Urban Legends: The Final Cut
$#%&! @$$%*^#$! %$#@!!!

I am getting too old for this shit.

Heh heh. Joey Lawrence. Heh.

Granted, I'm still not as old as the cast of Urban Legends: The Final Cut, which includes such stalwarts as Blossom's Joey -- oh, I'm sorry -- Joseph Lawrence and Jacinda from The Real World playing faux collegians, but I am nonetheless too jaded, too lacking in patience and tolerance and hallucinogenic drugs to possibly acquire anything from Urban Legends 2 but personal shame. Shame that I actually paid for the damn thing. Shame that a movie like this can be the highest-grossing movie of the week. Shame that I run a web magazine which may, due to its focus on the horror genre, inadvertently promote this senseless, insipid, pretentious, offensive pile of crap.

Urban Legends is not just a terrible movie, it is an ugly one. While not the worst movie I've seen this year (that honor still goes to The St. Francisville Experiment), it is the most vile and repugnant. When politicians and feminists stand up to condemn the horror genre in general, it is exactly this kind of film that they have in mind -- and this one, unfortunately, lends credence to their arguments. It takes an awful lot to offend me, but Urban Legends did it. It's sexist. It's racist. It's demeaning. It's graphically violent for no other reason than to relish the joy of savaging the human body. Add to this the fact that we have here not just a bad movie -- in terms of its uniformly awful acting, writing and direction -- but a slickly produced bad movie, one that does everything in its power to make brutal violence seem cool, glamorous, stylish. Urban Legends is much worse than its predecessor and even worse than I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, which I honestly didn't think was possible. Jennifer Morrison is no Jennifer Love Hewitt, lemme tell ya. And the sad thing is, I mean that.

The world's crappiest acting, caught on tape.

The premise of the film, as has been true this year alone with Scream 3, Shadow of the Vampire and Blair Witch 2, revolves around a horror movie within a horror movie, and in this case, a horrible movie within a horribler movie. (If Joey Lawrence still has a career, then 'horribler' is a word.) Urban Legends is set at the Alpine University film school, where the daily routine of senseless pretension -- see, if they prove they know who Hitchcock and Truffaut are, they're not talentless blowhards but real auteurs "slumming" -- is tragically interrupted by a serial killer wearing what appears to be a spaghetti strainer on his face. Of course, the actions of the real killer coincide with the movie made by Amy (Morrison), which revolves around urban legends, thus providing the tenuous link to the original film.

Urban Legends is what it would look like if the entire staff of Film Comment threw up on camera. While bad 1990s slasher movies openly emphasized what Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts did last summer, Urban Legends thinks it's really, really clever. As the student filmmakers compete for the 'Hitchcock Award', nods to films such as Vertigo abound, and we're supposed to be so impressed by director John Ottman's ability to put a video in a VCR and copy what he sees that we'll ignore, say, a woman being grabbed by the gaping, open wound in her side. Or the fact that a couple dozen models of slaughtered babies is played for laughs. Or the fact that every African-American character plays like a cliché from a really bad blaxpoitation flick (but they watch blaxploitation flicks in the movie, you see, so it's not insulting, it's self-referential).

Moving target John Ottman.

This is a new low. Urban Legends is so crude and inept that it can't even be laughed at, although I encourage you to try. Having been a child during the 1980s, my viewing of pre-1990s slasher movies has been selective -- I've seen Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, but not, say, Graduation Day or Splatter University. And after seeing Urban Legends, I now understand why the public has such a disdain for horror movies. The last few years -- with the first two installments of the Scream series, The Sixth Sense, Sleepy Hollow, Stir of Echoes, Dark City and many others -- have been good for this genre. Walking out of Urban Legends, a crumpled ticket stub in my hand, I found myself joining the ranks of the scornful and derisive. The last few years were a fluke -- this teen slasher thing is bad news. I know what I saw last Saturday night, and damn it, I'm kind of ashamed.

DROOL FACTOR: Nada. Joey Lawrence is Joey Lawrence, minus the haircut and excess of "Whoa!", and everyone else is just rank. Then again, I spent so much time cringing and looking at my lap that James Marsters could have walked on screen and I might not have noticed.

GROSS-OUT FACTOR: Everything, and in a very harsh, offensive way, but I'm not even going into detail. I'd feel like a forensic scientist detailing the remains of an autopsy.

STRONG CHICK FACTOR: I think I'm going to go rent Stir of Echoes again just so I can pretend that Jennifer Morrison is still dead.

-- Sarah Kendzior

Urban Legends is currently playing, and I think that plane to eastern Siberia leaves in a few hours. See you there.

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