I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer

I'm not entirely sure why, but slasher flicks almost never have a third entry that fits well with the rest...I mean, look at Halloween III: Season of the Witch. They strayed from the idea of Michael Myers being an unstoppable killing machine, then introduced mind control, killer masks, and human-looking robot assassins! Or look at Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors. Suddenly, the Freddy franchise has magical elements, dream powers, and 2 sequels so similar, they might have been better off combining them into a single story.

Anyway, that was what I was thinking as I decided to watch I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, an inferior sequel to what was already a much-criticized franchise. Anyway, I'm watching it this week, lucky me(and you, if you watch along with my "play-by-play" of the movie's story). Get ready to be both disappointed and SPOILED!

Full disclosure, right off the bat! Remember Ray, Julie and Brenda from the second film? Yeah, well, they aren't in this one. And seriously, it's not like any of them are too busy to conclude a trilogy, so that just bugs me right off the bat. Also, the movie doesn't seem to know where it wants to take place. The first several credits are shown over images of an empty ski resort, then the remaining credits look like they were superimposed over a crowd visiting Coney Island.

We're not even past the friggin' credits, and I want to shut this stupid movie off. Not a good sign.

Anyway, as the credits finally grind to a halt, we see a group of teens having fun, and looking right at the camera at various intervals. Nice. One of the teens, a blond girl named Amber, decides to tell the others about an urban legend, The Fisherman. They've dumbed down his origin story, so that he's now just some generic guy in a raincoat who stalks teens who "have secrets", and he appears around the same time every year. Yeesh.

Colby, Amber's boyfriend--and a dead ringer in some shots for Jake Busey--backs her up on the story, but their friend Zoe doesn't buy into it. Then they take some photos of each other, and decide to try one of those carnival games where you win a prize if you hit some milk bottles.

Then they suddenly start puking up exposition and plot points. They live in Colorado; Colby is going to college when summer ends, but Amber and her friends have a year left before they graduate; Amber is "organizing a field trip" in the fall, which I'm sure we needed to know for some reason; oh, and the kid running the bottle game is attracted to Amber.

Then the sheriff's son, PJ, shows up, announcing that he's decided to enlist. Everyone oohs and ahhs over him. Then the sheriff and a deputy move on, and more group pictures bare taken. Behind Amber is a red curtain, and there's a certain Fisherman-shaped silhouette lurking back there. Hmmm, it's probably nothing.

Gosh, the curtain just got slashed down the middle by the hook The Fisherman was holding. What a shocking development, huh? And I might be wrong here, but isn't he supposed to arrive AFTER they all try to cover up a crime that's murder-related? (well, okay, they're killing the script with weak acting, but still...)

Everyone freaks out(except 1 or 2 who didn't realize they were in the shot and look like they're laughing), and The Fisherman slashes Colby in the arm before he can get away. As they all run like ninnies, no one in the background has any reaction whatsoever. I guess screaming teenagers, bleeding arms, and psychotic killers in raincoats are an everyday occurrence in Colorado. Sounds like a hoot to live there.

Anyway, as they all continue to scream about a killer chasing them, people just generally ignore them and enjoy the boardwalk. PJ decides to break away from the others, and starts skating his way to the top of a parking garage. The others finally spot him at the top, and see that The Fisherman has him cornered. Oh no!

As The Fisherman is slowly cornering him, PJ's dad and the deputy show up.  They run to try to reach the top level before the killer can strike, but it doesn't seem likely to happen that way, given how close the killer is to his first potential victim. Perhaps they heard me, because PJ puts the skateboard on the concrete wall, and starts to skate away from the killer. When the cops arrive, both the killer and PJ have disappeared.

Colby, Amber and Zoe take off again, and run into a dark alleyway. The Fisherman shows up as they catch their breath, and it turns out to be their friend Roger. He claims to have bought the actual hook Ben Willis and his son Will(Remember him from the 2nd movie's dumbest clue ever? Will Benson? Ben's son? There, did I just  piss you off all over again over the stupidity of that scene? HA!!!) used in the killing sprees from the first 2 films, and shows it off. As Baby Darth Vader said in The Phantom Menace, "Yippee!!" (Heh, if you paid to see that in a theatre, I'll bet I just pissed you off again...I'm on a roll!)

Oh, and PJ was in on it as well, but he hasn't joined the rest of the group yet. Gee, where could he be? The others all go back to the boardwalk, and find a pile of mattresses that PJ was supposed to land on have been moved. Instead, PJ landed on a forklift, which is definitely not a stack of mattresses. His friends watch the cops and paramedics examine the body, and all have sad, horrified expressions on their faces...except for Roger, whose face is so over the top, he looks like he just passed a bowling ball in a Port-a-Potty.

The foursome walk out to the middle of nowhere, and I'm sure you know what happens next: they squabble, blame each other, decide to keep their prank a secret, burn the evidence blah blah blah. Hell, it was handled better in the first Scary Movie, and that was a spoof! There are 2 variations in this scene, though...First, Colby uses the hook to give himself a cut, to match what witnesses saw during the "attack"; and instead of "We take this to our graves", the pact becomes "The secret dies with us".

The scene fades out, and now we're in a cemetery. A helpful caption informs us that it's now July 1, one year after the previous events. Amber is there to put flowers on PJ's grave, then she decides that 10 seconds is enough time to mourn, so she whips out a camera. An sudden wind kicks up, then a bird swoops past her, scaring the crap out of the girl. Serves her right for goofing around with her camera, when she should be mourning her friend.

The movie then switches over to a farm. Exciting stuff, I know. A bunch of teens are partying near a silo or three, including Lance(the teen who was running that bottle game the night of the accident. He spots Amber walking by, and intercepts her, because he apparently still has a hopeless crush on her. Just tell her that you'll wait for her to get out of prison for killing PJ....she'll find it romantic!

Lance sees the camera, and Amber reveals that she's now really into photography. Yeah, we could tell because of the subtle camera you're lugging around. If she decided to go to med school, she'd probably be wearing surgical gloves and holding a scalpel. Don't you appreciate it when a movie dumbs it way down for ya?

Anyway, Lance has been doing maintenance and groundskeeping at a local ski resort, which finally gives the movie a reason to show those random ski lift shots during the opening credits. Further discussion reveals that Amber is waiting for Colby to arrive, which crushes poor Lance. Then Amber's friends drag her a few feet away, so that they can talk about Colby, just close enough for Lance to hear them.

When her friends ask her why she kept faithful to Colby for the entire year, she implies that it makes it all the more special when he finally comes back home. the other girls tell her to look to the side, and she sees that Colby already arrived, and she never knew about it. Uh oh, looks like Lance's opportunity to woo her may have finally arrived...

Amber marches over to Colby, and asks for a private chat. He tells her that his internship plans didn't pan out, and that he's been back for some time. When she asks why he never called her, Colby blames it on the pact they made to cover up their role in PJ's death. Translation: I wanted to date around, and I was hoping that you'd neve3r find out.

Colby then just meanders away, leaving Amber to get upset alone. She decides to leave the totally bitchin' silo party, and Lance offers to take her home on his motorcycle. She responds that she brought her truck, After some magical enchantments are performed offscreen, Amber ends up driving home in a jeep, not a truck. Whatever. Maybe The Fisherman will suddenly become The Equestrian using the same sort of magic.

Amber drives up behind what looks like the HOLLYWOOD sign, and leans against it while staring down at the town. Deputy Hafner(Yay! Another character gets a name!) finds her there while out on patrol, and offers her a shoulder to cry on, if she ever needs somebody to confide in. Yeah, right!

Upon returning home, Amber mopes around in her bedroom, staring at all of the photographs of her friends. An ominous-looking envelope is on her bed, with her name written on it, in a font very familiar to anyone who has seen the first 2 movies. It's just a note from her folks though, telling her that they've gone out, and not to throw any wild parties.

Um, okay. So why did that require an envelope? Don't most people on Planet Earth just write a not and leave it on a table, or stuck to a door or the fridge, or, I don't know, a countertop? I mean, seriously, it's a simple note! "Honey, we can't leave for the dinner party until I find an envelope for this quick message I wrote to our daughter. Yeas, I know we're running late, but this message NEEDS to be sealed up, in case the family dog decides to see what we're up to!

During the night, Amber hears a scary sound and wakes up. She wanders through her bedroom in the dark, and gets a text message. Want to guess what it says? I'll give you a hint...The words "summer", "know", "last", "did", "I", "you" and "what" are in the message. It's a stumper, I know.

Amber pays a visit to Zoe. Zoe is pretty resentful that Amber has been avoiding her until now, but she has also been getting the anonymous message. When Amber asks her for help, Zoe wants to know why she didn't just go to Colby instead. Despite her anger issues, Zoe agrees to let Amber stay with her for the night.

The next day, the pair go to the closed ski resort, to see if Roger is around. He scares them by arriving in a welder's mask, and carrying a small welding torch. They show him the text messages, and he claims that he hasn't received any messages at all. Roger proposes going to the cops, but no one else seems to like that idea. They even make him pledge to keep the secret again. Then Amber and Zoe leave, and let Roger get back to being creepy. My money is on him being involved somehow. Maybe Ben Willis had another son that we never knew about...

"Roger...Benson?!?"

Seriously, if any variation of that line is spoken, drinks are on me!

Okay, okay, back to the movie...Where were we? Oh right, Amber and Zoe just finished spending time with Roger, taking him away from his precious human head collection(...or so I imagine...). The girls sit outside for awhile, and eventually start cracking jokes with each other until they're friends again. Awwwww, that's touching.

The sheriff then pops up from out of nowhere, and scares them shitless. He says things to them that could imply that he knows something about what happened that night, or it could just be misleading innuendo. My vote is for the latter, since he would have made some arrests if he really knew what happened that night. Still, maybe he bears watching as well...

With nothing better to do, Zoe goes to a public pool, where Colby is the lifeguard. He doesn't believe that the threats are real, and accuses Zoe and Amber of making it up to get him to  come back to Amber. Zoe reverses his defense, saying that he could just as easily have sent the text messages as a childish prank.

That causes Colby to lose his temper, and he goes on a break to continue the conversation somewhere a little more private. He tells Zoe that it's not his problem anymore, and stomps away. When he returns to his post, he sees that somebody wrote a message on the concrete with water: I KNOW WHAT  blah blah blah. As Colby stares at the message, it begins to evaporate.

Amber, by the way, does what any young woman would do if her life was being threatened:  She takes a bike, and decides to head up into the hills by herself to look around. She's a genius! Some thunder alarms her, so she rides her bike over to the closed ski resort, so that she can snoop around in the dark, menacing buildings. I'd say it's safe to assume that Amber has a deathwish.

She wanders through the structure3 where the ski lift is housed, and a shadowy figure looms ahead of her, holding something that looks like a weapon in his hand.  It turns out that he's one of the maintenance guys, and Amber tells him that she had trouble with her bike. He offers to turn on the ski lift to get her back into town, and tells her that a storm is heading their way soon.

Amber takes him up on his offer, but rides the lift alone. She then gets all panicked when she sees The Fisherman waiting for her down below. She screams, the storm arrives, and the chair lift begins to rock back and forth. The Fisherman somehow teleports to right above her, and he uses his hook to smash a window. Amber screams some more, backs away from the window, then arrives safely at her destination. They should have called this I Know What You Did Last Summer, But I'm Not Going To Do Anything About It.

She realizes that the flash on her camera went off during the encounter, which means that she might have proof that The Fisherman came after her. She develops the film, then presents the pictures to Colby and Zoe. Colby claims to see nothing definitive in any of them, and he and Amber have a short spat. Then, when Amber asks why Roger didn't come to the meeting, Colby claims that Roger has apparently dropped off of the radar. Hmmm...the creepy-acting character suddenly vanishes? Let's keep an eye on this plotline...

Well now the movie is just busting my balls, because Roger is in the very next scene. He's been drinking and popping pills, and looks like a wreck. He writes what looks like a suicide note, then prepares a wrapped package to be mailed out. Roger picks up a hook(maybe even "the" hook, for all I know), and stabs himself in the wrist with it.

A noise distracts him from finishing the job, and he looks around to pinpoint the source of his distraction. As he wanders back and forth to investigate every corner and shadow, The shadow of The Fisherman looms before him. Roger starts running, but not before the killer gets in a quick slash at his midsection..

Roger creeps around in the semi-dark, trying to blend into the shadows, and for a few seconds it looks like he's more or less hiding from nothing. But then The Fisherman reappears, and Roger grabs a circular saw as a quick weapon. They duel, and The Fisherman nearly decapitates Roger with a deep cut to the throat. Well, so much for my detective skills!

