URBAN LEGENDS FINAL CUT

Directed by John Ottman
Written by Paul Harris Boardman & Scott Derrickson
Produced by Neal H. Moritz, Gina Matthews & Richard Luke Rothchild
Music by John Ottman
Cast: Jennifer Morrison, Matthew Davis, Hart Bochner, Joseph Lawrence & Loretta Devine

2000/99 mins/Color/5.1 DD
2.35:1 anamorphic/English/US Review from the Columbia Tristar DVD

Now this is going to be fun! To tell you the truth, I didn't expect much from this sequel in name only but not to be that bad. Off the late 90s/early 00s teen horror thrillers this is one of the worst. When SCREAM first appeared back in 1996, the mainstream audience screamed out loud that Wes Craven was a genius, they screamed that writer Kevin Williamson was a genius and they screamed that horror was back. Well sorry folks but Wes Craven has been making movies back in the early 70's, how can anyone forget THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT or THE HILLS HAVE EYES, hell even A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET was great! As for Mr. Williamson, just look at all the movies he wrote, the guy steals from everyone. He tried to make SCREAM clever and intelligent but it came out pretencious and annoying. He copied the intro of SCREAM 2 directly from infamous goremaster Chas Balun's DIRECTOR'S CUT, he copied John Carpenter's THE THING and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS in THE FACULTY and on and on... And has for horror been dead?! Maybe dead in the eye of the mainstream audience and media but not in the heart of the true fans.

The first URBAN LEGEND didn't broke any frontier but still managed to be one of Sony's top five highest grossing film of 98! The world is really becoming one crazy place. So a sequel was soon announced after. John Ottman, known for his great musical score, decided to take the job of director, his first time there and hopefully his last. URBAN LEGENDS FINAL CUT is even more pretencious and stupid than all three SCREAM united. Here's the synopsis; the film follows a couple of idiots (oups! sorry, students) attending the all prestigious Alpine University in film making. The one who comes up with the best film gets the Hitchcock award, $15 000 and contacts at Hollywood. WOW! But it seems like someone will do anything, and that means killing the idiots, to be the winner. From there what we endure are clichés after clichés.

First of all, why the fuck are they affiliating this piece of crap with Hitchcock?! The master would have never wanted to be affiliated with something like that. The whole Trevor/Travis twin thing is completely stupid and shows the lack of competence in the part of the writers, lame. The writers made it so that everyone could be the murderer since everyone is being an asshole to everyone, again this is showing the lack of competence in the part of the writers. And that mask... looks stupid! The hot lesbo chick never gets naked, we don't even see her in her bra!! Gimme my money back!! And finally the whole film within a film has been done a million time and it's uninteresting, sorry.

The only good thing about this is the scene with the girl who got her kidney (or is it liver?!) removed, she calls the police and they think it's a joke and has she tries to escape she gets her head chopped off in one gory scene!

As for the DVD, Columbia Tristar has done better. The film is available at a 2.35:1 aspect ratio and it's optimized for 16x9 tv. It is also available in a full screen version. Image wise, the darker scenes have lots of compressions something that shouldn't happen in a film so recent. In the audio department we get a 5.1 Dolby Digital audio track that lacks punch. There's also a Dolby Surround English and French track. There's an audio commentary with director John Ottman, he sounds like a nice guy but watching the film once was already enough for me. There's a very poor 4 minutes featurette. We also get a 5 minutes gag reel which is actually pretty dull and bunch of useless deleted scenes with or without the director's commentary, talent files and trailers. As for the menu it looks ok but has no sounds or animation. The film is separated in 28 chapters, comes with a 4 pages booklet and in a keep case.

Do yourself a favor and avoid this film like a plague. One scary final note; there's actually talk of a third film in this serie to be made. ItÕs insane to see that they keep making these multi millions shitty horror movies when great one donÕt get release.

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Review by Kim Dubuisson. All Right Reserved. 2003. ©