entire archive.

    Re: the Urban Legend series. None of the films have touched the best urban legend of all, the woman with her dog and the peanut butter. So in that respect all the Urban Legends movies failed.

  4. @Ftopel-take your time with the archive cause once you catch up there’s no going back.

  5. Film School was more like a Bertolucci film with really bad dialogue from kids who think they’re ‘artists’. Ugh, I have a special place in my heart for hatred of anyone who calls him or herself an ‘artist.’

  6. This is like that old urban legend about a final exam for a Harvard philosophy course consisting of a single true or false question. If the student gets it wrong, he or she will fail the class. The question is: I will pass this test.

    If the student says, “True” then the professor gets to decide the grade. However, if the student says, “Flase” then the professor’s hands are tied and the student must pass.

  7. In a semi-related note, the admissions exam for the All Souls Fellowship at Oxford actually did include this question, “Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?”

    I would contend that there are two correct answers to this.

    One: No. If an orgy is performed properly, none of the participants will be wearing clothing by the time one could fairly question the moral character.”

    Two: No. Fuck Nazis.

  8. Fuck Nazis? That would seem to be exactly the point of that particular orgy.

  9. Thanks for explaining my joke, Caoimhin. :P

  10. I have a question I’ve been wondering since seeing the first Urban Legends movie. How exactly did the opening work? I mean, what kind of weird ass planning did the killer have? Did she know that her friend was going to be driving past the gas station with the guy who had the really bad stutter? Did she know that she would get out of her car knowing that she wouldn’t get caught like they do in the urban legend? I just can’t quite figure it out.

  11. The Original Paul

    December 6th, 2015 at 8:48 pm

    Sternshein – I can’t give you an answer exactly, but I have this vision of the killer spending literally hours crouched in the back of her victim’s (not so large) car, listening to her singing to the radio out-of-tune, getting progressively more and more insane as the trip goes on.

    To this day I don’t understand why the only movie I’ve ever seen where a killer actually offs someone for their awful singing was a horror-comedy. (Horredy? Is that a thing?) Why hasn’t this ever been played straight? In real life, people have been murdered for the most ridiculously trivial reasons. So why not translate that to film?

    And to answer your question with another question… how the heck did the killer get into the car in the first place? Did she take a taxi out to the girl’s home the previous day in order to camp out in her garden until she came out and started her car journey the following morning? I realise we’re dealing with a killer who uses phrases like “I guess I am a little… nutty.” (Best line in any horror movie ever.) But still, there’s got to be SOME logic to their actions, right?

  12. grimgrinningchris

    March 23rd, 2021 at 3:48 am

    Still can’t believe you never went back to amend this to point out the the killer (SPOILERS)

    Is fucking Ellis.

    Ha.

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