Roger's friends find him soon after, and search the warehouse he was apparently living in for the killer. They find his evidence package instead, as well as the note.  Then, for some reason, Deputy Hafner arrives on the scene, gun drawn and looking intense. They show him the note, and he seems to buy their story that they just happened to find Roger dead.

After the corpse is carted away, Hafner tells them some things about Roger that they never knew: That he was failing his college courses; he was getting into fights;  he was hooked on anti-depressants...yeah, Roger was coming unhinged pretty damn fast. After Zoe and Colby leave, the deputy tries to wrap up his interview of Amber by flirting with her. Excuse me while i go gag.

Zoe and Colby must have hung around, because they drive Amber home. Inside, they all find a trail of litter, consisting of cut-up photographs that Amber took. The trail leads up to her bedroom, where the killer has left a collage on her wall that spells out a warning: SOON.

They all drop in on Lance, who us cutting up lumber with a chainsaw. Colby starts to threaten him, so Lance swings around the chainsaw, threatening him right back. For some kooky reason that defies any logic that I'm aware of, the encounter convinces the trio that Lance isn't the mystery stalker. Boy, they're even worse at investigating than I am!

The next suspect on their list is Sheriff Davis. They figure that the death of PJ pushed him over the edge, and this is his way of getting back at them. Heck, why not add Deputy Hafner to the list? His interest in Amber is waaaay over the top. He gives me the heebie-jeebies. Colby tests out the theory by leaving a threatening note on his car, then watching his reaction when he reads it.

Zoe is next on the killer's list. The Fisherman finds her taking a nap, and waits for Zoe to wake up. Then he surprises her as she walks around in her studio apartment, and jumps out of the dark at her. He reveals his face, and he looks like character actor Clint Howard. Zoe screams, wakes up, is killed with a hook, then wakes up again.

 I wish that last sentence was a joke, but this actually happened. Ugh. On a mildly interesting side note, when Zoe wakes up for real, the sofa is torn apart, and her guitar is wrecked. Uh, so now The Fisherman needs depth perception???

That same evening, Amber decides to go out by herself again. I'm telling ya, deathwish. She finds Lance lurking in her driveway, and he declares, "I know what you did last summer!" Gosh, where have I heard that line before?

It turns out that he's not threatening Amber...the phrase was scratched into his motorcycle. He thinks that Colby might have done it, but Amber warns him to be careful. Heh, nice way to pad the movie's running time, by adding extra victims to the list. Touche, awful movie.

Now the film wants us to catch up with Colby, who is night swimming. Man, all of the intelligent members of society are in this movie! He stops swimming to look for someone named Harry. Either that, or he's asking us if we think he's hairy. Either way, there's no answer to his query.

Just as he decides to go back to swimming, the lights in the pool itself begin to flicker. Colby leans on the edge of the pool, and The Fisherman shows up to pierce him through the ankle with his hook. Colby swims to the opposite ed of the pool, then gingerly hoists himself out of the water to examine his wounded foot. The scene ends there, which is rather odd.

He, Amber, Zoe, and now Lance, have a meeting of the minds. Lance refuses to believe that his uncle, the sheriff, would be capable of doing these things. Colby proposes that they tell the deputy, so that he can protect them. Anyone else think that's a bad idea?

They visit Deputy Hafner, but he's got a bunch of friends visiting, so they can't just blurt out the story right then and there. As they try to figure out a way to speak to him privately, Sheriff Davis stumbles out of his home, drunk and carrying more beers to pass around. Apparently, the meeting at Hafner's house is a "drown your misery in beer on the 1-year anniversary of the death of PJ" party. I'll bet they had a doozy of a time fitting all of that on the party invitations!

Whoops, I got sidetracked yet again!  They move away from the watchful eye of the sheriff, and decide that it might be time to leave town. In the morning, as they all meet up, Zoe announces that she can't leave just yet. It turns out that there's a talent show that evening(nice way to rip off the first film!), and Zoe seems to think that Hollywood talent agents will be in the audience. Yeah, dream on...

Okay, so they need a new plan. They're all going to the talent show, Zoe can play her song or whatever, and then they can flee from danger. Sheesh. The next scene shows Zoe rehearsing. All I can say is: She should've just left town.

Amber sits down with Lance, and vomits up more exposition, in the form of newspaper clippings about Ben Willis and his 2 murder sprees. She used the stories as the basis for her prank the previous year. Then we get treated to more blaring music.

Okay, so let's pause the movie here for a sec...Now, in the film, Ben Willis and his killings happened before the events of this film, right? And in both previous movies, the motive for the murders was personal revenge. So...why would he be involved with these schmucks? He's not Bloody Mary, where he just gets summoned by dumb teens doing dumb things to each other. And, as far as we know, there's no family connection to him in this entry.

So, why would they even bother with his story? Make Amber Julie's long-lost cousin, or have Brandy do a cameo. But don't just say it's Ben Willis, unless there's an actual REASON for him to show up! I mean, geez, they're not even in the same state that the first movie's accident was set in. What, did Ben Willis book a flight to Colorado, drag his mangled self across the country, check into a nice hotel, then went on a new killing rampage? See, crap like THAT is why I do this...because these movies need some healthy mocking!

Anyway....back to the movie. Enjoy!

Reading about  couple of murder sprees must be a turn-on, because Laznce and Amber get all hot and bothered after reading the articles. Thankfully, the movie then shifts to a parade scene(another "tribute" to the first movie?), and Colby approaches Lance and Amber. Colby's drunk, and he lets them know how he feels about seeing them together all of the time. To Amber's credit, she dishes his crap right back at him.

Then they file in to watch the talent show. Early on, Colby takes off by himself to get smashed again, even after Amber tries to stop him. Then we see Zoe by herself, trying to remain calm.  A figure approaches her, but it's just a stagehand, who tells her that her band is up next.

While they perform, the sheriff and deputy both linger near the stage. Colby, meanwhile, has found his way to a deserted bar, and he decides to celebrate his good fortune by drinking it up. The song ends, then we see Zoe sitting backstage by herself again. Amber and Lance show up to congratulate her on the performance, and Zoe reveals that an agent did, indeed, ask her for her contact information.

They're happy for her, but they also want to get going. Zoe scoffs that nothing's going to happen to them "in the next 2 minutes", which is obviously the cue for The Fisherman to burst into the room. He chases them out of the dressing room like a lame Scooby-Doo monster, and off they go! Jinkies!

They end up in a room full of metal lockers, and try to sneak past the killer. Every single time, he somehow ends up in front of them. Then Lance and Amber suddenly realize that Zoe has inexplicably been separated from them. She screams out their names and tries to escape through a set of doors, but her escape route is chained shut, and her cries go unheard.

Then You-Know-Who shows up.  Zoe sees his face and screams again, and he plunges his hook through her chest and midsection. Amber and Lance arrive just in time to see her cough up some blood, then get thrown to the ground like a rag doll. Amber approaches the body and cries over her.

Someone can be heard arriving, so Lance and Amber back up into the shadows to see who it might be. It's Sheriff Davis, and he calls for back-up. Then he finds the couple in the room, and assumes that they committed the murder. He draws his gun and prepares to arrest them.

At that very moment, The Fisherman impales the sheriff with the hook, then drags him backwards into the darkness. Amber and Lance take off running for the umpteenth time, and find time to call Colby and fill him in on everything that just happened.

As Amber is giving him the gory details, The Fisherman suddenly pops into the bar. Colby runs into the kitchen, and grabs a butcher knife as a weapon. He lets the killer get close, then plunges the knife into The Fisherman's back. The wound doesn't even slow him down. Colby runs further into the kitchen and freezer area, and The Fisherman winds up behind him. Colby is ambushed and killed, and his friends find him moments later.

Then Amber and Lance find Deputy Hafner, and try to get him to assist them. Instead, he draws a weapon on them, claiming that Roger told him about the prank and the aftermath. Then they see Zoe's bloody body in his car, and assume that he's the one behind all of the killings. Wow, did I finally make the right guess? I'm shocked!

So is the deputy. As he tries to figure out if they set him up, The Fisherman approaches him from behind. Deputy Hafner turns around in time, and quickly fires 2 shotgun shells into the killer. Neither blast stops him. The Fisherman lifts the deputy into the air, then pushes his body into a forklift. Ouch. He lets the body dangle off the ground, and admires his work.

Lance and Amber get into a car, and ram the vehicle into The Fisherman. His body flies into the air from the impact, and they stop to see if he gets up again. Why do they always wait? If there's an explanation for this that makes any sense, I'd love to hear it.

As you probably expected,The Fisherman stands up again. His hooded hat has fallen off, revealing that he's a rotting zombie. Okay, so I guess that he is supposed to be Ben Willis. And now he's a zombie. And probably a cyborg vampire from 1775, for all I know. This thing just committed the worst crime imaginable: it made the first 2 movies in the franchise look classy.

So, yeah. Zombie Ben Willis. His eyes glow red, and now the getaway car won't start. He teleports to the window and attacks them again, but Amber retaliates by stabbing him with the hook they bought on Ebay. Dark, oily goo pours out of the wound that the hook creates, and ZomBen vanishes.

Amber and Lance get out of the car, and Amber decides that she's going to hunt for the killer, and use the hook to finish him off. Yeah, right...let us know where you want to be buried, dumbass.

They run off into the night, and eventually find some kind of auto garage. They manage to get inside and close the entrance seconds before ZomBen catches them, and they dart around to look for a good hiding place.

They find themselves at a repair bay, and Lance gets the brilliant idea to connect the hook to an overhanging chain. He gives Amber the end of the chain, and tells her to release it when he gives the command. Then ZomBen comes in, and begins his latest attack.

Lance tells Amber to release the chain, and the hook cuts into ZomBen a second time, releasing more of the gooey stuff. Then Lance and Amber dive down into a repair bay in the ground, and ZomBen tries to slash at them from above. Then more running. Always with the running.

They sprint over to another building, and lock the entrance behind them. Lance stops in his tracks to tell Amber that they must continue moving. Wow. My mind has officially been boggled. Next, maybe he'll wake her up to tell her that she needs some rest.

They lock the entrance behind them, and use another door to get outside again. While Amber gets behind the wheel of a thresher, ZomBen tries to disembowel Lance, but cuts him across the chest instead. And yet, Lance lives! Amber turns the farming vehicle on, and ZomBen rips the door off of the hinges to snatch her up. He throws her to the ground, and Lance fires a gun at him to draw him away from Amber.

As ZomBen shambles toward Lance again, Amber gets her hands on the hook, and plants it right between ZomBen's shoulder blades. Then she says, "The secret...dies...with you!", and roundhouse-kicks the undead killer into the blades of the thresher, where he becomes Shredded Ben. Part of this balanced breakfast!

Amber approaches Lance, and calls 911. The police get a statement from the both of them in the ambulance, and they both boldly declare that the ordeal is over. I think we all know exactly what that means, right?

Yup, we get a final scene showing Amber driving in Nevada, on her way to see Lance. They're chatting via speakerphone, and Amber gets distracted when one of her tires  appears to get punctured. She pulls over, and gets out of the jeep to examine the damage. Then the call gets cut off, and a strange breeze kicks up. as amber spins around to survey the terrain, ZomBen suddenly appears behind her. THE END

Well, I guess it could have been worse. Wasn't too thrilled about the zombie crap or the blatant cribbing of specific sequences from the first movie, but at least no one in this film screamed at the sky, "What do you want, huh? Come and get me!"

It was still terrible though. 2 out of 5 killer trees for IAKWYDLS. And what useful nuggets of knowledge did this thing leave me with?

-People in Colorado are pretty casual when they see teens being terrorized by killers.

-Hollywood agents like to show up at random talent shows, to discover college dropouts who can sing.

-Stuff you buy off if the Internet is probably cursed.

Next up is a strange-looking movie called Ice Cream Man. Yum!

Psycho Cop Returns

Well, I missed yet another week by going to the hospital, but here I am again...with a working laptop again, saints be praised! So, until my run of good(ish) luck runs out, I better watch a slasher film, and quick! This time out, I'm watching Psycho Cop Returns, which looks like a cheaper version of Maniac Cop. Where's he returning from? Let's find out! As always, prepare your eyeballs for SPOILERS!!!!

Okay, so no subtitles. Bummer. The film begins with Psycho Cop(let's just call him PC) sitting at the counter in a coffee shop, just slurping up coffee and eating a doughnut. a few stools away, 2 young guys in suits are planning a bachelor party, to be held after hours at their office. The nerdier, more nervous of the 2-- Brian-- worries about losing his job, but his pal Larry offers to take the blame if they get caught.

