Starring: Jennifer Morrison, Matt Davis, Joseph Lawrence
Director: John Ottman
Rating: **
Here's an unabashed movie totally about the triumph of style over
substance—made as a sequel to the 1998 smash hit,
Urban Legend, this John
Ottman flick turns the basic motif of the killing competition in a film school on its
head. A group of student filmmakers have to make it outstandingly fast in order to get the
Hollywood projects of their dreams. But Travis (Matthew Davis), the most brilliant amongst
them, dies under mysterious circumstances. Then Amy (Jennifer Morrison) starts filming the
twisted tales known as the Urban Legends. Her crew members keep dying one by one in
seemingly fatal accidents orchestrated by a masked man who even films the murder of an
actress. He later calls it a great example of cinema verite. It is the murders, and the
attitude behind executing and filming them, which keep you glued to your seat. A female
student wakes up after a party in a bathtub with her clothes placed neatly besides her.
She tries to escape through the window, but the killer gets her by smashing her neck. Her
blood drips in tints of sharp red and is licked by a ferocious dog tied outside to a pole.
Then a charming half-Russian cinematographer who makes stylish passes at women gets mugged
in an alley while Amy's recording screams in a room. His blood dribbles unnoticed in
the snow like a sinister patch of decoration. The contrast in most of the scenes is
between black and red—the classic colours of revenge and doom. In between, there is a
sudden reversal to a gold and silvery hue—the combination creates an overall ambience
of a controlled, luxurious carnage. In a setting like this, you don't feel the lack
of substance or the fact that the plot is a rehash of several contemporary thrillers. The
motive of the murderer, the false leads which don't work often—small pinpricks
which otherwise would have stood out glaringly in a lesser film—do not matter to that
extent here.
This is an improvement on the Hollywood killer thrillers of the '70s, which brought
out the finesse and scheme of the murder but failed to detail its essential design. It is
also a contorted tribute to the great age of refined gore—the stealth, the
atmosphere, the fact that the killings are happening on film sets and their mock, plushy
baroque-ness, all invoke, in a bizarre, modish way, the classic motifs of Anglo-American
murder.