Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000)

Attempting to finish film school, a director doing her film about a serial killer killing his victims on urban legends starts to realize that a serial killer is running around behind the scenes killing off the crew, and must stop the madman before killing off everyone on the film.

This here was a pretty surprising entry. One of the things it does well is that it really features a lot of suspenseful work at times as this makes a hard time of determining if what's being seen is real or just being shot for the movie. It plays the movie-within-a-movie trick to nice effect, since it features enough to make hard to distinguish one from the other including it's wonderful opening sequence that takes a while before realizing after the fact it's been faked, a sequence where the assembled cast watch the dailies only for a strange cut-shot to play where one of the cast is viciously stalked and killed is screened where all but one thinking it to be shot for the film but the other positive that it's real and a later scene where a murder done during the recording of a scream-test loud enough to drown out the victim's own being great scenes. Even going away from that formula, there’s some rather fun stalking here from the bathroom chase featuring the woman trying to escape from the killer out into the alleyway or a thrilling chase through the recording studio and out into the surrounding countryside and pool while an attack at a carnival ride hidden by the darkness and fog comes off rather nice as well. The final confrontation in the movie-set graveyard setting is just fun, being creepy, exciting and all-around a blast with the true revelation and the different twists featured throughout make for a nice time here. The last big feature here is a really nice and healthy mix amongst the kills, which along with the mask worn are the film's rather good parts. This one here only has a few flaws to it. The main one here is that the main explanation for the killing has a lot of ways for how to interpret it, and it feels just too clumsy and unrealistic to be considered as believable. The fact that the violence is toned down from anything that it should have, since, for all the creativity displayed in the kills, it isn't very bloody and with a couple of kills that could've been in here. These are the same thing that really should've fixed by taking more of those and making them more bloody. It would've taken out a mild flaw in the film rather simply. The last flaw in here is the film's maddening ability to switch between the film shoot and the real world. It's fun at times, but there's also the fact that the film tries to be clever with changing around the two and it gets a little harder to defend the longer they go on. These here are the film's flaws.

Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, Brief Nudity and a sex scene.