As they discuss strippers, booze and weed, they attract the attention of PC. He approaches them and asks if they are planning anything illegal, and they both quickly persuade him that they're as law-abiding as he is. Oops, bad example!

PC goes out out to his car, whistling and skipping along the way. Weird, As he gets into the vehicle, the interior is shown to be filthy, covered in blood and various body parts. So....like my car, but cleaner. The credits roll, but the only name I recognize is Julie Strain, who's sort of a lower-budget Jamie Lee Curtis. I have a feeling that everything in this is a lower-budget version of something else.

Anyway, the theme song degenerates into a mish-mash of annoying noises, then we return to Brian and Larry, who are now walking back to the office. Brian is still whining about how scary the cop was, and Larry is mocking him. Both are too busy chatting to notice PC's car creeping along the curb just behind them.

No, Brian just saw the car. He freaks out, so Larry makes a few more snarky remarks at his expense, then decides to confront PC directly. PC turns on his siren, then speeds away. as the two dunderheads continue to head back to the office, PC circles the block, then resumes tailing them. Sadly, neither man possesses the ability to look behind them a second time. Tragic.

Back at their office, Larry and Brian get the groom-to-be, Gary, waaaaay too excited for the bachelor festivities. Oh, and I forgot to mention it before, but their boss is named "Mr. Stonecipher". Makes him sound like he belongs in some kind of wacky cult or something. Maybe as the guy who gets unmasked at the end of every freaking case Scooby and Shaggy ever investigated. "Look, the Lighthouse Creeper was Old Man Stonecipher all along! Zoinks!"

Aw crap, I still have a movie to watch, don't I?

Okay, so let's meet the rest of the soon-to-be-dead group thus far: we already met Larry, Brian, and Gary; then we have Michael, the portly joker in charge of supplying the alcohol; the crotchety old Mr. Stonecipher(Rut roh!); oh, and Tony, a fellow employee who has been having an affair with hot co-worker Chloe. There are more, but they arrive later in the film.

Anyway, Tony and Chloe decide to sneak away for a quick tryst in the copyroom, while Brian spots a pretty employee from the accounting department, Sharon. Larry tries to use a bad pick-up line on Sharon, but she shoots him down. Then Larry surprises Tony and Chloe in the copyroom, runs over to the copier, and makes a single copy of his goofy face, presumably to send to the accounting department. I've been to backwoods carnivals with less freaks than there are in this movie.

Larry faxes the picture, along with a brief message, up to Sharon. She responds by faxing back a photo of Mr. Stonecipher, urging Larry to make his move on him. Heh. Did I rent a horror film, or a cheap knock-off of Office Space?

So eventually the workday ends, and the grumpy boss leaves. The guys watch him go, then Brian spots the police vehicle parked in front of the building. While he once again gets worked up over it, Larry tells the others about the incident at the diner. Then Larry calls the strippers, to tell them the coast is clear. Oh, and he bribes Gus the security guard to look the other way as the strippers arrive. What could possibly go wrong?

One of the strippers presses all of the elevator buttons as they all step in, and promises Larry that they can use the extra time to give him a private show. Along the way, Sharon, who decided to stay late to get some work done, hears the commotion. She decides to check it out, but the elevator door closes before she sees anything.

Back in the copyroom, Tony is still screwing Cloe. When they hear the noise from the elevator, Chloe swiftly gets dressed, and they decide to find a better area in which to make out. Hopefully it's an office with better lighting. I swear, I've seen dungeons that were illuminated better than the offices in this building.

PC bangs on the locked front door, and Gus gets up to let him in. Damn Gus! Didn't you read the script? You're too old to be making rookie mistakes like this! I bet he kills you first. You're like the guy in every cop action movie who gets paired up with the star, only to die 2 days before retirement.

While Gus is waiting to exit the film, the bachelor party gets cranked up to 11. Too bad the Fun Dial goes all the way up to 100. They put on a porn flick that consists of a guy who looks a little bit like Paul Rudd in an afro sitting in a comfy chair, while 2 strippers dance around him. While that's playing in the background, a stripper dressed as a cowgirl starts to dance in front of the guys. who are each drinking from their own bottles of booze.

The next stripper emerges, and her costume is more generic. Schoolgirl, I guess. Then the third one comes out in the usual sexy maid outfit. The cheesy 70's guy in the stag film losses his fake moustache for a moment, and tries to stick it back on. I don't know why, but that part made me laugh for a minute or two.

Back in the ground floor lobby, PC grabs a sharpened pencil. When he accuses Gus of breaking the rules by letting the guys have their bachelor party upstairs, Gus tries to explain that it's all legit. PC doesn't like his attitude, so he drives the pencil through Gus's eye socket and into his brain, killing him offscreen. Then PC gets on the elevator to begin his killing spree. Finally!

The guys all hear the elevator door open, then close again. Everyone hushes up, but no one appears. They decide that Gus is playing a prank on them and resume the party, but then hear the elevator door open again. Mike decides to go see who it is. Bye Mike.

Mike gets in the elevator, which comes to a halt between floors. He pries oipen the doors, only to realize that he needs to boost himself up to get to the floor he's stopped at. Mike hoists himself up, not realizing that PC is beneath him, watching his chunky legs kick and flail. Mike manages to pull himself up all the way before PC can grab him, though.

Mike makes his way to the front lobby, where PC pretends to be the night watchman. Uh, wouldn't Mike know it wasn't him, since they work in the same building day after day? I guess not, because Mike doesn't sense anything wrong. PC makes up some dumb story about the elevator glitching up all day, and Mike believes him.

Returning to the party, Mike tells the others what PC told him about the elevator. For some reason, Mike decides to go back down to the lobby, and he gets in the "safe" elevator. As he rides down, the elevator begins to plummet, knocking him around like a pinball. Mike gets off at the first floor the elevator stops at, and it continues down without him. Then PC comes up behind him, so Mike offers him a bottle of booze as a gift. PC thanks him, then pushes him down the elevator shaft. SPLAT!

Back at the orgy, Brian gets worried when Mike doesn't return. A fax comes in, and Brian gets even more frightened when he sees that it's just a picture of a police badge. Larry convinces him that it's just a joke perpetuated by Gus. Then a second fax comes in: a picture of Mike's face, with the lower half distorted. Before Brian can dampen the mood further, Gary announces that he and a stripper named Lisa are going off alone to "spend some quality time together. Then he says the entire thing a second time. Strange.

PC continues to send faxes of Mike's face to the guys, while Mike's corpse has been left on the copier. PC finds a pair of what are probably Chloe's panties, sniffs them, and suspects "foreplay". Get it? Foreplay instead of foul play? This movie had to be based on a Hemingway novel, with great dialogue like that.

Somebody please shoot me before I reach the closing credits.

Speaking of Chloe and Tony, Sharon walks in on them having sex. Still? You'd think they would be as dried up and shriveled as The California Raisins after losing so many bodily fluids by this point in the film.

Anyway, they try to convince Sharon that they somehow lost their clothes in a mishap involving a stapler and tripping, so Sharon just scurries out of the room as fast as she can possibly move. In the hallway, she is unaware that PC is watching her from the stairwell. Then he hears Gary and Lisa enter the stairwell on another floor above him, so he decides to go after them first.

The stag film is still going, as is Larry with his partner. I guess that was more important than keeping the audience awake with some actual scary stalking. Brilliant move. Let's go back to Gary and Lisa now, okay movie?

They've decided to take their party up to the roof. Makes all the sense in the world. PC is already up there, with his gun drawn. He mentions someone named Ingrid, then shoots Gary off-camera, for the most part. Lame. He puts cuffs on the corpse, reads him a warped version of the Miranda Rights, then picks up and throws the screaming stripper off of the roof.

Scaredy-cat Brian sees her fall past a nearby window, then her body lands in a dumpster, and the lid closes over her. Of course, that just means that no one believes Brian when he tells them that he saw a body falling off of the building. Then PC sends yet another fax, this time a pic of Gary with his driver's license covering a bullet wound in his forehead.

Brian decides to leave the party, and try to calm his nerves. He nearly has a heart attack over a statue scaring him, with its big, menacing not moving at all or doing anything. Wow. Scary. Then he enters the room with the fax and copy machines, and finds the floor littered with hundreds of pictures. He runs back to the stairs like a cartoon character, then hears PC laughing somewhere in the building.

Brian tells Larry and the strippers that something is definitely wrong, then shows them the mess he found in the copyroom. He picks up several of the pictures and points out that Mike hasn't changed his position or facial expression in a single one of them. Even the strippers agree that Mike looks dead in the copies. Larry explains it away by telling them that Mike simply took one picture, then copied it over and over again.

Meanwhile, Tony and Chloe finally manage to finish up before the movie does. Good for them. Chloe suddenly realizes that she left her panties in the copyroom, and persuades Tony to fetch them for her. Now, I want to set the scene here, just so you can appreciate the stupidity of what happens next:

Okay, so Tony is standing up, ready to open the door, right? Well, Chloe is sitting nowhere near the door, at an angle to Tony's position, no less. Yet, when he opens the door, PC rushes at him with a flagpole, and somehow(through more bad editting of all the violence) manages to impale them both in a row, as if she had been directly behind Tony. Which she wasn't, she was diagonal to him and the door. Seriously, was the screenwriter in a coma when he came up with this script? Or maybe the guy who was hired to edit the film together?

Anyway, we get to go back to Larry still demonstrating how to make a photocopy of a copy. Brian shows him and the strippers how the image in the copy is degraded, unlike the pictures that are all over the floor. Plus, he points out that the mouth s distorted because of a stain on the face. He then shows the others the blood on the copy machine, which Larry decides is jam, even though it looks like blood.

Sick of Brian's rantings, Larry asks him where the corpses are, if Gary and the others are actually dead. Brian indicates the supply cabinet. Larry opens the cabinet, only to be shocked when the corpses fall through a panel in the ceiling. For his part, Brian is jumping around, screaming "I was right! I was right!" His part should have been played by Ted Raimi. At least then he might be tolerable and funny.

They all run to the stairwell, screaming like ninnies. Somehow they manage to quiet down a bit, go to another floor, and hide in a conference room. I'm just impressed that they could alll shut up for longer than 10 seconds. Someone approaches the door, tries the knob, and....awww, it's only Sharon. Everyone screams, then Brian explains what's going on. Sort of.

Not quite believing their wild tales of murder and crazy cops, Sharon decides to call 911. Too bad the phones are dead. They all decide, as a group, to find Tony and Chloe, so that they can give them a fair warning about the crazy killer in the building. Heh, I think they know already...

They all run back to the stairs, and hike one floor up. There, they find Tony stuck to the wall like a specimen in a butterfly collection, with a huge bloody pentagram displayed on the wall behind him. So far, it's the goriest death. Oops, and when I paused it, I saw Chloe's bloddy arms behind him, so I guess this was the end result of the impalement scene that made no sense earlier.

As Brian urges the others to run for the exit, PC sneaks up behind the group. He asks if everyone's okay, then makes up a story about getting a 911 call. He then tells them his backstory....finally!

Okay, so PC has a name now: Joe Vickers. Joe was a Satan worshipper, and was bestowed with satanic-powered strength. He was apparently shot 6 times in the film that preceded this one, stabbed, impaled with a wooden stake...;you get the idea. Guy is strong.

Brian and Larry both notice that the badge in one of the faxes, as well as the one Joe is wearing are one and the same. While he tells his origin story, they start to shuffle away toward the exit. Then Joe slips up by revealing that the third stripper was killed, but he calls her "your friend". Since he technically wouldn't know that there were 3 of them if he was just arriving on the scene, this makes the women suspicious of him as well...especially since he earlier told them that she was the one who had called 911. D'oh!

Their questions get Joe agitated, and he starts to lose his grip again. Larry and Brian shove a desk at Vickers, pinning him against the wall for a few seconds, enough time for almost everyone to escape the conference room. Except Larry. Joe shoves the desk back in his direction, then puts the barrel of his gun in Larry's mouth, and pulls the trigger. Again, it was offscreen. This movie is so tame, I'm surprised it doesn't have a Disney logo on it. I've seen more violence on episodes of Barney and Friends.

So Brian sees Larry get shot and screams, which draws Joe's attention. Brian waits for Vickers to get within touching distance, THEN decides that it might be a good idea to run away. As expected, he gets shot in the back. Hey, at least we don't have to hear his incessant whining anymore!

