Urban Legend (1998)
Director: Jamie Blanks Cast: Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Jared Leto, Joshua Jackson, Tara Reid, Michael Rosenbaum, John Neville, Robert Englund, Natasha Gregson Wagner Screenplay: Silvio Horta Producers: Gina Matthews, Michael McDonnell Runtime: 100 min. US Distribution: TriStar Rated R: horror violence/gore, language, sex
By Nathaniel R. Atcheson (nate@pyramid.net)
Imagine this: you're walking down a really dark hallway. It's so dark that you can't see anything -- not even the walls, not even your hands! (The only thing illuminated is your face.) You're looking around slowly, plodding through the darkness, scared of something that may or may not be there. Suddenly, a half-second crack of extremely loud guitar music radiates from a six-foot stack of speakers right next to you. Would you be scared? I sure would be. I'd fall to the floor, convulsing, perhaps even weeping, and I doubt that I'd ever recover from the incident.
In real life, this would be frightening. But in a horror movie, the formula doesn't work quite the same way. For instance, the scene described above is a common one in Urban Legend, with each segment ending in that ultra-loud burst of music. When we see people walking through dark hallways, we know that they're probably just going to have the stuffing scared out of them. On occasion, he or she might get gutted by some maniac, but, typically, scenes like this are false alarms.
Urban Legend is wholesale false alarms, none of which are particularly alarming. Ever since Scream came out in 1996, the studios have been rushing to bring out their own teen horror flicks. They range from the watchable (I Know What you Did Last Summer) to the silly (Disturbing Behavior), but I have yet to see one that does everything right. Urban Legend is perhaps sillier than all of them, sporting a kinda-cool gimmick/plot. It's watchable badness, with some decent moments of suspense and good acting. But I wonder if the director, Jamie Blanks, had any idea that the film is inherently and completely ridiculous.
Like most of these new-wave Teen Horror Flicks, Urban Legend has a gimmick in place of a story. The gimmick is that the killer murders people based on urban legends. Urban legends are those stories that everyone knows and thinks are true, but really hold no truth whatsoever. I sat in quiet astonishment as the fable of Mikey, the Life Cereal kid, is discussed on screen. I heard that story probably twelve years ago (when I was just a tyke), and in all this time I've never heard anything that proved the tale true or false. It's slightly amusing the way Urban Legend uses this group of famous stories to create a sequence of interesting set-pieces. Strictly as a formality, the film has a main character: her name is Natalie (Alicia Witt). She's a college student, and -- just as our young heroines in all of the other Teen Horror Flicks -- she's the girl the killer wants to abuse emotionally.
This film is profoundly silly, but there's stuff I liked about it. First, there's Alicia Witt. She's a great actress (very Witty), and, when given the right material, extremely funny (remember her on "Cybil?"). The script for this film, which was written by Silvio Horta, doesn't give her much of a character to work with, but she's fun to watch anyway. Also fun is Rebecca Gayheart (Noxema girl!); she overacts on a nuclear-meltdown level, but I think she's aware of it. In addition, the film features John Neville (as the evil Dean) and Robert Englund (for a guy so well-known, you'd think he'd make a good movie every once in a while). There are lots of actors in this film, but no characters -- that tends to be a problem when we're trying to manifest sympathy for the figures on screen getting all hacked up.
Blanks has a good visual style, and the film is competent in its execution. There are a few really nicely-done scenes, including a gore-fest that has something to do with a dog in a microwave; the opening scene (which features an uncredited Brad Dourif in a role not unlike his first in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) is spectacular and beautifully ironic. There are some good camera angles, and Blanks injects enough atmosphere to keep the film from being dry and uninspired. It's just too bad that the film is overflowing with cliches and scenes that end with loud bursts of music.
Even for a horror film, there are necessary elements missing. It isn't very scary -- it relies a little too heavily on gore and gratuitous violence (some of it is simply unpleasant). What makes films like this really scary is a believable explanation for everything. That's where Urban Legend really loses it -- the final fifteen minutes of the film are laughably absurd (I'm not exaggerating -- I was laughing). Did Blanks know how silly all of this stuff is? Perhaps. It would have been nice if the urban legend gimmick had been put to better use, but I'm more concerned with the numerous scenes that rely on that crack of loud music to scare the audience. It's so hard to scare us when we know it's coming anyway.
** out of **** (5/10, C)
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Nathaniel R. Atcheson
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