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R: ARCHIVE, S: MOVIES, D: 09/21/2000,

Urbania; Urban Legends: Final Cut

Have you heard the one about the guy -- or is it a girl? -- who's lulled into a drunken one-night stand with a stranger and awakens the next day in a bathtub full of ice to discover that a kidney has been surgically removed? Two new movies depict varying versions of that bit of contemporary apocrypha, examining in their respective ineffectual ways the lure of such grotesque and cheesy folklore.

The more tightly wound and ambitious of the two is Urbania, first-time director Jon Shear's adaptation of Daniel Reitz's play Urban Folk Tales. It's the story, or stories, of Charlie (Dan Futterman), a Manhattanite who walks the nocturnal streets of the city in a kaleidoscopic fugue of memory, fantasy, and freak encounter filigreed with half-heard, sometimes enacted urban chestnuts like the kidney story above, or the one about the poodle in the microwave, or the baby on the roof of the car. Gradually, details emerge of a traumatic incident involving Charlie and his lover Chris (Matt Keeslar). The shards of the past merge with Charlie's present pursuit of a hunky homophobe (Samuel Ball); the resolution of the mystery proves anticlimactic and maudlin. Although earnest and even wry in its probing of the need for stories to make sense of love, loss, and anger, Urbania succumbs to smug pretentiousness.

Pretentious in its own way is Urban Legends: Final Cut, which takes the premise of its 1998 predecessor -- killings on a college campus that mimic well-known urban legends -- and cranks it up a postmodernist notch or two. This time it's the film department of a college campus that's suffering the casualties, as star senior Amy Mayfield (Jennifer Morrison) comes up with the bright idea of making a movie about a college campus victimized by urban-legend-inspired murders only to have members of her cast and crew fall victim to the same. First-time director John Ottman shows some cinema savvy in his allusions to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and other classics (Amy is out to win the school's "Hitchcock" prize) but can't resist settling into the usual Scream routines and hopelessly convoluted plotting. Despite a funny, self-reflexive finale and a feisty pair of f/x weenies, Final Cut is not what becomes a legend most. Urbania plays at the Kendall Square; Urban Legends: Final Cut plays at the Copley Place, the Fenway, the Fresh Pond, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

-- Peter Keough