Sharon and the strippers try running away, but stumble into each other on the stairs. They finally figure out how to run down the stairs at the same time without bumping into each other, but by that time, Officer Vickers in in hot pursuit.

Despite earlier showing them several floors above the ground(high enough to barely make out the police car parked in front of the building), the women reach the lobby in mere seconds. Must have been all the adrenaline. Sharon takes the gun she finds on Gus, then she and the strippers wait for Vickers to appear. Then they realize that he has managed to lock the exit, so they need to go upstairs again, to look for an alternate way out. Uh, ever heard of breaking a window?

They haven't. Joe surprises them in the stairwell, and holds one of the strippers at gunpoint. When Sharon refuses to drop her gun, he surprises her by shooting the OTHER stripper in the head. He tells Sharon that he promises not to shoot his hostage if she drops her gun, then strangles her instead. Hey, he kept his promise!

Sharon starts running up the stairs again, while Joe grabs his gun and fires wildly into the air. As he moves back into the main hallway of the building again, he tries to get Sharon to reveal herself with a few taunts. She pops up at the end of the hall, and plants an emergency hatchet into his stomach. Sharon then tries to finish him off with the gun, but it turns out to be unloaded. She escapes again, while Vickers casually removes the axe from his abdomen and goes after her.

Sharon finds herself in the Stonecipher offices, and she grabs a couple of heavy liquor bottles to use as makeshift weapons. Then Vickers faxes her a picture of himself grinning like a loon. Unable to find any unlocked offices, Sharon runs down another hallway, right before Vickers enters the cubicle area.

He makes his way around the cubicles, using the axe to smash and destroy most of the objects near him. As he reaches one of the doors Sharon found locked, he uses the axe to rip the door to shreds. Of course, Sharon is still running away, down a completely different hallway, so she may have bought herself some time. She finds a restroom unlocked, and ducks in there to hide from him.

Vickers checks the elevator shaft next, which seems kind of stupid. While he's still investigating, Sharon finds several flammable sprays in the bathroom, and formulates an idea. Or maybe she has gas, the expression on her face could go either way.

Vickers passes by about a dozen or so doors, and now he seems to magically know where she is hiding. Where was this instinct in the last few scenes? Anyway, he marches through the bathroom door, only to get a faceful of spray and a long trail of fire that seems to have found a comfy place to rest on his face.

When Vickers screams and falls to the ground, Sharon grabs the axe from him....and promptly throws it down the elevatyor shaft. Does this dumbass have a deathwish, or what??? Hold on, it gets even better: she then pushes Joe Vickers down the elevator shaft as well. Yup, the same one she threw the axe down into. Do I need to draw you a picture? I'm not Nostradamus, but I'm willing to wager that:
A) Vickers ain't dead, and
B) He's about to get his axe back.

I haven't seen anything that obvious and contrived since Tommy Jarvis basically gave Jason back his mask, weapon AND his life at the start of Friday the 13th 6. I'm almost nat the point where I'm rooting for Psycho Cop instead of his victims.

So Sharon makes her way slowly down the stairs, and finds Brian. Yup, the annoying wimp still lives, dammit! Together, they get all the way to the lobby, before Sharon remembers that Vickers locked the doors by cuffing them together. In yet another botched kill scene, Brian gets over to the elevator doors, where Vickers is waiting for him inside with the axe.

Even though they're facing each other, this somehow results in Vickers imbedding the weapon in Brian's back. There is one sort of cool detail, though...One half of the sunglasses Vickers has had on throughout the move is now fused over his eye, like a makeshift eyepatch.

Sharon start to run back up the stairs again. Please, God, no....I've seen these stairs so may times tonight, I feel like I live in this damned stairwell. Sharon and Vickers have a long, pointless chase sequence down a bunch of corridors that all look exactly the same. Did I die, and wind up in some kind of Movie Hell, where the same scene is now in an eternal loop?

Sharon finally finds an unlocked door, and steps through it. Vickers does likewise, and then it's more of the same. Eventually, Sharon sees a sign showing the exit to the parking garage, so she exits there. And now they're both running.

Sharon manages nto get out onto the street, and starts to scream for help. As she runs, Vickers keeps gaining distance on her, until he's mere feet behind her. He does catch Sharon, right outside a crowded bar. The many patrons and employees of the bar hear her screams, and go outside to see what's happening.

In what I guess is supposed to be a spoof of the Rodney King incident, everyone in the bar grabs a bat or other blunt instrument, and they save Sharon by beating Joe Vickers within an inch of his life/undeath/whatever. Oh, and did I mention that someone was recording the beating as well? It's very subtle, like a sledgehammer to the balls.

Anyway, the tape makes news, and both Sharon and Vickers are brought to the same hospital. Oh, and Brian too...I guess he's as unkillable as Psycho Cop seems to be. While they watch the news together, Brian wonders if their injuries are covered by worker's comp, and both he and Sharon start to laugh like loons. Literally, Brian starts flailing around on the bed and contorting. Who the heck laughs like that???

Just a few doors away, Vickers is in his room, which is being guarded by a pair of cops. They hear some kind of growling from inside his room, and run in to check on Vickers. They're even joined by a nurse and possibly a doctor. after more growling noises and several screams, Vickers emerges from the room, dressed in hospital scrubs. He faces the camers, rips off the bandage covering his left eye, and reveals that it has completely healed, as have all of his burn wounds. As the credits roll, there are snippets of the porno film from the bachelor party shown. THE END

Boy, this one was a major stinker. What's the point of making an over-the-top slasher flick, if you're just going to release it with huge portions of the action missing? And why isn't the first one on DVD yet? 2 out of 5, mostly for the silly jokes and nudity.

And what did I learn from Psycho Cop Returns?

-Some treasures are better left buried.

-People in danger often decide to wait for dangerous killers to get close to them before deciding to run away.

-Bars are always filled with weapons, and crowds of people who want to use them.

Next up is Whisper, the film I was going to watch this time out. Wish me luck....I need it.

Urban Legends: Final Cut

My last movie was a bland, forgettable film with some eye-candy and nothing else. This week's movie, the much-maligned second film in the Urban Legends franchise, HAS to better. It HAS to be. Right? Well, I guess we're about to find out, because here comes my SPOILER-heavy experience watching it.

The movie begins with a lot of thunder and lightning. Oh, and apparently, we're on a plane filled with partying college kids.. Cool. A young woman is nervously watching the rough weather, while a whiny-voiced nerd next to her is helpfully recreating the "gremlin on the plane's wing" moment from The Twilight Zone. Nice guy.

Another girl, who was in the slasher Valentine, goes off with her boyfriend to join The Mile High Club. Along the way, an elderly woman gives them the stink eye. Oh, and in the most awesome spoiled surprise ever, you can clearly see the message YOU'RE GOING DOWN written on the bathroom mirror, waaaay before you're supposed to. Nice.

Anyway, Nerd Boy sees a creepy male flight attendant staring at the rowdy students, and they make eye contact. That's when the Mile High Girl, whose boyfriend is, ummm, munching Down Under, finally sees the message on the wall. When she reads it out loud, her boyfriend happily agrees. Heh. She yanks her boyfriend's(Rob's) head up so that he can see the message, and they both quickly decide to get out of the bathroom as they feel the plane rapidly descending.

As they're still figuring out how to exit the toilet, the rest of the passengers get freaked out when breathing masks drop from the ceiling. Mile High Girl exits the restroom first, and sees all of the passengers slumped over. She assumes that they all just passed out, until the old lady she saw earlier slumps over in her seat, revealing a knife wedged in her back. Guess she's not sleeping.

The killer emerges with another bloodstained knife, and he and Mile High Girl face off for a moment or two. Fate intervenes, and the killer is knocked over by a runaway drink cart that comes sliding down the aisle. Rob finally emerges from the bathroom, and asks his girlfriend what's going on, then they both start running up the aisle.

In the small area the flight attendants use to prepare the snacks, they find Nerd Boy dead. The killer pops up again, so the couple decide to run to the front of the plane. Along the way, they discover a couple of female flight attendants strapped into their seats, brutally slaughtered. Ignoring reality, the couple easily slip into the cockpit and shut the door on the killer, locking it also.

The crew is dead as well. When the hell did this guy have time to commit all of these freakin' murders? As the killer attempts to bust open the door, Mile High Girl dumps the pilot out of his seat and decides to try to contact someone on the ground. She should just wait a second, she's heading right for them...

She puts on a headset, and just starts saying, "Mayday!" over and over again into the microphone. At the very same time, the killer gets in, so she screams even louder into the headset. Then a guy in sunglasses appears in the windshield, clinging to the rain-soaked glass. Mile High Girl shrieks, and he yells "Cut!"

Yeah. It was all just a movie set.

While the director continues screaming at the crew, the "rain" stops, and the plane stops shaking. Then he scolds the actress, Sandra, telling her that her character isn't supposed to be flying the plane. He also scolds a crew member named Vanessa(played by the lovely Eva Mendes), because she let a boom mike drop into one of the shots. As Vanessa commiserates with fellow crew member Amy , the director kisses up to the actor playing the killer, because he seems to have a stick up his ass. Oh, and Joey Lawrence is another crew member, "Graham", working with a scruffy guy referred to as "Scrote".

Using a megaphone, the director then threatens to kill Sandra if she doesn't do the scene right. He then has them set up to try another take. Hmmm. Is this an early hint about the killer? Probably not.

The heroine of our story, Amy, is next seen jogging. She's apparently the world's least-athletic runner, because the season changes from winter to spring in front of the campus as she's running toward the main building. As the movie resumes, the chairman of the film department is welcoming film students for the spring semester. See, I told you she ran slow! Thought I was kidding, didn't you?

Anyway, he delivers some grandiose, self-serving speech, then introduces a douchebag named Mr. Solomon to the students. The kids make fun of the staff as each teacher is introduced by Mr. Solomon, due to the fact that they're all a group of sad-sack has-beens. Then it's revealed that Amy is one of the small minority of film students who have yet to submit a "thesis film", a finished production that shows her skill as a film-maker put to the test. Heck, she hasn't even submitted an idea yet! She better hurry up, because at the end of each year, one lucky student wins a $15,000 prize known as The Hitchcock Award. The award more or less guarantees the recipient a future in Hollywood. From the rafters, Scrote is reading Solomon's speech into a microphone, and Solomon is repeating it word-for-word. Douche.

Um, it's winter again. WTF, man? Oh wait, Amy is walking across the campus...that explains it. By the time this movie ends, it could be decades later. Pray for my sanity, folks.

Amy gets frightened by a group of mother-flockin' birds that totally flock her up, then she gets a beam of light aimed right at her eyes. The light belongs to Reese, a member of the campus security staff. Reese! She was in the previous movie too, so I guess her character's presence is the connective tissue between both films. Awesome...I loved her goofy character in the first movie.

Okay, so Reese offers to give Amy a lift. She's probably seen how slow Amy walks. During the short drive across the campus, the women bond over a mutual love of Pam Grier movies. Then Reese suggests the events of the first UL film as Amy's thesis. Cute. She reveals that the murders at Pendleton were covered up, and she was fired for not agreeing to go along with the deception.

Amy enters the film library building, and walks into Solomon's office, where he is being slowly bored to death ny a lecture by one of the "legends" on the faculty. Amy gives Solomon her thesis, which is a slasher flick based on urban legends.Uhhhh....kind of "on the nose", isn't it?

Solomon likes it, but agrees with Amy's assessment that it needs to be given a definitive style. He suggests that it would work best as either a gore-heavy slasher flick, or as a more tension-filled psychological thriller, and she declares that it would have a bit of both. Solomon then compliments her on the idea, saying that it's "great". Wow, the writer sure had a healthy ego, huh?

That night, Travis(a hopeful director, as well as a friend of Amy) is on a date with a cute gal named Lisa. He orders drinks, and we see the killer spiking one of the drinks at the bar. Travis soon leaves, and Lisa unwittingly sips on the drink that was tampered with. She spurns the advances of a rather intense-looking stalker-type, and tries to leave, because she has a flight to take the next day. Of course, that's pretty much when the roofies kick in.

Lisa gets as far as the coat-check area, and then her eyes start to blur. Unable to properly see the number on her ticket, Lisa gropes around the coats--and that's when the killer leaps out of hiding and smothers her in a plastic sheet. Sounds dumb, I know, but it's a pretty decent jump-scare.

When Lisa wakes up, she's in a bathtub filled with ice. She sees a fresh-looking kidney in a dish next to a pair of bloody scissors, and finds a ragged, bleeding scar in her side. Lisa realizes that she's been made part of one of the most infamous urban legends ever told, and sees her abductor in another room, with his back to the frightened young woman.

