Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000)

A sequel arrives, as sequels do, and this one sets its slaughter inside a prestigious film school where the Hitchcock Award and its accompanying stipend are worth killing for. John Ottman directs, edits, and scores his own debut, which is the most interesting fact about it. The students make a thesis film about urban legends while being murdered in the fashion of urban legends, a loop of self-reference that the film mistakes for cleverness. A fencing mask, a bell tower, a drained log flume standing in for a mine ride. The machinery is visible and none of it frightens anyone.

The cultural ledger here is thin, and honesty requires saying so. Minority performers appear in supporting roles, unremarked and incidental, their presence carrying no argument and no weight. A forged note suggests the heroine harbors romantic feelings for another woman, a thread dangled and dropped within a single scene, functioning as a red herring and nothing more. The protagonist is a woman navigating a competitive program, but she is a final girl by inheritance, not by thesis. Nobody in this film has a position on race, on money, on the body, or on the climate. The killer wants an award and stolen credit. That is the entire political economy on offer.

What the film does possess is a certain exhausting self-awareness, a running commentary on horror tropes that lectures nobody about anything except the genre's own depletion. Critics at the time were unanimous and unkind, and the passage of years has not improved the vintage. It topped the box office once, briefly, which proves only that appetites were strong that September. We classify it, we note its faint gestures, and we move on to the next bottle.