Urban Gothic is an interesting and original horror short story anthology format, uniting standard horror material with contemporary urban London settings. Writer Tom De Ville has a good ear for streetwise chatter and a reasonably acute sense of class and ethnic difference; his pieces that are essentially character-driven tend to be more successful than those that depend rather more on sensation and plot device. The London locations and young cast combine to make something surprisingly creepy.

Highlights include the opening episode, "Deadmeat", in which a group of sensation-seeking young people, on the run from drug dealers and sexually rapacious employers, find a corpse with a look of horror on its face and decide to experiment with necromancy. In the fly-on-the wall documentary parody "Vampirology" a film crew follows a vampire on his nightly round of drinks with yuppie friends, before devouring a lost tourist. Keith-Lee Castle's portrait of a lost soul is remarkable, and the guest appearance of Ingrid Pitt, every vampire's favourite starlet, is hilarious. --Roz Kaveney

An attractive young woman is driving her car on a dark country road and singing along to the radio. She's running out of gas and so she pulls into a gas station (run by a jittery, stuttering Brad Dourif) but then flees what seems to be an attack, only to find the real threat in her backseat: a hooded killer with an axe who takes her head off with a well-aimed swing. You've heard the story before? Not surprising, given that it's one of the more famous urban legends borrowed for Urban Legend, a post-Scream exercise in self-referential horror. The students at an ivy-covered New England college are turning up dead, the victims of a serial killer who murders in the fashion of the "apocryphal" modern myths. It's all for the benefit of good girl with a dark secret Alicia Witt, the sole witness to most of the killings. Doe-eyed Rebecca Gayheart, as her gullible best friend, and Jared Leto, the ambitious campus journalist who tracks down the secret that hangs over the school, lead a cast of pretty young women, hunky guys and campus characters, notably the suspicious professor Robert Englund, a genre legend in his own right as the star of seven Nightmare on Elm Street films. Take away the cheeky remarks and self-awareness and it's a throwback to the 1970s' rash of teen slasher movies, where sexually active teens are sliced, diced and otherwise slaughtered in elaborate and ingenious ways. The increasingly preposterous film is no Scream but the modestly stylish production has its moments. --Sean Axmaker

While Urban Legends: Final Cut is not nearly as terrifying or inventive as its predecessor, the film does offer up a fairly suspenseful whodunit that fans of the teen-horror genre will likely appreciate. Amy Mayfield, the film's heroine (played by fresh-faced Jennifer Morrison), the daughter of an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is trying to make a name for herself at Alpine University, "the greatest film school that ever existed". Along with several other students she is competing for the coveted Hitchcock award, which virtually guarantees the winner a successful career in Hollywood. When the film school's resident genius and likely winner of the award is found dead, suspicions arise. As other film students are killed off one by one, everyone becomes a suspect. Would someone kill to win the prestigious award? While striving to be Hitchcockian in theme (as evidenced by its multiple references to the director himself), the film never quite moves beyond cliché. Many scenes are a little too reminiscent of other popular teen-horror flicks such as Scream (the anonymous masked killer, though not nearly as frightening), The Blair Witch Project (Amy is chased through desolate woods by her stalker), and Friday the 13th (Amy hides from the killer in a lake setting eerily similar to the one where Jason lurked so many years ago). These elements seem just a little worn out. Morrison gives a serviceable performance, and Loretta Devine, from the original Urban Legend, adds humour as a Foxy Brown-worshiping security guard. The film manages to keep you guessing until its conclusion, and a sequence set in an abandoned amusement park is truly creepy. But ultimately Urban Legends: Final Cut lacks the originality to make a name for itself among the many films of its genre. --Mindy Ruehmann, Amazon.com