Though she's really trying, Lisa can't quite make a quiet escape. She slips on the bloodstained floor, but still manages to shut the door and put a few obstacles in the way, to buy herself the time she needs to escape. Pretty smart thinking.

Or not. Lisa sees her purse on the floor, dumps the contents on the floor, and dials 911. While that also seems smart, she screws up big time by telling them about the kidney heist. The dispatcher informs her that he knows the urban legend, and hangs up. Lisa spies a window that could be a good escape route, but a dog outside convinces her to think otherwise.

She sees a different window, and decides to use that one for her exit. 2 things happen then: the killer gets into the bathroom, and the dog finds her hanging halfway out of the window. The killer reaches Lisa first, and tears open her surgical wound. She tries to hang onto some barbed wire, but that works out about as well as you'd figure it would. Making one last attempt to defend herself, Lisa tries to hit the killer with her hands, and breaks the glass in the window instead. The killer brings the jagged shards down on her neck, decapitating poor Lisa. As the dog contemplates how to eat a human head, the window opens one more time, and the killer lets the stray dog have her kidney too. Yum!

In the next scene, we go back to film school. Amy meets up with Sandra for lunch in the dining hall. There, she tells Sandra another urban legend, one I haven't heard before. Supposedly, before taking their finals, a group of students got together and had a midnight scream session, to alleviate tension.( Yeah, I'm sure the rest of the school appreciated that!) The story goes, that as the students screamed, the noise covered the sound of the screams of an actual murder victim.

As Amy reveals that the story is an urban legend, Sandra starts relating several stories involving bugs and other gross things found in food. Really? During lunch? Anyway, when Sandra asks for a role in the movie, Amy invites her to a late-night recording session for authentic-sounding screams. Gosh, I honestly have no idea what will happen next.

Amy is next seen walking past several recording/editing studios.The asswipe director from the great opening sequence is watching painful clips of Sandra trying to scream in a way that sounds terrified. She can't do it. In the next editing bay, Travis is watching a clip that sounds like a feminine hygiene ad. Behind Amy, someone walks into the corridor wearing the same snowjacket the killer from the first UL movie wore. Uh oh....is crazy Brenda back? Nope, it's just the 2 slackers who provided the "special effects" in the opening sequence.

Travis hears the commotion, and comes out to chat with Amy. When she asks how his film is coming along, Travis clams up a bit. Amy asks him to look at her script, and they make a date for Tuesday night. Fascinating. Considering that the only 2 films we've seen these students make so far are slasher movies, I'm betting that Travis isn't directing something based on a Jane Austen novel.

The the story switches gears to bring us to show us a hot-but-not-yet-famous Eva Mendes(Vanessa), and a not-famous-and-perhaps-never-will-be Joey Lawrence as Graham. Was Joey the one who always said "Whoa!" on that sitcom, or was that his brother Matthew? Wow, I sure do get easily distracted! Anyway, Vanessa is annoyed that Graham is always on his phone, so she brings up the urban legend that cell phones give you brain cancer. It turns out that they're at a storyboard/script meeting to discuss Amy's urban legend movie. Also there are Scrote(whose real name I'm still not sure about), Sandra, and the 2 effects/prop guys. Graham pompously tells Scrote to wash his car, and the poor guy does it.

Amy then shows the group another urban legend, involving a girl who has a fear of the dark. She sleeps with her dog in the room,and he licks her hand when she lets her arm hang off the side of the bed. The next morning, the woman finds her dog's corpse hanging on a shower rod, and a message written on the wall: HUMANS CAN LICK TOO.

As they continue to sit and chat, there's a pointless discussion over which is better, practical effects or digital effects, followed by a verbal attack on Amy by Toby, the student directing the airplane slasher seen at the start of the film. He thinks that she stole his genre, even though she tries to tell him how her film is different.

Back at one of the housing buildings, Amy finds Travis drunk and despondent. His film only earned a C minus, and Amy tells him that he deserved better. When he brings up the Hitchcock Award, Amy tells him that he's too talented to fail in Hollywood. Then, seeing Travis at his lowest, she asks him to help her find a new director of photography, since Toby abandoned the position 1 scene ago. He gives her a tip about a guy named Simon. Before she leaves, Amy tells Travis that everything will be okay. Yeah, right!

That evening, Amy is ready to shoot her first movie scene as a director. As she is greeted by a few cast and crew members, there's an accident on the set...Sandra is hit by a fallen light. Amy examines the wound on her scalp, then Sandra opens her eyes and says, "Gotcha!" Yeesh.

Amongst the giggling crew, Sandra tells Amy that Graham's father got her an audition for an episode of ER. Then they start setting up for the scene with the dead dog and the girl's hand getting licked by a killer. The dead dog prop is pretty realistic-looking, which just makes me wish even more that the movie scenes within the movie were an actual movie. How many times in 1 paragraph can I say "movie"? Movie. Movie, movie.

Anyway, an ominous man in black walks onto the set, just as they start filming. He introduces himself as Schorm, and says that Travis asked him to assist her with her film. Ah, okay, this is "Simon", the director of photography that Travis promised to get for Amy's horror movie. He then tries to seduce Vanessa, but it turns out that she's into women. Cool! So am I!

After that, the parking lot is deserted, but not for long. Sandra staggers outside, struggling to carry a dress and some other stuff to her car. Unfortunately, it appears that she may have locked herself out of the car.

Sandra trudges back to the set, and fumbles around for the interior lights. She finds herself on a set dressed up for a crime scene, complete with a strobing police light. As Sandra looks around for her keys, a shape under a red blanket begins moving. The killer eventually stands up, and attaches a microphone to a camera, which he then picks up to begin filming Sandra's murder.

Sandra is, of course, unable to see a tall figure dressed in a bright red blanket suddenly standing up. I know, I know, the killer's behind her...but wouldn't she still see or hear a sudden movement like that? Oh, and can we dispense with the whole "our victim looks in one direction long enough for the killer to move to a different position in the background" scene in every single frickin' horror movie too? That one never ceases to annoy me.

Anyway, the killer sneaks behind Sandra, and slashes her with a razor just as she finds her stupid keys. Then we see the rest of the small cast and crew watching the scenes they have of Sandra so far, giving the worst screams in the history of cinema. Simon even suggests that maybe they should make it a horror-comedy. They watch Sandra's character find her "cat" several times, and each take gets more and more horrible. I'll bet she took lesson's from the Jon Lovitz character Master Thespian.

As even Amy can't help laughing at the footage, the lights go out. After a few seconds, the projector starts up again, this time showing Sandra's murder. The murder is shown through the killer's camera, and everyone starts to wonder who filmed it, and why it's so realistic. Boy, these students are SMART!! Amy even runs up to the projection room to examine the film reel, but the killer has already taken it. Scrote, whose real name, I'm pretty sure is "PA Kevin", denies having seen anyone.

Dirk and Stan try to assure Amy that, as special effects guys, they know it's fake. Then there's another death, one that just happened: Travis just killed himself. Professor Solomon gathers the entire film class together, to give them the details of Travis' suicide. He supposedly blew his head off on a building rooftop. Amy looks to the side, and sees a mysterious figure slipping away from the crowd.

There's a small memorial for Travis, mostly attended by young women. One of the old has-beens gives Amy his condolences, then Graham approaches her. Being Graham, he tries hitting on her, even going so far as to tell her that if she plays along with him, his father will fund her movie entirely with his wealth. Graham calls Amy a hypocrite, and reveals that he knows that her father made movies as well. He also tells her that the only reason she's trying to be a filmmaker is because she needs to "save face". Then he walks away. Whoa!

As she walks by the campus tower, Amy briefly sees a light go off on one of the upper floors. Amy crosses under the police tape and finds the front entrance unlocked, so she enters. The lower floor is filled with statues covered in plastic. A figure runs past Amy, and she needs a fresh change of underwear. Oh wait, no, that was me. Good think I wore my brown trousers.

Amy, being a complete tool, remains rooted to her spot on the floor as the figure walks slowly in her direction. When he emerges from the plastic draped from the ceiling, the mystery figure is revealed to be....Travis!?!

DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN!

Oops, it's his never-mentioned "twin", Trevor. Was this movie written by folks who worked on daytime soaps? I'm willing to bet that it was. Either that, or it actually is Travis, and he's the killer. Either way, this twist is pathetic. Trevor asks Amy some questions about his brother, then starts to walk away when he doesn't like her answers.

Amy stops him, and discovers that Trevor thinks that Travis was murdered. Shocker. He begs her not to tell anyone that she saw him, then walks away again. If he isn't Travis, he's a dumbass, because he walks right past two students, running the risk of being identified. Considering that he claims not to know who were or weren't friends of his brother, that seems pretty damned stupid.

The movie brings us back to the set of Amy's movie. 2 actors are doing the "midnight scream" scene, and the filming has gone late. Exhausted, Amy tells everyone how great they're doing, and to go home until tomorrow. Vanessa pulls her aside, and asks Amy if anything is wrong. Amy doesn't mention the whole "Travis had a twin brother" thing, but mentions that she needs volunteers to record a loud group scream to loop into the scene they just shot. Vanessa begs off, claiming that she's too tired. Graham and Simon also decline to stay.

As Simon walks away, PA Kevin admires his camera, but Simon warns him not to touch it. Simon steps outside, and it looks like the entire campus teleported to London. Simon trudges down the sidewalk, unaware that the killer is following him at a pretty close distance.

There's a sequence now that's alternating between Simon and Amy. While he's walking, unaware that the killer is right behind him, she's getting a group together to record an epic scream in a sound booth. As the screamers start to get obnoxiously loud, Simon pauses outside the building to smoke, and you can even hear the scream faintly from where he is.

The killer whacks Simon in the face, then uses the camera as a weapon. The screams continue to drown out Simon's cries for help, and the killer uses his own camera to bash Simon's skull in. The screams stop, and Amy catches some of the murder in her sensitively-tuned boom mike. She drops all of her equipment, and rushes outside to see if she can save her director of photography. She misses seeing some bloody evidence in the snow, but does notice a handful of security cams in that location. I guess it's time to revisit Reese.

Reese, naturally, is a terrible security guard, so it should come as no surprise when I tell you that she's using the security monitors to watch one of her favorite movies, something featuring the character Foxy Brown. Amy convinces Reese to let her take a look at the timeframe showing the campus while the recording session was taking place. Reese warns her, though, to bring the tapes back immediately if she finds something suspicious.

Amy gets some time in an editting booth, and sees Simon get killed exactly when the scream session was taking place. She gathers up her stuff to find Reese, then hears an odd noise. She turns on the lights outside the booth, and nearly has a heart attack when she sees the killer wearing a freaky mask shaped like a crescent moon.

She assumes at first that it's Stan, one of the effects guys. But when he creepily tries to get to the door at the same time that she does, Amy locks it. Mzoonface then ducks past the door, drawing her forward to try to keep an eye on him. When she leans forward, the killer smashes the soundproof glass, and is now wearing his familiar fencing outfit. Amy tries to open the other exit, but it's jammed, so she instead kills the power with an emergency hatchet. When the killer steps into the sound booth, Amy ducks behind a table, runs past him, and quickly scurries away.

Amy watches from another hiding place as the killer walks around the booth, looking for her. He sees that he's standing next to a large piano, and tests each key, one note at a time. Want to guess what object Amy's hiding under?

She throws an object at some chimes, and makes her escape when the sudden sound and movement distracts the killer. Amy manages to get outside, but theb killer chases her out of the building, and follows close behind. She gets down to the lake or pond used by the rowing team, trips, and falls into the icy water. As Amy swims over to the side of a nearby building, the killer picks up his pace to see if he can spot her in the water before she gets away.

Amy, now hiding beneath a grating, hears the killer moving around looking for her. When gets to a point directly over the grating, he and Amy stare at each other.Then the killerlifts open the grating, and the chase resumes under the campus. Oops, no I guess the killer is trying to outrun her to the exit from above. My bad.

Amy gets to the end of the first corridor, and nearly gets knocked off of her feet by Reese, who saw her running and came to get her. Unfortunately, Reese never saw her attacker, and the killer apparently took the security tapes.. Reese feels bad for Amy, but tells her that without solid proof, no one would ever start an investigation.

