Featured Movies
Partners
Urban LegendAfter Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's Scream gave the slasher film a new lease of life, myriad imitators sprung up to capitalise on the film's success. Some even went on to become profitable franchises in their own right - the absurd Scary Movie spoofs, for example, or the B-movie-esque I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend films.
Like killers themselves, slasher films need an MO, or a signature. Michael Myers has his weird face, Jason has his hockey mask, the Scream killers don their Munch masks, and the killer of Urban Legend wears a snorkel parker (which isn't exactly scary in itself) and offs victims along the lines of, you guessed it, urban legends. One example is the babysitter who is tormented by an unknown caller who turns out to be a nutter already in the house. (This was the story that provided the premise for the 1979 film When A Stranger Calls and its 2006 remake).
After a girl (Gregson Wagner, doing the prologue cameo equivalent of Drew Barrymore in Scream) is killed by someone hiding in the backseat of her truck, some of her fellow students at Pendleton University get a bit nervous. "I knew I should have gone to NYU," says Brenda (Gayheart). Her best friend, Natalie (Witt) is more seriously troubled because, unknown to her friends, she knew the victim at high school. Paul (Leto), an aspiring reporter, sees the death as a valuable story; stooges Parker (Rosenbaum) and Damon (Jackson) just think it's all a load of hogwash, like the university's very own myth about a dorm massacre 25 years before, while wry college DJ Sasha (Reid) is sceptical.
When their lecturer Professor Wexler (Englund) tells them urban myths are just "contemporary folklore" containing a "cultural admonition", the kids, apart from Natalie, are pretty much placated. Then Natalie witnesses Damon's murder by hanging. Her friends insist he's just played a practical joke and is away on holiday. "I thought that it was the only way a girl would ever say he was hung," jokes Parker. Even when Natalie's roommate (Harris) gets it, no one believes her, in this case saying it was suicide. But the body count keeps on rising, making the presence of a psycho undeniable.
Campus horror is a recurrent theme in slasher films. The university is presented as an autonomous, isolated place, a suitable hunting ground for serial killers. From Black Christmas (1974), to Graduation Day (1981), right up to Cry Wolf (2005), the campus has proved almost as fertile territory for slasher movies as America's hinterland.
Urban Legend draws on the vintage material, but gives it a knowing 1990s twist through the casting of Robert Englund as a teacher with a Freddy Kreuger puppet in his office, and the inclusion of a black campus cop (Devine) who's obsessed with Pam Grier's Coffy and Foxy Brown. It's not exactly inspired, but it's handsomely shot, Leto and Witt are appealing leads and writer Silvio Horta and director Jamie Blanks try their darndest to keep you guessing with plentiful misdirection.
Is the killer Wexler, who has a parka and an axe in his office? Is it Paul making a career for himself? Is it Damon? Or is it weird, parka-owning janitor (Richings), credited simply as 'Weird Janitor'?
|
