Urban Legends: Final Cut film review

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URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT

Getting an education in America can be a hazardous business. If the student loans and pressure to succeed don't cripple you, the stranger you apparently killed in a hit-and-run during the holidays certainly will.

At Alpine University, student film-makers Amy (Jennifer Morrison), Travis (Matthew Davis), Graham (Joseph Lawrence) and Toby (Anson Mount) are competing for the prestigious Hitchcock Award, which virtually guarantees the winner a glittering career in Hollywood.

Under the tutelage of Professor Solomon (Hart Bochner), Amy makes a fictional psychological thriller about a killer who murders students in the style of urban legends - contemporary tall tales which have taken hold in popular culture.

She is inspired by the real-life massacre at Pendleton University, the former place of employment of Alpine's campus security guard Reese Wilson (Loretta Devine).

Amy's creative team comprises a motley crew of friends and classmates: Sandra (Jessica Cauffiel) who believes the key to a good performance is plenty of volume, boom operator Vanessa (Eva Mendes) who is much more interested in flirting with Amy than rolling sound, special-effects nerds Stan (Anthony Anderson) and Dirk (Michael Bacall), and cameraman Simon (Marco Hofschneider) who thinks he is God's gift to women.

The production is soon thrown into disarray when Amy's rival Travis commits suicide in suspicious circumstances, and members of her crew begin to fall prey to horrible accidents. Forced to question where fiction ends and reality begins, Amy vows to catch the killer before she too becomes an urban legend.

Urban Legends: Final Cut is the latest in a very long line of facile teen slashers which mistakenly believe that the key ingredient in a good horror story is plenty of entrails and gore.

Thus, director John Ottman floods his film with numerous elaborate death sequences, including a very nasty decapitation by window pane. The screenplay holds few shocks and even less in the way of character development. It's pure soap opera, from the introduction of Travis's vengeful twin Trevor, to the softcore dream sequences and hare-brained hairpin plot twists.

If screenwriters Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson had tried to play the situation with tongue-in-cheek rather than completely straight-faced, they might have just about got away with it.