Urban Legend (1998) – Review

Much like the golden age of the slasher flick, The second coming of the stalk and slash movie also had its leading lights that forged recognisable franchises. The obvious one is the one that kicked it all off; Wes Craven’s Scream – a film that not only rejuvenated the slasher film in general but gave the ailing horror genre a much needed blast of relevance. Not far behind was I Know What You Did Last Summer, a much more subtle take on matters that tended to skew more in the mold of classic slashers than taking its cue from the meta crimes of Ghostface.
Bringing up the rear was Jamie Blanks’ Urban Legend, a film that set its tone somewhere between the first mentioned movies – it wasn’t trying to be too post modern like Scream, but it certainly wasn’t as straight laced as I know… either. However, swapping out cinephile levels of film knowledge for tales of urban misfortune wasn’t really enough to disguise that Urban Legend wasn’t so much as homage as almost a straight copy of Craven’s game changing opus. However, like the legendary stories that are shared down from generation to generation, has time given this particular slasher entry a new lease on life?

Welcome to Pendleton University, a campus that contains some of the most late-90s student you are ever likely to meet; however among the smug himbos and surly goths, it seems that a killer is stalking their prey by styling their murders after numerous urban legends that everyone at some point have claimed has happened to a friend of theirs. When the first victim is decapitated by a murderous assailant hiding in the back seat of her car, it starts a wave of panic throughout the campus, but it seems that the person who should be worrying the most is Natalie Simon. You see, even though she hadn’t admitted it to anyone yet, it turns out that the first victim was an old friend of hers and soon other murders soon start claiming the people around her such as the class clown and Natalie’s goth roommate. However, despite her desperate pleas to the Dean, no one actually believes that anyone has been killed due to a noticable lack of bodies and so the student has to rely on her friends for help.
This proves to be spectacularly bad strategy as Natalie’s pals all tend to be in the flakier end of the spectrum. Best friend Brenda is something of an airhead, student reporter Paul is more interested by nailing an impressive byline, rich kid Parker is a massive prick and DJ agony aunt Sasha is too obsessed with sex to care much. Worse yet, anyone of these kids could be the killer, along with the cover-up obsessed Dean and a teacher who just happens to teach an advanced class on urban legends and soon Natalie has nowhere to turn as the killer lurks ever closer. What is Natalie’s guilty secret, how does it relate to the killer’s quest for vengeance and will she have any friends left alive at the end of this, flakey or otherwise?

So it’s no big surprise that Urban Legend proves to be the least of the three big slasher franchises that came out of the 90s slasher boon, but while it falls foul of virtually every single niggle that plagued the second wave of the sub-genre (over lit, dated, falls apart the second any logic is added), you can’t say it’s not bending over backwards in order to be fun. Director Jamie Blanks no only seems cool with the fact that his movie is a shameless rip of Scream, but seems jazzed to play up to it, delivering plenty of larger than life suspects/victims and an entire college campus to run around. However, the first major problem is the whole killer at college thing had already been done a year before when the Scream sequel also set its slashy shenanigans in an institute of further education. While that film had an absurdly attractive sitting around discussing the nature of horror sequels, Urban Legend has them casually chatting about all those exegerated dark stories we’ve all heard, however it just proves to be nowhere near as endearing.
While Scream help change the game by giving us three dimensional characters that where likable despite their inherent smugness and I Know… tried to give us a more brooding, slower form of the whodunit as our nubile young cast tried to crack the case of the hook-handed fisherman, Urban Legend is content to be as flashy, loud and obnoxious as it can while only occasionally hitting the sweet spot. Even though it may seem a little weird to point a finger at a stalk and slash flick and declare it vapid (isn’t that sort of the point?), Urban Legend does itself no favours by basically stealing it’s best ideas from other movies. Beyond the deployment of snarky students, the film lifts quite heavily from the likes of The House On Sorority Row and Prom Night insofar as having a prank kick off the killer’s rampage and I have to say, the levels of gore don’t quite match the energy the film is trying to achieve. Oh, and let’s not forget the audacity of the killer’s choice of identity hiding costume being a fucking duffle coat with the hood up.

But that’s not to say that Urban Legend doesn’t bust out a few blinders here and there and long term horror fans can’t have helped but notice that there cast boasts a few legends of its own here and there. The most obvious is Robert Englund of course, as he chews the scenery as an unnecessarily sinister lecturer without the aid of a razor fingered glove, but more hard-core genre fans will also spot Brad (Chucky) Dourif as a stuttering gas attendant in the opening sequence and Natalie’s doomed roommate is none other than Danielle Harris, the little girl from Halloweens 4 and 5. On top of an impressive genre cast, we also have a clutch of familiar faces padding out the main characters that include Alicia Witt, Jared Leto, Joshua Jackson, Tara Reid, Rebecca Gayheart and Michael Rosenbaum fill out all the usual slasher roles, but aside from a sequence or two that prove to be pretty damn memorable, most of the film proves to have far less staying power than many of the stories it gleefully tries to recreate.
The opening kill is as an effective slaughter scene as you’ll ever see as driving rain, a fatal misunderstanding and a stuttered warning delivered just too late drop us into the action perfectly. Later, another victim to be is attacked by the killer in her room only for her roommate to enter and just assume that the muffled screams of her promiscuous roomie are the moans of kinky love making and simply goes to sleep in the darkened room while a homicide occurs.

However, outside of these stellar moments, Urban Legend struggles to be anything more than a basic slice and dice that doesn’t have enough charm to cover over some glaring plot holes. For the killer to pull off some of the ridiculously complex plans they have to shoehorn the renowned cautionary tales into a clutch of murders, they’d have to have a keener criminal mind than Heath Ledger’s Joker and the preposterousness of it all isn’t helped by the fact that not even Witt’s final girl is particularly likable.
On the other hand, if the movie does one thing, it’s living up to its title – because 90% of actual urban legends are bullshit too.
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