I’ll cop to thinking there is a good movie somewhere in this mess, but these films rarely come close to any sort of legitimate entertainment, horror or otherwise. In the first film, a bunch of college students are terrorized by a guy in a black parka who uses urban legends to pick them off one by one. In the sequel, a completely different group of students is terrorized by a dude in a fencing mask who uses urban legends to pick them off one by one. Aside from the separate casts of gorgeous twenty-somethings, the two films are almost disturbingly similar. The strongest resemblance lies in the fact that both films really stink.

The cardinal sin committed by both movies is it frequently uses urban legends that are either unfamiliar or totally invented. We’ve all heard about the driver ignoring warnings about the guy in the backseat of the car, but do you recall an urban legend about a guy getting his ankles slashed and then being impaled on garage tire spikes? What about the one with the people getting electrocuted in the tunnel of terror? How ‘bout being bludgeoned to death with a camera lens? A web search would have turned up plenty of unused and well-known urban legends - what about the old “razor blades in the apple”?

There’s such a lapse of logic in these slasher movies that if they’re not really scary, you can just get lost in finding all the mistakes. The first movie is one in which everyone is a suspect (and when the killer is revealed, there’s been no evidence to suggest their identity), in the second, they inadvertently reveal the killer within the first fifteen minutes. Speaking of these masked killers, doesn’t anyone notice a dude wearing a black rain slicker with a fencing mask attached to it? I’ll buy a killer in a black parka going unnoticed, but don’t you think someone would spot a guy soaked in blood, hefting dead bodies all over campus wearing a fencing mask?

I also love the only recurring character in both films, a black security guard named Reese (Loretta Devine). She spends the whole first movie not believing a serial killer is on the loose, then spends the second movie convinced that the same thing isn’t happening again. A broken window could be vandals, the murdered bodies could just be a big mix-up at the morgue, etc. Wicked as it might be to imagine, I kept hoping she’d get offed just so she could refuse to believe there was an ax sticking out of her back.

There are talented people scattered amongst the wreckage of these films. The first features a supporting performance from Michael Rosenbaum, known to geeks as Lex Luthor from SMALLVILLE, here almost unrecognizable as a well-coifed frat brother. The second was directed by John Ottman, editor and composer on X-MEN and THE USUAL SUSPECTS., and he manages to include a few clever moments, like the classy montage where the protagonist imagines all her friends’ faces superimposed over the killer’s. Still, the first loses points for the inclusion of Joshua (THE SKULLS) Jackson in another supporting role, and the second endlessly mentions Alfred Hitchcock, only pointing out just how far it is from anything that man ever made.