‘Don’t you want to be an urban legend, Nat? All your friends are now...’
I always fancied Urban Legend to be one of the more sophisticated teen slashers that followed in the wake of Scream at the tail-end of the ’90s. Watching it again for the first time since I was a teenager was a chastening experience. While it was lovely to revisit a film that I must have seen 20 times, it does not hold up so well today…
An unknown killer starts murdering students at a midwestern university campus in the style of well-known urban legends. A cast including Jared Leto, Joshua Jackson, Rebecca Gayheart, Alicia Witt, Michael Rosenbaum and Tara Reid try to figure out what’s going on. Throw in a pair of cameos from horror royalty Brad Dourif and Robert England and you’re really looking at something special.
I do genuinely love this film so let me begin with the positives. The concept is genuinely ingenious and deserves to be explained again in a reboot. The young cast is mostly solid and Silvio Horta’s script, while undoubtedly indebted to Scream, does have some nice moments. Director Jamie Blanks fails to imprint much of his own style, instead resorting to the ’90s house style of brightly lit interiors and constant thunderstorms when outside, but this is not the film to be showing off. The death scenes, however, are competently handled and memorable. Now, let’s get to the bad stuff…
Well, first off, Alicia Witt is woefully miscast. She simply doesn’t have the chops to be a ***spoiler*** final girl. Everyone else nails the brief (basically act like the characters from Scream), but Witt never really fits. This harms the movie. What harms the movie more though are the many incredibly unlikely coincidences and plot holes. Sure, you don’t go into a teen slasher expecting everything to be tied up with a bow on top, but some of the stuff here is genuinely preposterous.
***more spoilers ahead***
The idea that Gayheart’s character Brenda Bates (nice nod to Psycho) could carry three corpses of men twice her size to the top floor of an abandoned building without anybody noticing is just lazy. As is the sheer number of red herrings knocking about. It’s like a communist chip shop out there.
These small grumbles aside, however, there is no denying that Urban Legend is a lot of fun, despite being slightly overlong, and as a nostalgia exercise I really enjoyed it. Is it actually good though? Probably not, dear reader, probably not.