Shifts in subgenre midway through a franchise aren’t as rare (or as desperate) as they might initially sound, it’s just how you handle it that counts. Good examples include Aliens shifting the tone to a sci-fi war movie; the sixth Friday The 13th suddenly morphing to comedy; and Army Of Darkness unrepentantly going full slapstick when having Bruce Campbell vs. the Evil Dead – but the flip side usually means that if you get it wrong, things tend to end up on the disastrous side.
This takes us to the Urban Legends franchise which, if I’m being honest, had never really been that impressive in the first place. While the first film was a so-so product of the second coming of the slasher film and its sequel was a baffling tonal train wreck that mixed Hitchcock worship with the insistence that a fencing mask is a good idea for a killer’s disguise, the third movie simply shrugged and went “screw it, we’re using ghosts now”. Thus Urban Legends: Bloody Mary was born; the last, pathetic gasp of a franchise that was pretty much done the first movie ended…
Back in 1969, tragedy strikes when a trio of football jocks think that it’s a hilarious idea to drug their prom dates and kidnap them – but surprise surprise; when their misogynistic jape goes horribly off the rails, one of the girls is killed once she panics and tries to flee. That girl was Mary Banner and her body was hidden away in a trunk located in a storage room and never found while every one else goes on to live their life, but decades later, here sad story has become an urban legend told at slumber parties between bouts of random pillow fighting.
An ignominious end, I’m sure you’ll agree; but after one such night of snacks and gossip, high schooler Samantha Owens starts having similar issues after an inflammatory article she wrote in the school paper about the football team results in her and her friends experiencing a similar, potentially dangerous prank when they are “jokingly” drugged and kidnapped. This creepy coincidence seems to spark off some supernatural chicanery and before you know it, Samantha is having visions of a spectral Mary who obviously hasn’t managed to put the malicious bout of manslaughter that killed her behind her yet and before you can say “Elm Street”, the ones responsible for Sam’s abduction soon start dying in groovy, urban legend-y sort of ways.
While jocks and their girlfriends start meeting their premature ends in malfunctioning tanning beds and bizarre spider manifestations, Samantha and her brother, David, try and unravel the mystery of Mary before the body count rises, but it soon becomes apparent that her tragic end is linked to their family in some rather worrying ways. You know, typical ghost movie stuff…
The sudden – and frankly unnecessary – lurch into the realms of the supernatural for the Urban Legend series make you instantly default into two mindsets before you even watch the thing. The first has you wondering why they bothered to name it an Urban Legends movie in the first place, because the series is hardly what you would call a leading light in the world of horror franchises in the first place; but after watching this thing for barely five minutes, you shift your thinking to ponder over why they made this rather dreary and noticabltly cheap movie at all. Despite featuring some familiar, before-they-were-famous faces in the cast and including a director responsible for one of the best Stephen King adaptations of the 80s, Bloody Mary has all the quality of a student film that suddenly got released as a real movie.
It was initially a shock to me, because I actually have quite an affinity for the 80s version of Pet Sematary, so to see it’s director, Mary Lambert (who also directed the music videos for Madonna’s Like A Virgin, Material Girl and Like A Prayer) trawl such depths is nothing short of depressing – although, to be fair, she also directed Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid a couple of years later so maybe this isn’t the low point after all. Lurking elsewhere at the top of the cast list is none other than House Of Cards player and forgotten Sue Storm, Kate Mara, who seems to be paying her acting dues with the dead-eyed complacency of someone who has already figures they’ve blown their audition. I mean, she’s competent enough; she mumbles through clunky exposition like a pro and looks appropriately scared at the various, ineffective jump scares peppered in by the editor after the fact, but despite adding an understandable abuse of women side plot into proceedings, Bloody Mary simply can’t pull itself out of its inferior, Elm Street clone, nature to be even remotely entertaining.
In fact, as the insufferable film school students from part 2 would probably tell you, is that the most interesting thing about Bloody Mary by far is the weird, inverse, mirror image the franchise ends up having with the Prom Night series. Where as that franchise kicked off with a classic slasher MO and then morphed into supernatural flicks for the two “Mary Lou” sequels, Urban Legends is the reverse thanks to its two slasher/one supernatural ratio that also features a vengeful Prom Queen from beyond the grave. However, as intriguing a coincidence as that may be, it still would have been rather watching Prom Night II: Hello Mary Lou than this dreck.
Even the kills are a bit naff. Sure, there’s a fun one involving a tanning bed, but the one from Final Destination 3 (which came out.a year later) still blows it out the water and even though there’s a rousing demise caused by some numbskull blowing his dick off after pissing on an electric fence, it just makes Bloody Mary’s powers a bit confusing. For example, if Mary has the supernatural ability to cause spiders to magically erupt from a zit in a girls face or telepathically screw with a tanning machine without even being present, why does she also need to physically throw electric switches or choose to stab up a guy with a broken bottle like gnarly toothed meth addict? Why we’re on the subject, why would she go after Samantha’s tormenters and not her own – it’s not like she didn’t know their identities and what’s the point of introducing Sam’s two friends when they literally walk out of a classroom halfway through and never seen again?
Baffling for many different reasons, but boring for so many more, any good points Bloody Mary manages to whip up (Rooney Mara cameo, one death that’s actually a surprise) are soon smited by such production values so lame, not even the woman who staged Fred Gwynne’s truly shocking demise in Pet Sematary can manage to do anything with this tripe no matter how many stands it takes against men getting away with harming women.
While Mary brings deserved death upon her tormentors, she also managed to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the Urban Legends franchise with impressive finality. But considering that the franchise was hardly great to begin with, maybe the snarling wraith did us all a favour in the long run as she invites the series to take a slash on a high-voltage barrier.
Bloody Mary? Bloody Nora more like.
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