Urban Legend
*
Rated on a 4-star
scale
USA
Directed by Jamie Blanks
Written by Silvio Horta
CAST.....
Alicia Witt..... Natalie Simon
Jared Leto..... Paul
Rebecca Gayheart..... Brenda
Robert Englund..... Professor Wexler
Natasha Gregson Wagner..... Michelle
Michael Rosenbaum..... Parker
Loretta Devine..... Reese Wilson
Joshua Jackson..... Damon Brooks
Tara Reid..... Sasha
John Neville..... Dean Adams
The idea behind "Urban Legend" is
a good one, and has the potential to be made into a terrifying movie. Terrifying
in such a way, truth be told, that it could play with our minds and stay
with us. It involves a serial killer who starts to really enact horrific
urban legends at an American college campus -- those macabre stories that
kids tell each other, insisting that "It really happened!" and "I know someone
who knows who it happened to!"
Unfortunately, it never comes close to realising
its promise. It completely fouls things up in settling to be a boring 90s
attempt at making a conventional slasher pic. Its clichés include,
but are not exclusive to: the Idiot Plot, the House of Horrors, The Sob Story,
silly flashback confessions and trick suspects. There is also, of course,
what Gene Siskel called the Fallacy of the Talking Killer, whereby the villain
talks for so long in their final moment, that even with all remaining hostages
straight in the line of fire, the butcher is foiled.
On the subject of clichés, "Urban Legend"
has full-time employment for those false alarm moments in which a character
is startled by someone harmless approaching them, while a jarring chord lashes
out on the soundtrack. If there were one instance of this here, it would
be comical. Since there are around twenty, it's punctuation.
The film has so many disheartening blunders that
any review is in danger of becoming a list. Eventually, as with most bad
movies, the story makes the mistake of beginning to contradict itself, but
my heart began to sink much earlier on, when the dreary-looking frame revealed
such fine actors as Brad Dourif and Joshua Jackson. Dourif has done good
work in modern classics like "Mississippi Burning" and "Blue Velvet", not
to mention his Oscar-nominated turn in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".
In "Urban Legend", his embarrassing part is as a jittery pale-faced tramp
living in a dingy gas station. Jackson, who plays loveable goof Pacey Witter
on the wonderful TV show "Dawson's Creek", is quickly murdered in this, but
worse -- while alive his character is one of the idiot
students.
The reason I deem the students in this film to
be as unfortunate as any murder victim is because they are, quite frankly,
a bunch of morons. No wonder the sign outside their school looks like a
gravestone -- if mental institutions had execution chambers, they would contain
more life and intelligence than this place. Not a single conversation or
action by any of the pupils expresses the slightest bit of acumen, or even
common sense. There is not a modicum of civility, and all have a sick detachment
to the serious events going on around them. Most annoyingly, they all talk
with a lazy, whining, sarcastic drone -- "Like, you know...
duh!"
The adults are no better. The university's dean
(John Neville) speaks like a kooky old grave-robber. A female security guard
(Loretta Devine) has the sound of a woozy, drunken, five year-old boy with
Down's Syndrome who tries to underscore everything with the word
"zoom".
The biggest problem in this sea of flaws, however,
is how repulsive it becomes. The film finds increasingly elaborate and disgusting
ways of killing both humans and animals, presented with too much slick and
intense filmmaking to be intended as cheesy fun, and too little to be intended
as truly scary. The purpose of "Urban Legend", therefore, is for sadistic
voyeurism. To enjoy it would reveal appetites that beg for professional
treatment.
COPYRIGHT© 1999 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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