Urban Legend review.
It’s been 25 years since Urban Legend hit theaters. A look back at a hit post-Scream movie that struggles to ever be anything more than that.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Urban Legend
Directed by Jamie Blanks
Written by Silvio Horta
Starring Jared Leto, Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Joshua Jackson, Loretta Devine, Tara Reid, Michael Rosenbaum and Robert Englund
Urban Legend Review
The only period of horror more uninteresting than the post-Scream era is the remake era that immediately followed it. Scream was a game changer. It’s just that no one really talks about how it changed the game for the worse. That’s not it’s fault…Scream is a masterpiece. It’s also one of cinema’s greatest examples of studios learning the wrong lessons from success. No one wanted to admit the truth. Scream is a movie that can only exist in the moment it did. Tell that story at any other point in time…the things that it’s commenting on (societally, technologically and in film) don’t line up. It had to be 1996. And it had to be Scream.
Studios don’t look at any of those things. They don’t see art. They see commerce. Specifically, they see Scream resurrecting a dead genre and becoming an unexpected 100-million-dollar box office success. Sony saw those returns. Urban Legend is the result. Unable to recreate the lightning in the bottle success of Scream…Urban Legend aped what it could control to lure movie goers to theaters in 1998. And it worked. Commercially. Not creatively. Which was the extent of Sony’s interest anyway.
You liked that fresh-faced cast of up-and-coming actors? Urban Legend has so many it will make your head spin. Jared Leto, Tara Reid, Rebecca Gayheart, Alicia Witt, Joshua Jackson, Michael Rosenbaum…every key role is filled with a rising star. Natasha Gregson Wagner takes the Drew Barrymore role of doomed girl in the opening scene. To its credit…Urban Legend honors the genre by casting a few legendary horror faces as well. Robert Englund has a key role as a professor. Brad Dourif appears in the opening. Danielle Harris plays Alicia Witt’s roommate.
Instead of commenting on slasher films like its obvious influence…Urban Legend builds its narrating around…you guessed it…urban legends. It’s inherently silly. It gets sillier when the reason for the killer’s obsession with urban legends is revealed. There’s no way to make a movie about this without an inherent absurdity. Unfortunately, outside of the post killer reveal, the movie doesn’t seem interested in playing it up for fun. Even the killer’s costume (a hooded parka) is rife for comedy that never comes.
That’s not to say Urban Legend doesn’t think it’s being funny. Its more annoying characters think everything they do is hilarious. They never are. With its soon to be all-star cast and a concept not nearly as clever as it thinks it is in hand…Urban Legend was born. A movie that never manages to find an interesting angle or a hint of suspense throughout its story.
The opening scene is pretty good though. If only because Michelle (Gregson Wagner) belts out Total Eclipse of the Heart while driving with the same accuracy and exactly as in tune as we all do. A rare moment of realism in a movie that rarely manages to find the rails it wants to go off. That spark of fun is quickly diminished when we meet our crew of unlikable college students. Witt and Leto fair the best. Which makes sense since they end up as our lead investigators and heroic survivors.
The main problem in Urban Legend is that it gives you information without getting you invested in the story. It’s talking at you. There are no real suspects to mention. The two times they make the effort to point at someone are too obviously a misdirection to work. The actual reveal of Brenda (Rebecca Gayheart) as the killer kind of works as a surprise…but that’s just because the movie does such a poor job making the mystery work.
Once revealed…Gayheart finally gives the movie some of the absurd energy it has been desperate for. Of course, it makes no sense…but we take what we can get. Her character is the kind that goes so over the top after revealing herself that it is impossible to believe she was able to hold it together until then. You genuinely feel like they filmed the first two acts of the movie without telling her she was going to be the killer. It comes out of nowhere…and she immediately transforms into an entirely different person.
As mentioned, her reason for reenacting urban legends is a ridiculous one. Her boyfriend was accidentally killed by Michelle who…also liked to reenact urban legends. Oh boy. Natalie was there that night, so she has to die too. Why does everyone else have to die in their own poorly thought-out urban legend? Who knows. Everything Gayheart does between killing Michelle and trying to kill Natalie is complete nonsense. But at least it becomes something fun. It ends on a particularly fun note…perhaps because we’ve completely given up on thinking at this point of the movie.
The cast is largely fine. Too many of its characters are written to be obnoxious for anyone to succeed too fully. You can see the star quality across the young faces…but it’s unsurprisingly the turns by Englund and Dourif that steal their scenes. Urban Legend was wise to cast them.
25 years is plenty of time to judge the intent and execution of a movie. Urban Legend’s purpose was to cash in on the horror renaissance brought about by Scream. Its near 75 million dollars at the box office makes it an unqualified success story. The total lack of anything to add to the genre, on the other hand, leaves it in a pile of movies from the era it came from. One of the more financially successful versions, sure. Also, one of the emptiest.
Scare Value
All the elements are in place as Urban Legend tries to make lightning strike twice in the post-Scream era. A cast of budding young stars…a script that thinks it’s being clever…a fun (if ridiculous) central concept. This is very much the movie you would get if someone took what they think made Scream great and tried to duplicate it. You end up with a soulless, flat product that lacks what matters most. Original ideas and a deep, nuanced understanding of the subject matter. Urban Legend is far from the worst movie of its era. But it is utterly unremarkable.
2/5
Urban Legend Links
Get on VOD from Vudu and Amazon
Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon
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