Freshman Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt) and several of her closest friends, all students at a prestigious New England college, are stalked by a serial killer whose crimes are patterned after well-known urban legends.

CRITIQUE

It’s only been ten years since its release, but Urban Legend seems a bit of an odd duck these days. Most current horror flicks are either lousy, toothless remakes or lousy, paint-by-numbers torture porn flicks. Urban Legend is neither, instead representing a distinct late ‘90s/early ‘00s genre: Scream knockoffs. Yes, this was another attempt to craft a hip, self-aware slasher flick. Or at least that’s what the producers wanted everyone to believe back in late 1998.

In reality, though, this was just another shameless cash-in, less influenced by Scream’s wit and craft than by its box-office success. By no means as good as Scream (or even Scream 3, for heaven’s sake), Urban Legend is slightly better than most of the other clones that followed in the wake of Wes Craven’s flick, thanks in large part to director Jamie Blanks’s snappy pacing and some better-than-the-movie-deserves work from Witt, but in the end that’s not really saying much.  

Rather than go into all of these reasons I don’t like this movie (such as the lame dialogue, characters who act and talk as they’re written by a person who learned everything he knows about the way people act and talk from watching television), I’d rather discuss the moment at which I completely lost interest in Urban Legend. It comes roughly midway through and involves (spoiler alert!) the death of Witt’s roommate.

Through plot contrivances that won’t hold up under scrutiny, Witt walks into their dorm room while the other girl (played by Danielle Harris and portrayed as the sort of Goth chick conceived by someone who’s never actually met a Goth chick) is being murdered, although Witt misconstrues Harris’s moans as sexual pleasure. The next morning Witt awakens to find Harris dead, her wrists slashed open; Witt also finds a bloody message scrawled on the wall by the killer. The school’s dean (played by John Neville, who should have learned his lesson by now) and chief of campus security (improbably played by Loretta Devine) survey the scene, listen to Witt’s story, and determine that Harris committed suicide.

Now maybe I’m over-thinking things here, but how is this possible? Harris looks like she weighs ninety-eight pounds wet, yet someone thinks it possible for her to slit both of her wrists, then use the ensuing flow of blood to scribe a final message to her roommate on their wall. That’s a neat trick for someone who’s rapidly bleeding out. An even neater trick is her hiding the instrument she used to slice open her wrists as well as whatever it was she used to write the message (which, given evidence presented here, must have been a 2-inch paintbrush).

You’d think someone would mention something about the knife or whatever it was Harris used (which would have been covered in her fingerprints if she’d offed herself, unless of course she slit her wrists while wearing gloves and then disposed of the gloves along with the knife or whatever) but no one ever does. I doubt many suicides have much time to hide their instrument of choice in between the time they use said instrument and the drawing of their last breath, but what do I know?

There are two possible reasons for the absence of any mention of this: either writer Silvio Horta (who years later would create the American version of Ugly Betty) is so incompetent he never though of it, or he realized that this would have destroyed the second half of the story and chose to ignore it.

Sticking to my promise not to go into the numerous reasons I don’t like this movie (such as the omniscient, omnipresent, superhuman killer--who can take two shots from a semiautomatic handgun with no ill effects whatsoever--or the drawn-out, laughably ridiculous, anticlimactic finale), I’d instead like to posit the following: If you’re willing to accept the idea that a college professor could murder thirty people at the school at which he teaches without the outside world catching a whiff of the crime for twenty-five years, then you may be able to enjoy Urban Legend.

I’m not willing to accept that any more than I’m willing to accept the notion that a fat man flies around earth once a year handing out toys or that a fleet of McDonnell-Douglas DC-9 aircraft flew across the galaxy to deposit evil aliens into Earth’s volcanoes. But if you can, then knock yourself out.

One last thing--this movie makes mention of many famous urban legends, including the babysitter receiving phone calls from the killer one floor up, and Mikey’s Pop Rocks-and-Pepsi induced death, but no one ever mentions the poor family who came home to find their home burgled of everything but their toothbrushes and camera. What’s up with that?

THE VIDEO

The quality of the 2.40:1/1080p transfer included here is highly variable. Interiors and brightly-lit exteriors often look excellent, but nighttime exteriors are soft and murky, so much so that on a few occasions (the opening sequence in particular) I had trouble discerning what was happening. Detail, as you can probably surmise, is uneven; colors are generally strong (the amber and green hues of the Canadian locations often look beautiful), but the blacks could have been deeper.

THE AUDIO

The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio (available in English, Portuguese, and French) provides the usual slasher movie experience, with swelling music and the expected horror stings screaming from every point in the soundstage. Dialogue sounds good throughout, and there’s a nice sense of immersion in several scenes (if you’re guessing a thunderstorm will pop up at some point, pat yourself on the back); the low end also rumbles nicely.

Thai and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks are also included. Arabic, Dutch, French, English, English SDH, Indonesian, Korean, Thai, Spanish, Chinese, and Portuguese subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The commentary by director Jamie Blanks is typical of the chat tracks for this type of movie. Blanks (who apparently fell off the planet after the movie was released) talks about how great the script was, how great the cast was, and how much fun everyone had working together, all the while never realizing just how utterly ridiculous the movie is.

The making-of featurette (10 minutes) is simply an EPK-promo piece created for the movie’s theatrical run.

FINAL THOUGHTS