Once home, Amy calls Trevor and asks him to meet again with her. The following day, Amy tells Trevor that she now believes that Sandra's murder was real, and that Travis was murdered too. When Amy mentions calling the cops, but Trevor once again advises against it. He tells Amy that he's had trouble with the law in the past, but is now tryig to change his ways. When Amy opens up for the umpteenth time about her dad's suicide, she decides that perhaps the killer is one of the students competing for the Hitchcock Award. Wow, she finally realized what most of us likely figured out when the award was first mentioned. Someone give her a cookie!

Trevor asks Amy where her next scene is being filmed, and she mentions a closed-up theme park on the edge of town. He tells her that he will try to hide there, in order to try to ambush the killer when he tries to strike again. When she hesitates, Trevor asks her to trust him.

Amy is next seen going for a jog, as the murders and the list of suspects weigh heavy on her mind. As the fencing mask is shown, each person's face is superimposed over it, usually saying something inane. The scene goes nowhere, and the next time we see Amy, she and Vanessa are doing a storyboard for the sequence they're going to film at the amusement park. Solomon admires the artwork, and asks them to tell him the urban legend.

It's another one I've never heard of, but it sounds interesting. It's about a carnival in town, but it's not like others. It has a version of the usual Tunnel of Love ride that is littered with body parts. The next morning, the carnival has left, and several local children are missing, to replenish the decorations at the Tunnel ride.

Vanessa makes light of the fact that the ride they're filming in doesn't look scary in the least, and then Dirk and Stan, the effects guys, arrive with props. They declare that the silly ride can be made scary in 3 hours, and are told that they only have one. As Amy watches them walk into the tunnel, one of them does some eerie whistling.

Inside, Stan yells down to Derek for a status report. Derek has been hard at work getting the electricity working for several mannequins, while Stan is above him on another level, happily dressing the set with morbid props. Outside, Amy gets pissed when Graham reveals that he asked more people to join the crew, without asking her first.

Stan and Derek horse around with various body part props, then Trevor shows up and lets Amy know he's there. To get some alone time with him, Amy tells everyone to take an hour to go grab a meal. The cast and crew gratefully leave. Trevor starts to move from his hiding position.

Stan and Derek haven't heard about the lunch break, so they're still testing the equipment. Amy calls them on a walkie-talkie, and they offer to show her their work so far. Amy agrees, but looks worried. They tell Amy how to start up the ride, and she hops into a mining car after following their instructions.

Stan tells Derek that Amy's on the way, and hurries to adjust some of the props. He fails to notice one of the miners slightly moving. It turns its head, revealing the fencing mask to the audience. Stan fiddles around with more props, and the killer gets behind him, and taps his shoulder. When Stan turns and sees him, the killer strikes his noggin with his pickaxe. Then he waits for Stan to grab a metal bar for support, and electrocutes him by sending charges through the bar.

Derek climbs the ladder up to Stan's level, and comes face-to-mask with the killer, who bashes a couple of his fingers pretty badly...he won't be playing piano for awhile, let's put it that way. Derek attempts to go back down the enclosed ladder, and the killer follows. Amy is completely unaware of the killer up ahead, of course, and admires the gruesome decorations that Derek and Stan have lined the tunnel with.

She comes to the end of the ride at roughly the same time that Derek gets off of the ladder. Inagony because of his wounded fingers, Derek weakly crawls away from the killer, but it's too late to escape. The killer corners Derek, then pushes him into a fusebox, and his corpse dances like a cockroach on a hot frying pan.

The power goes out, stranding Amy on the track. She assumes that it's a joke at first, but exits the cart after nothing turns back on. She calls down to the effects guys, then descends the enclosed ladder herself.

It doesn't take long to find a flashlight, then Derek's corpse. Amy runs back to the ladder, but narrowly escapes being spotted by the killer. In a clever and suspenseful bit, Amy hides behind the ladder enclosure, putting her mere inches from the killer's back. As soon as he's lower than her, Amy slides around to the inside of the cage again, and swiftly ascends the ladder. Of course, the killer hears the commotion, and starts to climb up after her again.

Amy decides to run back through the tunnel, and the killer stops for a moment to watch her retreat, before heading behind the scenery to try to get to her. When Amy descends some stairs, the killer grabs her ankle from behind the stairs and sends her sailing to the floor. She manages to get back on her feet and running again, and finally gets outside.

She sprints down the street--in fog, no less--then does something only a bonehead would do: Amy stops in her tracks, and turns around. Reese then makes her jump by getting in front of her. That leads to Reese calling in the cops, who take the corpses and tape off the crime scene. 2 cops behave like complete dickheads toward her and Reese, and Amy cuts their questions short.

Back at her place, Amy has a confrontation with Trevor over his so-called "protection", which apparently consisted of letting the killer have at her. Trevor claims that he was following Graham, and didn't get back to the set until after the police had arrived. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight. I think we may have our killer. Heck, he may even be Travis, faking his death to claim victims easier.

Amy must have been dropped as a baby, because she buys his alibi and fills him in on what happened in the tunnel ride. She relaxes when she decides it wasn't Graham, but then Trevor tells her that Graham slipped away somehow. Uh-huh.

Suddenly, Amy has a possible revelation. She remembers that Stan and Dirk were only sophomores. Going with that logic, she decides that it wouldn't make sense for the killer to target them. Uh, Queen Dumbass, they were crew members on your movie, which makes them just as much targets as ANY cast and crew working on Hitchcock Award-eligible movies.

Anyway, Amy decides that her dumb suspicions over the choice of victims is worth looking into, but Trevor convinces her to get some sleep first. He gets her to relax on the bed, then spoons up behind her to get some cute-girl booty acti...uh, I mean he spoons her to also get some well-deserved rest.

Heh, it turns out my sarcastic comment was right on the nose! They decide to do the ol' horizontal bop. Sadly, we see more of his ass than hers. Man, I need to watch more "old school" slashers...these post-Scream slashers are waaaaaay too politically correct. Well, whatever...as they make love, Trevor takes a knife out from a hiding place, then plunges it into a pretty gosh-darned surprised Amy.

Aw, it was just a dream sequence. Amy sits up in the bed. It's morning, and Trevor has left, probably to post all of the pics and videos he took of her on Facebook. Oh, wait...she slept in her clothes. So even THAT didn't happen. It's like watching a movie produced by The Vatican.

Hmmmm, I guess it's not morning, because when Amy looks out of her window, it's darkout. Also, there's a light that goes on in the building where Travis killed himself. Amy runs to the tower, because apparently, she just never learns. By the time she reaches the top floor, Amy is out of breath and limping. I know the feeling--I get the same way after watching these things.

She assumes that it's Trevor waiting for her, but it's not. It's Vanessa, the hot lesbian. Giggity!

Vanessa claims that Amy sent her a note, asking for a rendezvous. When Amy tells her that someone else sent the note, Vanessa gets upset and Amy starts looking for the killer to emerge. It doesn't take long: a corpse falls from somewhere above them. It happens pretty fast, and even rewinding the damn thing, I'm not sure who it is. Oh, and as all of this is happening, Reese is just getting back to her security monitors as the killer begins the next chase.

As Amy tries to get herself and Vanessa to safety, Vanessa demands an explanation. Instead of answering her friend, Amy sees how close the killer is, and off they go again. The way Amy runs, I expect the killer to catch up in about 3 seconds.

Reese finally sees the alarm flashing, just as the girls arrive at the top of the tower. They find what appears to be a closet, and hide inside. Of course, it only works as a hiding place if they don't call attention to themselves. So they decide to get chatty.

As expected, the killer finds them and snatches Vanessa away, before slamming the door shut, and jamming the lock with a screwdriver. Screaming, Amy accidentally pulls a switch for the lights in the closet, and sees a pile of body parts in there to keep her company. To be more specific, she finds Simon and Sandra, with some assembly required.

Amy manages to force the door open, but finds Vanessa hanging from a rope tied to the giant bell in the tower. She runs back outside, just as Reese arrives. And Trevor. Would anyone else like to just randomly pop up? Anyone?

Trevor apologizes for leaving Amy unguarded, but tells her he found a clue. Jinkies! He tells Amy that, pnce he removed her name from the cast and crew, he found a common link between the rest of the group: All of them worked on the thesis film Travis created. They find the film and watch it, for more clues.

It's a stinker. But Amy DOES find a clue. The movie was spliced onto the credits Travis created. That implies that somebody else threw together a bunch of outtakes. At least that explains his low grade. But who sabotaged his movie?

They assume it was Toby, just to be an ass-hat. Then Toby is seen driving drunk, putting lyris to the theme music from Gone With the Wind. He brakes suddenly for a car in the middle of the road, but it's the killer....say WHAAAAT?!?

It's actually Amy, but she has a gun. Wow, I am more confused than a blonde trying to decide which sock goes on her left foot, and which goes on her right. Oh,wait...Travis is also there, holding a flare. They kidnap Toby.

The take Toby somewhere isolated, and handcuff him to a chair. Before they can question Toby, Professor Solomon walks in on the makeshift interrogation. As he does a double-take upon seeing Travis, Graham also pops up, albeit in a hiding spot.

Solomon asks Amy about the gun, and she admits that it's only a prop. Then Travis, pretending to be Trevor, tells the professor that Toby stole "his" movie. Unfortunately, Travis slips up by saying that Toby mixed "his" sound, and Toby clarifies that Travis preferred to do all of his own sound edits by himself. Toby even says that Travis only gave him a film credit to given him enough points to graduate.

Toby asks Solomon for help, and the teacher shoots him, send the chair and Toby soaring onto a movie set. Solomon confesses to blowing Travis' head off, and demands to know who Trevor actually is. Graham's phone goes off, and Trevor uses the distraction to wrestle with Solomon over the gun.

Sadly, Solomon keeps the gun. Amy tries hiding on another set, and Graham almost leaves, but decides to try and rescue Amy. Whoa! Solomon makes Trevor walk in front of him, and Amy sees Graham signal her to stay put. She, of course, stands up. When she gets Solomon talking, we finally get to hear what the motive was for the killings.

Solomon ended up losing the Hitchcock back when he was a student, to some dude named Chip. The deciding vote was cast against Solomon, by none other than Amy's father. Trapped in a mediocre teaching job, Solomon decided to steal the film Travis made, and replace it with the crap Amy and Trevor watched. He then began kiling everyone on Amy's set, merely to distract everyone from what he was doing.

Speaking of distractions, Graham uses Solomon's confession to sneak up behind him and bash him with a folding chair. Being a movie prop, it has almost no effect, so Solomon shoots Graham while he and Trevor grapple for control of the gun. It gets dropped and slides across the set, and the 2 men fight using whatever props happen to be nearby. Ay yi yi.

Thank the heavens, Reese comes to the rescue. Quickly assessing his chances, Solomon decides to try to convince Reese that Amy and Trevor were trying to murder him. Reese tells Amy to drop her gun, and she complies. Then Reese tells everyone to get off the set. Feeling pretty confident, Solomon blames Amy for the murders, and tells the security guard that it was Amy she saw one night lurking around.

Oops. It turns out that Reese had kept that to herself. Caught in his lie, Solomon kicks Reese's gun out of her hand, then punches her as she reaches for the gun with the gold trim. A bunch of prop guns also end up on the floor, and everyone goes looking for any of the real guns.

Amy gets the gold gun, and Solomon and she exchange taunts. When Solomon tries to get Amy to fire at him, she hesitates, so he lunges at her. The gun goes off, and it turns out that Amy fired it into Soloomon at close range. Then Toby and Graham turn up alive and begging for medical help, and Reese delivers a corny line from one of her favorite blaxploitation flicks. Sheesh.

In the following scene, Trevor accepts the Hitchcock on behalf of his brother. Scrote, watching from the rafters, pulls out a rifle with a telescopic sight, and aims at Trevor. Reese spots Scrote before he pulls the trigger, and takes him down with several shots., he falls, not to his death, but onto an inflated stunt pad.

Everyone who survived is there: Graham is Amy's agent; Scrote, as we saw, is an actor; and Toby, who was such an ass, is now doing Scrote's old job of being a lackey. Oh, and Amy is a big-time director, with Trevor at her side. Everyone lives happily ever after...

Well, with one exception. Solomon is seen in a hospital for the criminally disturbed. As he sits in his wheelchair looking catatonic, a nurse starts to push him down the corridor, telling him that they have a lot in common, and much to discuss. The nurse turns out to be Brenda, the killer from the first UL movie. As the credits roll, she wheels Solomon down the longest hallway in movie history. THE END


Whew! I know, I know, I'm 2 weeks late. Last week, I was hit hard by an infection, and spent most of it in bed. Literally, I slept something like 3 days straight. This past week, I had a lot to catch up on, not just this blog. I'm trying to double up on my movies, to make up for that week, so we'll see how that goes. The next slasher is something called Venom, so hopefully it's good.

