All Blood, No Heart

A paralysingly-stupid movie with a sadistically funny story line.

A paralysingly-stupid movie, "Urban Legend 2" is a flick that could well join the ranks of The Zee Horror Show, with terrible direction, unconvincing actors and a story line so unbelievable that it starts being sadistically funny after a while.

The story is set in a college where students of cinema are to make a film of their own to win a prestigious award that could well take them to Hollywood. Caught up as ever in these dollar dreams, there’s a lot of unfriendly competition and threats of plagiarism. One student (Jennifer Morrison) decides to make a film about a campus killer...and whaddya know, there really is a campus killer, sadistically murdering her friends as the movie progresses.

However - and this absurdity takes the icing on the cake - she has some help in the unlikely form of the twin brother of a murdered student (Matthew Davis), who has vowed to find his brother’s killer. From here on the movie goes from bad to worse until the credits start rolling.

What on earth was John Ottman thinking when he was behind the camera? The direction is terribly weak, with scenes of the movie jumping away from each other in opposite directions. If the direction was a little tighter, perhaps this movie could even have been enjoyable; however, the poor direction serves to kill the drama and thrill instead of enhancing the suspense.

Surrounded by mutilated corpses, blood and gore, and ear-piercing screams, the cast has very little to do, and it does it badly. While the two leads turn in acceptable performances, the rest of the cast is uniformly bad - a fact made worse by the lack of a coherent storyline and poor production. Not a movie to look forward to!

This article was first published on04 Jun 2001.