'Urban Legend' Sequel Cuts Like Butter Knife

Director John Ottman doesn't get my vote for the Hitchcock award.

That's the fictional award film students are vying for in "Urban Legends: Final Cut," a sequel to the 1998 horror flick "Urban Legend."

Perhaps if Ottman had focused all his attention on directing, rather than also taking on the editing and music composing tasks, this film would've become more than a derivative, blood-and-guts teen slasher flick.

Instead his directorial debut is just that: two-dimensional characters, bland dialogue, and no real scares.

Instead of picking up where the first film left off, "Final Cut" takes a different route. It follows a group of film students at Alpine University competing for the aforementioned Hitchcock award, given to the best thesis film of the year.

Heroine Amy (Jennifer Morrison from "Stir Of Echoes") decides to make her film a horror based on urban legends, after hearing the campus security guard (Loretta Devine from the original "Urban Legend") recount the events that encapsulated the first film.

So the horror film-within-a-horror film begins, borrowing heavily from the "Scream" sequels. Is the scene being filmed part of Amy's project? Or is it horribly real?

Once again a group of relative unknowns are assembled for the project. There's Matthew Davis (appearing in the upcoming Joel Schumacher pic "Tigerland") playing good/evil twins Travis and Trevor, Joseph Lawrence (of "Blossom" fame -- did the Joseph throw you off?) as a fast-talking wannabe player, and Anthony Anderson and Michael Bacall in the roles of Stan and Dirk, both George Lucas-idolizing special effects nerds.

Hart Bochner plays the students' cool-as-a-cucumber and kinda cute professor.

As the competition becomes fierce over who's going to win the Hitchcock, students start dropping like boom mikes, and everyone begins to suspect something strange is going on.

Points go to whoever picked Peterborough, Ont.'s Trent University as the backdrop for this horror film. With its forboding high concrete walls and narrow passageways, the campus just screams for a scary movie to be filmed there. Someone was using their noggin when they picked that place.

There are nods in the film to the master of horror himself, with the Hitchcockian focus in on Amy's perfect eyelashes and wide-eyed look of horror ? la "Psycho," a "Vertigo"-esque chase up a clocktower's spiral staircase, and also a bit of "Blair Witch" thrown in with some of the running-through-the-woods scenes.

But these references only serve as reminders of better written, better acted, and genuinely scarier horror films. Legends, if you will.

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