Oh, and what has Urban Legends: Final Cut taught me?

-That I can get tons of mileage from jokes about Joey Lawrence. Whoa!

-Killers are often caught because their plans are waaaay too complicated.

-Taking a tragedy that killed many of your friends, and using it as a stepping-stone to fame, is never in bad taste.

See ya!

Jason X

Phew! There's finally a light at the end of the tunnel...this week, I finish off the Friday the 13th franchise with one of the more interesting ones, Jason X. I know there's still Freddy vs. Jason to watch, but it's really just a Freddy movie with Jason in a supporting role, so don't hold your breath waiting for me to get to it. Anyway, SPOILERS ahoy, so let's get started!

Our tale this time begins INSIDE Jason. During the credits, we take a journey through Jason's body and bloodstream. Every now and then, the camera pans back enough to show that Jason's being poked and prodded by a team of government-funded scientists. They take blood samples, skin scrapes, hair follicles...you name it, they study it. Oh, and did I mention that Jason in this one is back to being a Mongoloid, and has healthy flesh? When did he find time to come back to life... after his trip in the New York(Canadian, heh) sewers, maybe?

Well, at least it's a pretty great visual treat to sit through these credits. When they end, we discover that the year is 2010(wait, they captured Jason LAST YEAR?), and Jason has somehow been defeated again, and is being kept at a facility at Crystal Lake. The military apparently wants to exploit his rapid healing ability in their own soldiers. As the movie begins, a lone soldier is keeping vigil in front of Jason. The killer is bound by several chains and shackles, still dressed in his usual hockey mask and uniform. After making a few nervous attempts at engaging Jason in a chat, the soldier grabs a nearby tarp and throws it over the killer to cover him up.

There's an abrupt scene change, and we meet a team of doctors and soldiers, commanded by Dr. Wimmer(played by creepy film director David Cronenberg) as well as an attractive young woman named Rowan. Rowan wants to convince the military to destroy Jason, but they think that his inability to die or suffer permanent injuries is worth studying further. At the very least, Rowan wants to have Jason frozen, but Wimmer refuses. He and the soldiers plan to transport Jason to another government facility, for more in-depth experiments.

They approach Jason, who is still covered by the sheet. Wimmer asks the soldiers to remove the sheet, and doing so reveals that the soldier who had been guarding Jason was strung up in his place, chained and bleeding. Caught off-guard, the men fail to see Jason attacking from behind. He takes out the first 3 soldiers with brute force, then uses his chain to strangle the fourth one before the guy can shoot him. He beats the last soldier with a rod to the face, then notices Dr. Wimmer escaping. Jason throws a metal rod at the doctor, impaling him from across the chamber.

From the corridor, Rowan hears all of the screaming and shooting. She decides to take a quick peek, but one of the soldiers is thrown at the door, knocking it off its hinges as his body slides to a stop at Rowan's feet. She stares at the pile of corpses inside Jason's cell, then sees Jason looming in the hallway behind her. Great. This movie has an alive, teleporting Jason. Why not have him talk, too? Then it can hit the trifecta of stupidity.

Rowan grabs the military rifle off of the dead guy on the floor, and starts running. She gets to the basement level, where she lures Jason into a cryogenic storage chamber. When he gets to the middle of the small room, Rowan fires at him with her rifle. After several hits, one knocks Jason off of his feet, and he sails into a cryogenic chamber. Rowan swiftly locks him in, then starts the freezing process, but Jason stabs her in the abdomen with his machete before the process completes. As the cryogenic area self-locks, both Rowan and Jason freeze and die.

The story then picks up 455 years later. A class of science/archeology students, led by their teacher Professor Brandon Lowe is taking a field trip to what was once Earth. Due to overpopulation, pollution and several other factors, humans learned to colonize other habitable worlds and abandoned ours. So much for Earth Day.

So why was this intergalactic field trip done at the Crystal Lake research facility? Who knows. The students in Lowe's class include Tsunaron, a goofy-looking surfer dude-type; Azrael, an even GOOFIER dude who is accident-prone and lazy; Janessa, a cute brunette who seems to be channeling Allyson Hannigan's quirkiness; and KM-14, a female android built by Tsunaron as a "companion". There's also a black dude along for the class, but in this scene he has no dialogue, and no one calls him by name. Nice that even in the future, horror cliches still exist.

As the students look around, Azrael gets his hand frozen to a coffee mug while examining it. They quickly find the chamber Jason was trapped in, but can't figure out his appearance or the machete frozen in his upraised arm(and I can't figure out why the equipment would still work after more than 400 years...and wasn't the army supposed to be moving him? Wouldn't there have been an investigation when the soldiers never returned???).

Azrael pokes at him a bit after the cryogenic chamber is opened and Jason's thawed-out arm lowers, severing Azrael's arm. KM uses some kind of quick-sealing bond to cover the stump, then gives Azrael a dose of painkiller to calm him down. Lowe uses a communicator to call Lou, the ship's pilot, and tells him to prepare for lift-off as soon as they get back.

Once aboard the shuttle pod(which is shaped like a giant hockey mask on legs), we meet the rest of the crew in the larger ship that they're taking the trip with: Brodsky, the tough-as-nails Marine in charge of a small squad of soldiers; Crutch, a scruffy engineer; a cute doctor named Adrienne(and her students, Stoney and Kinsa)...and that's about it. So, let me see, we've got the students, the Marines, carry the one....about a dozen or so people for Jason to kill. Cool.

In the medical bay, Azrael lays down on a table and his arm is placed directly beneath his stump. Using nanobots called "ants", the stump and the arm are fused back together, then the ants retreat. Azrael staggers to the corridor, where a friend gives him a high-five, causing Az to stumble in pain again.

At the same time, Professor Lowe is analyzing Rowan's DNA to see how much damage the freezing did to her body, and Adrienne is analyzing Jason's body with her two horny helpers, Stoney and Kinsa. Adrienne eventually throws them out, and examines Jason alone, with a remote linkup to Professor Lowe's lab station. It's always a good idea to be in a room alone with Jason. Yup. Move along, nothing to see here...

Rowan has suffered damage from the prolonged freezing process all over her body, so the ants cover her completely to begin their repairs. In Adrienne's lab, she begins an autopsy of Jason, starting with a scan of his skull, which shows an abnormally small brain. Ha ha! She then gently removes his deformed eyeball, while he stares up at her with his good eye. She examines the mangled eyeball and drops it into a sink filled with liquid nitrogen. Yum, who wants eye-sicles?

In Lowe's lab, the repair job was a success. Rowan wakes up and immediately attacks Professor Lowe with a hard punch to the jaw. When she gets her bearings, the first thing Rowan asks about is whether or not Jason is dead. They only tell her that he was frozen along with her, then they inform her that it's been over 455 years since the day she was frozen. Talk about sleeping in...

Professor Lowe gets to his private quarters as soon as he can, and calls a frail man named Dieter Perez. Dieter's asleep, but he agrees to take the call when he sees the caller. Dieter is sort of a fencer of artifacts, but he remains skeptical of the value of Lowe's latest "treasures". Apparently, re-animated people are a dime a dozen, even if they've been frozen for as long as Rowan was.

Dieter perks up when he sees the name Voorhees. Apparently, even 455 years later, Jason's legend still gets around. He strikes a deal with Lowe to pay a ridiculous amount of money for Jason's remains, and the two agree on the terms. As soon as the online chat ends, Janessa shows up, ready for some kinkiness. Rowwwwwwwr.

Adrienne cuts Jason's mask off to examine his face, and we get our only really good look at him unmasked in this movie. His skin is soft and lumpy-looking, and his teeth are a bit crooked, but other than that he looks like a troll from your average Grimm Brothers tale. Except for the first couple of movies, I don't think I've ever seen this much skin on his face. Grimacing, Adrienne drops his mask back into place.

In Lowe's quarters, Janessa is using a pair of tongs to twist his nipples. Believe me, it's as weird to watch as it is to read. I feel sleazy just typing it. She rides him like Seabiscuit, until he agrees to let her pass his course. Yeesh. I wonder which end got the bottle....on second thought: No. I don't wonder.

Jason's blood begins to ooze out from under his mask, dripping onto the floor of the lab. Adrienne fails to notice it, because she's at her desk, studying the various samples of blood and tissue that she took from him. At the same time, KM is showing off some metal nipples to Tsunaron. He doesn't realize it, but KM has grown beyond her programming, and loves him. Awwwwww! Kiss her, ya lug!

Okay, so back to Stoney and Kinsa...briefly. They're making out, so apparently "horniness" hasn't found a cure in the future. We switch back to Adrienne so fast, it gives me whiplash. She hears something, but when she turns around, Jason has resumed playing dead-ish. She looks around a bit, then goes back to her analysis. Jason flexes an ice-covered hand, and Adrienne looks up again. He lays still. When she goes back to her study of his DNA, Jason stands up, then glances over at the cute scientist.

Adrienne remains oblivious, until she sees the examination table is now deserted. Jason grabs her ponytail, presses his arms around her, then throws Adrienne against a wall. The anonymous black dude from the field trip is on the other side of the wall, but he fails to notice her struggle through the frosted glass wall. Jason drags Adrienne over to the liquid nitrogen, dunking her head into it until her face is frozen solid, then he smashes her face against the table, shattering her head. Before he leaves the lab, Jason grabs a particularly nasty surgical saw to replace the machete that Professor Lowe took out of his frozen hand.

Lowe, meanwhile, has brought Rowan a tray of food. He tells her that they're heading for Earth Two, then relates the story of how "her" Earth was depleted of all resources, destroyed with pollution, and eventually abandoned. Rowan tells Lowe that she was one of the heads of the project researching Jason's invulnerability. She says that they tried to kill him in numerous ways--gas, electrocution, hanging, firing squad--but he never died.

Meanwhile, Janessa is trying to make a move on Tsunaron, but he shoots her down. They get introduced to Rowan, then Brodsky and KM come in as well. Rowan accidentally discovers that Jason is on the ship, and she insists on proof that he is dead. Can't say that I blame her.

They find Adrienne's body, and put the ship on a high-security lockdown, until Brodsky's squad can find and kill Jason. Hearing the security alert, Stoney and Kinsa decide to stop making out, and join the others. Jason has other ideas. He meets Stoney at the door, impaling him, then dragging him away, as Kinsa goes hysterical.

She gets to the lab with the others, and informs them of Stoney's death. Brodsky tells his squad to be on alert, and to shoot to kill. When Lowe tries to bribe the Sarge not to kill Jason, Brodsky agrees, but then tells his squad to kill Jason anyway. The Marine grunts all have names like Dallas, Sven, Geko and Kicker, but they might as well be named "Body 1", Body 2", and so on.

We then find Azrael in a virtual reality game with Stone Cold Steve Austin's Canadian-actor equivalent, Lukewarm. They're shooting imaginary aliens when Jason steps in and starts killing the aliens as well. Lukewarm stops the program after Jason kills his and Azrael's "avatars", and then watches Jason pick Azrael up by the neck. Lukewarm shoots at Jason, who drops the kid and goes after Lukewarm, but Az tries to help by jumping on Jason's back. Jason pries the kid off, snaps his spine, then shoves Lukewarm's face into a wall.

Next, Crutch is being stalked. He hears someone in the general vicinity, but can't tell who it is. Crutch then sees Jason's reflection in a monitor, but before Jason can slash him, Brodsky and his squad blast away at the killer, and destroy Crutch's little "garden" in the process. Jason disappears in the smoke and barrage of bullets, and Crutch escapes while the trio look for Jason.

The first one to die, Sven, is snatched up by Jason as he walks by the killer's hiding place. Jason snaps his neck. The next to die, Condor, is trying to spot Jason by climbing a landing and seeing the room from above. Sadly, Jason is already up there to meet him(More teleporting!), and hurls Condor onto a giant drill. The drill impales Condor as his body spins, sending gore everywhere.

Brodsky fails to reach them on his headset, and gets nervous. The 2 female Marines find Condor, and report that he's "screwed". Ha-ha. Jason goes after the first woman, Geko , when she backs into him in the darkness. Jason cuts her throat and lets her stagger into one of her squadmates, Kicker. He fires several rounds at Jason, and watches the big guy stumble backwards onto a giant hook. Kicker then hoists Jason into the air by the chain that the hook is attached to, and reports that he killed Jason.

