If the renowned horror cycle hadn?t already slashed all its yearnings to a bloody pulp since the reawakening with ?Scream? in 1996, then the new ?Urban Legends: Final Cut? will certainly put a stop too all that is hockey-mask wearing and chainsaw-wielding. The film is essentially a series of badly written pseudo-scary cop-out gore bits with all of the thrills and spills cut out, with a rusty ol? blade that couldn?t be duller.

Set at a posh University out in woodsy Maine, the plot (he, he, ho, ho) comes together, I think, when a young girl at a night club is drugged by a mysterious crowd prowler, kidnapped, and later has her kidney surgically removed. She frantically calls 911 on her cell phone while the masked killer chops and saws something in the kitchen. The emergency operator thinks she's pulling a fast one. ?Let me guess?You woke up in a bath full of ice with your kidney missing?? That is rather elaborate urban legend, one of which has never crossed my path. But the more gruesome, the better, as the maniac comes a?callin?, decapitating the girl with a large shard of glass not before puncturing the gapping wound on the side of her torso with his fingers. This isn?t modern 90s trendy horror but wannabe Italian trash at it?s worse. Remember Sergio Martino?s 1974 crap classic ?Torso??

It seems the killer (or, nowadays, killers) is trying to bump-off every student involved in coveting the prestigious Hitchcock Film Award (oh geez!), which spotlights the student director of the best student movie of the year. Victims and suspects include Jennifer Morrison, Matthew Davis, Loretta Devine, Hart Bochner, and television?s biggest I?m-so-cool-it?s-dorky veteran Joey Lawrence (?Blossom?). If only the slasher could get to these annoyingly inept characters before the ill-conceived, flabbergasting climax. And only in movies do college film departments look like multi-million dollar Hollywood sound stages. Jason Voorhees would be so envious of the modern masked madman. I guess log cabins are a thing of the past.