By the early 1990s, the slasher was dead. Or at least bankrupt. There were no new ideas and fans had stopped watching them. Then came Scream. Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson turned the slasher upside down and made it self-aware. I loved it. Lots of people loved it. It was a huge hit. Like a lot of huge hits, imitators followed.
Unfortunately, most of these films missed out on what made Scream so good. Mainly a self-aware, clever script, and genuine thrills. The imitators copied the up-and-coming cast from hip TV shows, a hip soundtrack featuring up-and-coming alternative rock bands, and lots of (not too gory) violence.
Urban Legend poses the idea of what would happen if a serial killer used actual urban legends as his/her inspiration? Which is both an utterly stupid and kind of amazing idea for a horror film.
I’m not by any means an expert on urban legends so take this thought with a grain of salt, but it does feel like the late 1990s were a real hotspot for urban legends. The Internet had just taken off in a very big way which allowed urban legends to flourish like never before, but we weren’t so internet savvy (or cynical) as to easily debunk them. So, the idea of using urban legends for your slasher movie makes sense.
The movie is bad though.
It is set at a fictional New England university that is populated by beautiful, hip, kids who get picked off one by one in not all that interesting ways.
Our hero is Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt) a sweet, sincere, student who is very upset over the news that a student was recently decapitated in her car (that’s the legend where a creepy dude (the always great Brad Dourif) freaks a girl out while trying to warn her that there is a killer in the backseat).
Jerod Leto is the school newspaper reporter who knows all about urban legends and is obsessed with scoops. Rebecca Gayheart is the best friend, Tara Reid is the party girl who hosts a sexy call-in radio show, and Loretta Devine in the sassy security guard.
Oh, and Robert Englund is the professor who specializes in urban legends because that’s a thing.
Some of the urban legends discussed and used to kill people include the don’t flash your lights at another car who doesn’t have their headlights on legend, the aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the lights last night because I was secretly killing your roommate in the dark legend, and the don’t drink soda with a mouthful of Poprocks legend (one of these didn’t actually kill anybody).
The kills are all fairly tame. The reveal of the killer is downright awful. Everything in between isn’t all that bad, but neither is it particularly interesting.
themidnightcafe.org 