Nope. Jason lifts himself off of the hook and kills Kicker buy cutting him in half. The top half tries to crawl away(should we call him Crawler now?) and radio for any survivors to escape, but the only one left seems to be Brodsky. Brodsky finds one of the dead girls on a hook, and tries to sneak up on Jason. Jason grabs him by punching through a steel container, and stabs him twice through the stomach. Before he dies, though, Brodsky gets some funny dying words, saying that one stab in the ribs won't kill him, then admitting that the second stab did the trick.

Back in the lab, Professor Lowe and his surviving students,along with KM and Rowan realize that Jason has massacred all of the Marines. A loud pounding on the door frightens them, but it's only Crutch. He finds out about the dead Marines, then Lowe talks to the pilot, Lou, who is just about ready to begin docking with Solaris, the space station they were trying to reach. He prepares for docking, then Jason kills him from behind. Pilotless, the Grendel crashes through Solaris, killing everyone on the station in one fell swoop, as well as damaging the ship. The black kid, who finally has a name(Waylander), puts the damaged space station on the viewscreen just before it explodes. Whoops!

After the explosion, Tsunaron does one of the few SMART things in the film, by sending a distress beacon out into space. After Professor Lowe assures the survivors that this particular region of space is heavily travelled, Jason begins pounding on the heavy metal door. When he stops for a few moments, Rowan hopes out loud that he went away, leading Janessa to deliver a classic wiseass comeback: "Why don't you stick your head out and have a peek?" God help me, I think I'm in love.

While everyone's staring at the metal door, Jason crashes through a glass wall. They all sprint back into the corridor, stop when they realize they're alone again, then have another realization strike them like a sack of hammers: they left Professor Lowe with Jason. D'oh! Say goodbye to your GPA, kids!

Lowe tries to bargain with Jason for his life. Sure, that always works with unstoppable zombies! He offers Jason money, power, influential connections...but Jason only looms closer. Finally, Jason moves in for the kill, and...ignores Lowe, in favor of the ancient machete he had been holding when frozen. Lowe proudly yells out to his students in the next room, "Guys it's okay...He just wanted his machete back!" Ay yi yi, what a lunkhead Lowe is.

In the next room, Rowan tries to come up with an escape plan. She asks Waylander if they can "beam off" of Grendel, and he looks at her like she's Anna Nicole Smith's dumber cousin. They decide it might be possible to relaunch the shuttle, and Crutch agrees to get to his console and start the launch sequence. Waylander tells Crutch that he'll assist him, while the others try to get to the shuttle. Rowan picks up the rifle-cannon off of one of the dead Marines, and assures everyone that she can use it.

KM and Tsunaron move off in a different direction to arm KM with more weapons. When he asks KM to assess their chances of escaping the ship, she calculates that they're almost definitely going to die. He kisses her, and she responds that their odds just got much better. Gotta love how horny these guys in the future are, huh?

Rowan, Janessa and Kinsa make their way to the cargo bay, where most of the Marines were picked off. Curiously, they find the spike Brodsky was impaled on, but no sign of the Sarge anywhere. Kinsa starts to lose it at the sight of all the blood, and Rowan threatens to kill her before Jason can, if she doesn't shut up. Then they spot a surviving Marine across the room. Rowan decides to help the survivor, and orders the other two women to get to the shuttle bay.

Back at the flight deck console, Crutch and Waylander find Lou, sans skin. They move his body(what's left of it...) out of the way, and start to prepare for the shuttle launch.

Rowan discovers that the survivor is none other than Brodsky. She examines his wounds and tries to get him on his feet,but he can't do it. She promises to bring back some others to help move him, then resumes looking around.

Crutch uses Waylander's vest to wipe Lou's blood of of the equipment, much to the young man's chagrin. Then Crutch delivers another really funny line about a war he survived, the "Microsoft conflict", where "We were beating each other with our own severed limbs." I gotta say, as cheesy as some of this movie is, I love the dialogue.

Anyway, at her console, Kinsa meets up with Rowan, who asks for assistance in moving the injured Sarge. Crutch tells Waylander to go, but when Waylander meets Rowan at the spot where she found Brodsky, he is no longer there. Left alone at his console, Crutch is shown Lowe's severed head, right before Jason smashes Crutch face-first into an electronic panel, killing him.

Frightened, Kinsa seals herself inside the escape pod. Rowan tries to talk her down, but Kinsa tries to launch the pod before it's properly unclamped from the Grendel. The clamps tear the pod apart when it starts to take off, and the explosion knocks everyone to the ground.

Janessa, Rowan and Waylander stand up just as Jason finds them. The weapon in Waylander's hands jams, and Jason moves in to finish the trio off...until Tsunaron enters the room. Trailing behind him is the new, improved KM. She's dressed like a dominatrix and armed with what the Marines earlier referred to as a "BFG", which should be familiar to anyone who's a fan of classic shoot'em ups. Everyone else: look it up. You'll probably laugh yer asses off afterwards.

Also funny, in a stupid way, is Tsunaron proudly proclaiming that he gave KM "an upload", when I'm pretty sure he meant to say "upgrade". KM grins and promises to hurt Jason, and he throws his machete into her stomach before she even gets to fire a single shot. Awesome. She jitters around a bit, then goes limp. When Jason goes to retrieve his weapon, she looks up at him, grins, then fires her BFG right into his face at point-blank range. Jason flies off of his feet across the room, and KM somersaults after him. Yay! Finally, a proper showdown.

KM pulls out 2 handguns and continues to assault Jason. Then she uses martial arts to knock him around, finishing him off with dozens of more gunshots and even more karate. KM proudly stands over the killer, but he knocks her off of her feet and gains the upper hand. Before he finishes the android off, Sarge comes out of nowhere to stab Jason from behind.

Back on her feet again, KM backs Jason against a wall, then shoots around him, creating a hole-y outline. When he raises his machete, she responds by shooting his arm off, then kicking him through the wall. She further damages Jason by shooting his left leg off, then blowing two-thirds of his head apart. Uh, I think you got him, honey. Still not finished, KM flings Jason's machete across the room, planting it in his crotch. Owwwwwwwwwwwww!

KM kisses Tsunaron, and everyone celebrates. The survivors get to Lab Two, where they patch up Brodsky. The Grendel shakes some more, and Waylander announces that, according to the computer, the hull is damaged and Grendel is losing oxygen. Luckily, another ship, the Tiamat, has responded to their distress beacon. Unluckily, Tiamat is 45 minutes away, which means that everyone on board the Grendel will run out of air long before the Tiamat reaches them.

Rowan has an idea, though. She points out a flimsy walkway connecting the part of the ship they're on to another, less-damaged section. She proposes that they make their way to the intact section, disconnect the damaged area from the end of the walkway with explosives, then wait there for the rescue ship to arrive. Everyone agrees that it might work, and they tell the Tiamat to continue on their rescue course. Quickly, the group leaves the sick bay to begin the trek to the undamaged section of the ship.

Jason, by the way, landed on the repair table when KM shot him up. A malfunction restarts the medical console, and the nano ants analyze Jason's injuries and begin the task of repairing him. There's not enough healthy tissue on him to complete the job, so the computer replaces the missing areas with synthetic tissue, essentially giving his DNA an even better upgrade than it already had...or "upload", to use Tsunaron's dumbspeak. The ants even improve Jason's clothing and mask, making them into literal armor, and give him both of his eyes back, which is pretty nifty, considering that one was completely removed earlier in the film. Nice ants.

While Jason's being repaired, the survivors are setting up the explosive charges, planning to detonate the damaged part of Grendel, to separate it from the section they're going to. When they finish setting the charges, Jason(or, as he's referred to in the credits, "Uber-Jason") makes his big debut. The only thing I don't like about the new look is the mask: it's bulky and lumpy, and looks like something from the "Mighty Ducks" cartoon from several years ago. But everything else is pretty sweet, including his new, demon-red eyes.(And again, I ask...how did the ants replace the eye that wasn't there to fix up? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)

KM tries to kill Uber-Jason again, but this time, the bullets all just bounce off of him. KM decides to try martial arts again, but warns everyone to run away first. Unfortunately for her,Uber- Jason uses her distraction to knock her robotic head off of her robotic body. Rowan tries to step in to help, but Uber-Jason starts to choke her.

Waylander distracts Uber-Jason long enough for him to drop Rowan and join the others in their frantic escape, but Uber-Jason just throws him around like a rag doll. Brodsky shows up to find out what all the commotion is, and Rowan tells him that Waylander has the detonator for the explosives. Before he dies, Waylander shows Uber-Jason the detonator, then presses the button.

Everyone gets knocked around by the explosions, and the intact portion of Grendel eventually stabilizes, just as the rescue ship arrives. Everyone sighs with relief...then Uber-Jason punches a hole in the outer hull of the chamber they're in. As they struggle to avoid the vacum of space, Janessa starts to lose her grip on the metal floor. She delivers the immortal line, "This sucks on SO many levels," just before being sucked into space and crushed into a blob of goo. Damn. I liked her.

The only survivors now are Tsunaron, Sarge, Rowan, and KM's head. They seal off the destroyed room, just as Uber-Jason breaks through the outer wall. They run through door after door, sealing off each one as they go. Tiamat docks with Grendel, and a flimsy-looking tunnel opens up and connects the two ships. Too bad the escape hatch won't open. The power to the door is cut off.

Brodsky volunteers to do a space-walk to open the hatch manually from outside. As he climbs out, Uber-Jason breaks through most of the doors they sealed on their journey to the hatch, and Tsunaron and Rowan try to think of a way to impede his progress. Rowan tells Tsunaron that they need to create a diversion, which Tsunaron begins programming while Rowan (guided by Sarge's audio input) tries to repair the panel needed to get the escape hatch opened.

The diversion is funny as heck: Using the virtual reality tech we saw earlier in the film, Tsunaron and KM transform the room next door into Camp Crystal Lake. It doesn't fool Uber-Jason for very long, so they add in a pair of nubile female campers in tights shirts and short-shorts. The virtual campers tell Jason that they plan to drink, smoke and have oodles of sex, then they go topless and climb into sleeping bags.

His reaction is awesomely funny. Uber-Jason picks up one of the girls, seals her into her sleeping bag, then uses her as a club to bash the other virtual girl. The whole time, both girls are saying things like, "Ow, that hurts!" When Uber-Jason finishes the fake girls off, he resumes trying to reach the remaining people on the Grendel.

Just as that happens, Rowan gets the escape hatch working. Sarge uses a rocket pack to get to them from outside, as the remaining section of the ship that Uber-Jason demolished starts to explode in a chain reaction. Rowan and Tsunaron run through the space-tunnel, until Tsunaron realizes that KM's head was left behind. Against all logic, Rowan goes back to the Grendel to snatch up the robot head.

Rowan sees Uber-Jason striding in her direction as the virtual campground explodes and burns around him. Before he reaches Rowan, Uber-Jason is stopped in his tracks by Brodsky, and the two start brawling as the Grendel gets destroyed around them. As Rowan watches through a small porthole, the blast propels Uber-Jason toward the escape pod. Before he gets to them, Uber-Jason gets sideswiped by Sarge, and the two hurtle in the direction of Earth 2.

Tsunaron, KM and Rowan marvel at the fact that they survived, and we see Sarge and Uber-Jason start to burn up as they enter Earth 2's atmosphere. As the movie comes to a close, a young couple on the planet mistake the burning astronauts for a falling star. They make a wish, kiss, then realize that the "star" landed in a nearby lake, and decide to go check it out. Uber-Jason's banged-up mask lands at the bottom of the lake. Here we go again...THE END

Y'know, that was a fun one to watch. The jokes were funnier than expected, the effects were well-done, and the look of the film was sleek. Also, the cast was pretty likable and the women in particular were gorgeous. On the downside, the story was weak, and riddled with plotholes: How did Jason get into the hallway at the start, without Rowan seeing him? How was the lab still operational over 400 years after the facility closed? How did the ants repair Jason's malformed eye, after we saw Adrienne remove it? Well, in spite of the inconsistencies, I still found myself loving the movie as much as I did when I first saw it in theaters, so it gets 4 and a half killer trees out of 5.

And what did I learn from Jason X?
-In the future, all women are attractive.
-Computers 455 years from now will have extensive information about summer camps from the 20th century.
-Canada has their own Stone Cold Steve Austin, and he's easy to kill.

Next week, no movie. I'm going in for surgery Tuesday, so I'm taking at least a week off for the operation and recovery. When I'm feeling up to it(hopefully the following week, maybe the next), I'll pick up right where I left off. The next slasher film on my queue is Blood Harvest, starring Tiny Tim, so it sounds hilarious right off the bat! See you soon(I hope...)!