Urban Legend (1998) * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright by Serdar Yegulalp
I had this stupid little smile on my face during the opening scenes of URBAN LEGEND. I thought back, fondly, to CANDYMAN, an intensely disturbing little movie that took the idea of urban legends and invested it with a grand and primordial dread. The only dread I felt during URBAN LEGEND was the fear that my watch had stopped.
Okay, maybe I'm being too cruel. URBAN LEGEND was obviously put together, post-haste, to cash in on the success of movies like SCREAM and I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER -- a movie where teenagers and proto-twenty-somethings get sucked into various horrible happenings, but maintain the ability to spit out ironic one-liners and wisecracks. LEGEND is competent and amusing, and gory without being excessive, but barely worth more than a glance when it comes on cable TV. We've seen it all before, better.
This time around, the premise is that various students on a college campus are being stalked by a nutcase whose methods of dispatching his victims are patterned after various urban legends. There's the Man With The Axe In The Backseat, the Microwave Death, and so on. About all that's missing is the Death By Broiling In A Tanning Salon and the Choking Doberman -- and if you don't know about those, go ask the guy who writes "The Straight Dope".
Once the movie gets rolling, though, there's not much to look forward to beyond the unmasking of the killer. But along the way there are some cute stops. Robert Englund (the voice and face of "Freddy Krueger" from the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movies) plays a professor on campus who runs a class on urban legends, and one of his hallmarks is that the camera never just seems to SHOW him. We'll see a bunch of students in a hallway or something, and then the camera will slam-pan to the side with a ZOINK! of horror-movie synth music, and there he is. I guess it goes without saying that he's one of the suspects.
Movies like this inspire a great deal of free-association in me. For instance, why is it in films like this that the killer always chooses to dress so homogenously? In ...SUMMER, it was a yellow rain slicker; in this movie, it's a parka with a fur-trimmed hood, which in the middle of a non-snowbound campus, would be sure to grab anyone's attention. And do the people who compose the scores for these movies all use the same orchestra hit synthesizer patch? It sure sounds like it.
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