‘Urban legend, my ass...’
As I have a long-standing love of the 1998 post-Scream slasher, Urban Legend, I’ve been circling this sequel for years. As I’m currently embroiled in a foolhardy endeavour to watch 31 horror films in 31 days, this felt like the perfect time to finally take the plunge. The film is… totally as I expected it to be…
There is, once again, a killer on campus, but this time, all the students are film students, so they sprinkle in inane references to Hitchcock whilst being summarily murdered. The cast features a bunch of TV no-marks, as well as Eva Mendes, and a returning Loretta Devine as Pam Grier disciple and rent-a-cop. Reese Wilson. There is also a, quite frankly, preposterous cameo in the film’s final scene from one of the main players from the source material.
Where Urban Legend was smart, funny and based on a genuinely compelling and original conceit, this sequel is laboured, predictable, and, ultimately, quite dull. The cast are utterly forgettable. There probably must be a score, but I’ll be damned if I can remember any of it, and the final reveal of the person behind the murders lands with a thud rather than a bang. Surprisingly, however, the film more than doubled its $14 million budget at the box office, but the mauling it received from critics was enough to serve as a full stop on this franchise forever (the third entry is a sequel to the first two films in name only).
Final Cut has a couple of pleasingly deranged death sequences, but it’s not enough to save the film from mediocrity – strangely disappointing.
