Review: Urban Legend (1998)

You know, it actually surprises me that it took so long for somebody to make a mad slasher film in which the murders are based around popular urban legends. After all, a number of slasher films, good (Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street) and bad (Friday the 13th, Hell Night), have been built around the idea of a place where multiple murders have already taken place--the stuff urban legends are formed from.

It's just too bad that, once somebody got around to making such a movie, it had to be such a tiresome affair as Urban Legend, the latest entry in the self-referential, hip slasher movie trend started by the Scream movies and continued by I Know What You Did Last Summer, which dictates that a cast of young, beautiful people--at least one of whom must belong to the cast of either Dawson's Creek or Party of Five--are picked off one by one until the brightest, most resilient of the bunch unmasks the killer (or killers, as the case may be).

The cast of Urbam Legend is an unusually comely one, even by the high standards set for this subgenre: Alicia Witt, Jared Leto, Rebecca Gayheart, Joshua Jackson, Tara Reid and Natashia Wagner Gregson are among the gorgeous potential victims, while character actors John Neville (the "well-manicured man" from The X-Files) and Robert Englund (Freddy!) are on hand to act as suspects.

A killer is loose on the campus of a New England college, knocking off coeds and frat boys using various urban myths, like the "body scraping the car roof" story or the "killer calling from the upstairs phone" legend. This setup has its moments, most of them belonging to Witt, who comes to believe all of the murders are somehow connected to a shameful secret from her past. She's smart, resourceful, determined...and just as doomed to suffer as anybody else in this movie.

Some of the deaths are pretty gruesome--murder isn't pretty, kids--and most of them are entirely pointless: if the killer wants revenge on Alicia Witt's character, why not just go right after HER instead of depopulating the student body? Why knock of characters who barely KNOW Alicia? I must give credit where it's due, though: it took me a while to figure out exactly who the killer was, and there were some cute in jokes, like when Joshua Jackson starts his car and the theme from his TV show, Dawson's Creek, comes blaring out of the stereo (see, I told you at least one DC cast member had to in here somewhere).

Maybe I've just seen too many of these purportedly hip-and-funny-yet-scary ventures. Maybe I've just gotten tired of seeing talented young actors looking scared and dying horribly. Maybe I've come to expect more from the subgenre and find this to be little more than connect-the-dots filmmaking. Whatever the specific cause, Urbam Legend ultimately depressed me with its body count and lack of invention, despite an inventive, promising premise that it never does much with.

Excuse me now...I've got a taste for Pop Rocks and Pepsi....