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Urban Legends: Final Cut |
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Film students at Alpine University are competing for the coveted Hitchcock Award, which will send one lucky person on the fast track to a directing career in Hollywood. Senior Amy Mayfield can’t seem to find a story inspiring enough to capture on celluloid for the competition until she meets a security guard who tells her of a campus serial killer who butchered eight people. With the inspiration of this urban legend, Amy begins shooting her thesis movie. But all does not go as planned. The director of another film mysteriously dies. A masked man beats one of Amy’s crewmembers to death. In short, the horrific violence she is trying to produce on screen is coming to life. Now Amy and her peers must try to stop the vicious killer from not only sabotaging their work, but ending their lives.
• positive elements: Amy tries to console her friend Travis who isn’t happy with his film project. When Amy comes to Travis for help on her project, he finds her a director of photography. Travis’ brother, Trevor, works with Amy to catch the killer. People risk their own safety in an attempt to unmask and apprehend the murderer.
• spiritual content: None
• sexual content: A couple passionately kisses and then retires to an airplane lavatory where they begin to disrobe, fondle each other and have oral sex. A steamy bed scene finds Amy stripping down to her panties while Trevor wears nothing at all (viewers get a brief glimpse of his backside). A female mannequin (that looks remarkably real) appears naked from the waste up. A lesbian tells a man she’d want to sleep with him if he were a woman. An actress wears a short nightgown. Perverted comments involving female anatomy appear throughout the film.
• violent content: After suffocating a woman with a plastic bag, a man proceeds to cut her kidney out, feed it to a dog and behead her with a jagged window pane. An actress is repeatedly slashed with a knife until she dies, all shown in graphic detail. A masked murderer sneaks up on an unsuspecting filmmaker and beats him to death with a movie camera. During a moment that marries sex and violence, a man literally stabs his companion in the back while enjoying a sexual encounter with her. A student hangs dead from a bell tower. Electrocution takes the life of two men and a handgun kills two others. Lingering shots of bloody bodies leave little to the imagination.
• crude or profane language: Over two dozen f- and s-words, a half dozen-or-so misuses of God’s name and a number of mild profanities.
• drug and alcohol content: A woman unknowingly drinks alcohol that is laced with a drug. Characters drink cocktails and beer in a bar and one of them smokes a cigarette. Travis holds a bottle of hard liquor and smokes on his porch. Another man smokes a joint.
• other negative elements: Disturbing props for Amy’s horror film include a strangled dog, a decapitated head and dismembered babies.
• conclusion: This disturbing slasher sequel seeks to confuse the boundaries of fiction and real life. At any given moment, it is hard to decipher whether the violence on screen is part of the killer’s rampage, part of Amy’s film or part of a dream sequence. "There’s these fine lines between fantasy and reality. ... [This movie] kind of blurs that: ‘Is she filming this or is that really going on?,’" says the film’s star Jennifer Morrison. This process not only glorifies gore, but also encourages young people to figure out how the disturbing images all fit together. Make sure this tall tale doesn’t become legendary in your household.
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