URBAN LEGEND (Tri-Star) Starring: Jared Leto, Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Joshua Jackson, Robert Englund, John Neville, Loretta Devine. Screenplay: Silvio Horta. Producers: Neal H. Moritz, Gina Matthews and Michael McDonnell. Director: Jamie Blanks. MPAA Rating: R (violence, sexual situations, profanity) Running Time: 100 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Hey, did you ever hear the one about the really good post-SCREAM teen horror film? It seems that some film-makers, realizing there was a new market to be tapped after the success of SCREAM and its sequel, decided to make an even better variation on the theme. The script was intelligent, the obligatory pop culture asides felt more than obligatory, and the suspense was genuinely scary. It was both fresh _and_ frightening. No, really, it actually happened. A friend of my cousin's sister-in-law actually saw it.
Sorry, friends, but the preceding is a myth -- an URBAN LEGEND if you will, exactly the kind which forms the basis of the film of the same name. You see, the story on the Northeastern U.S. campus of Pendleton College goes that a psycho professor murdered a dorm full of students 25 years ago, but the administration hushed it up. Now, as the silver anniversary approaches, more nastiness is going on. A young woman is decapitated by a figure in the back seat of her car; another is killed in a darkened room while her rommate lies blissfully sleeping. All of it is somehow connected to Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt), a student with a dark secret in her past, but who is murdering students based on urban legends? Hot shot school reporter Paul (Jared Leto)? Frat boy prankster Damon (Joshua Jackson)? Folklore professor Wexler (erstwhile Freddy Krueger Robert Englund)? Or some other disgruntled soul?
If you actually care about the answer to that question by the end of URBAN LEGEND, it will only be to see how convoluted the explanation could be. Like too many recent horror films, this one obliges you to play Name That Killer, without giving you enough information to permit anything but a random guess. And if you think abut the revelation for long enough afterwards, you'll realize it just doesn't matter. Memo to horror film-makers: we don't need to be guessing who's behind Michael Myers' mask in order for him to be threatening. Stop wasting our time; this is a slasher film, not Agatha Christie.
Frankly, it's about time slasher films started acting like slasher films in plenty of ways. Ever since SCREAM (or even Wes Craven's earlier NEW NIGHTMARE, if you wanna be picky), horror films have gone all post-modern on us, eschewing grind-it-out gore in favor of winking recognition of genre conventions. URBAN LEGEND's pop culture nuggets range from the acceptably smirky (a snippet of the "Dawson's Creek" theme played when "Dawson's Creek" cast member Jackson turns on his car radio) to the who-cares ridiculous (naming one character after one of the film's producers), and those are only a couple of examples of the strained reaches for gags in Silvio Horta's script. There's just not enough humor or creativity to compensate for the raw terror lost in forced attempts to be cute. Aside from the effective prologue sequence, URBAN LEGEND misses the boat on providing gut-level scares.
Ironically enough, it also misses the point that most of the late 70s/early 80s slasher films these arched-eyebrow cousins goof on were actually moralizing cautionary tales, just like the ones described by Englund's folklore professor. When he asks his class if they know the one about the babysitter who gets a call from inside the house, many movie fans will say yes...it was called WHEN A STRANGER CALLS. URBAN LEGEND nicks from the cine-literate horror of SCREAM without even realizing it, because movies _are_ our urban legends. The film might have been on to something with a killer copycatting other movie murders, rather than trying to pass off the ever-popular "impaled on the parking lot tire spikes" tale as part of the collective unconscious, or giving us the Nanook of the North terror of a killer hidden behind a zipped-up parka. Pity the talented Alicia Witt (late of TV's "Cybill") for getting caught up in a horror film that's not clever enough or scary enough to succeed as anything but a clutch-your-date Friday night special. URBAN LEGEND is a tale too often told. And as one character in the film says, "If you're going to tell the story, at least get it right."
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 sub-urbans: 3.
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