I also saw "Urban Legends" recently.
When I heard the premise for this film last
fall, I thought it was the most ingenious premise I'd ever heard
in my life. I LOVE urban legends. I like horror movies, but they
never, never scare me. You know what scares me? Those creepy
nasty urban legend stories about headless babysitters and
murdered roommates. So I thought the idea of a psychopath loose
on a college campus, painstakingly acting out those sick urban
legend horrors, was just inspired.
The film is pretty well done, even though it
begins to disappoint in the last act. The photography is well
done and professional. The young actors, none of I've seen
before, are all decent. The "characters" they play
(okay, the "victims" they play) suffer less from the
typical Hollywood cliche of ridiculous archetypes (the Football
Star, the Kid who's Really Into Horror Movies, the Geek) than
other movies in this genre. Unfortunately, minus the archetype,
there's hardly any character to these characters. But that's
fine. They're victims, by and large, statistics in a body-count,
and the film doesn't try to hard to pretend they're more than
that.
Let me tell you how this film begins: A young
woman is driving on a dark country night through slashing rain.
The needle on her gas tank is pinned to "E." She pulls
into a quiet, isolated, run-down gas-station. Throughout this,
the camera is careful to never show you what might or might not
be in her back seat...
I HATE this story. It scares the shit out of
me.
And, if any of you have heard this urban legend
before, let me tell you: The film offers up a new twist. The
legend depicted here goes on beyond its usual punchline, horribly
on to a chilling conclusion.
And that's the first ten minutes.
The movie packs some really nasty Urban Legend
murders in its first half. However, somewhere around the half-way
point, the writers seem to forget the premise of the film and
several later murders are just inventively gorey, but nothing
from any Urban Legend I've ever heard. One murder that echoes an
Urban Legend I have heard-- which concludes with a woman's head
spinning around on a record player, as the needle keeps skipping
over the same part of the song-- is carefully cropped out frame
so you never see it. And nobody ever says HOW she was murdered.
I'm just guessing about how her head is found, based on the sound
of a skipping record player and a dim memory of this UL. I guess
they had to cut out this part to get an R rating. Or maybe it was
just too gruesome. Who knows. Point is, unless you know this UL,
you'll be scratching your head about this scene.
The film has all the usual cliched flaws of
this genre. As other reviewers have pointed out, the students of
Pendelton College (where the film is set) have the odd habit of
sneaking up on one another, grabbing fellow student's shoulders
from behind, and saying "HI HOWYA DOING????!!!!"
punctuated by a shrill musical "stinger."
The killer's identity here is hidden by the
snorkel-type parka he wears; his face is obscured in the darkness
of the snorkel hood. There's a problem with this: it's just
stupid. Parkas are NOT scary. They're silly. Just give the killer
a mask, for christ's sakes. Don't reinvent the wheel. And worse--
to throw suspicions around, half the people on the campus seem to
own this exact style/color parka. One person wears it,
ridiculously, to an indoor swimming pool. Give me a break.
As in all other movies of this genre, the
killer is doing this because of a wrong the main character did
long ago. Although here, of course, the wrong the main character
did involved acting out her own Urban Legend, so it's kind of
justified. And don't bother trying to figure out who the killer
is-- as in all other such movies, there's grounds to suspect
everyone, and the killer could just as easily be Marge the Math
Major as Professor Bigglesby. It's a gory version of the
boardgame Clue.
But it's the last half-hour that disappoints,
when the film abandons the UL premise to become just another
bodycount flick. Until that point, however -- and even through
it, actually -- it's a well-done slasher flick.
Recommended, to those who like this kind of
thing.
