What Looks Good On Paper.... (Urban Legend (DVD))

Member Name: wampyrii

Product:	Urban Legend (DVD)
Date:	16/12/01 (43 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: see review

Disadvantages: see review

At least there is one good thing to be said about the breed of slasher movies which have sprung up since Wes Craven’s Scream parody revived the genre - at least they make SOME attempt to make the plots a little more interesting than they used to be. The 80s were more than happy to take a rigid, omnipotent serial killer in a mask and have him slash his way through a bunch of promiscuous teenagers in increasingly more violent, gory and inventive ways...at least until the various censorship boards became tired of the so called video nasty and slapped them down rather harshly. That pretty much sounded the death knell for slasher movies, there were a few more abysmal offerings such as Jason Takes Manhattan(Friday 13th Part ermm...5000?) which, now deprived of showing ever more violent scenes, really had nothing else to offer. The 90s slasher movie tries to be a little more clever than this and weaves in the killings around an actual(Heaven forbid!) plot, and gone is the promiscuity thing too...well, sort of.

Urban Legends focuses upon ermm urban legends with the killer here working through a teenage group again but this time with each killing being a re-enactment of a well known urban legend. We have all heard of things like the ‘stolen kidney myth’ and umm, well others which I can’t think of right now because I tend to ignore them completely but you know them when you hear them which definitely adds a wider appeal to this movie. For once, a slasher movie has something of an interesting premise...interesting on paper anyway. This time our prerequisite female heroine comes in the form of Natalie(Alicia Witt), a college student who becomes convinced that all her friends are being murdered by a killer who copies the urban legends of the country when comitting his murders. She believes that she is being stalked by a killer who is preying on her friends after her best friend is killer, then her room mate...but everyone else just looks upon it
as freak coincidence. Her group of friends are the usual slasher movie charicatures - the smart guy, the joker, the babe, etc. who all line up for the killer’s blade...or whatever else he/she decides to use. Natalie knows that she must stop this herself because no one else believes her and ultimately it is to be her who will become the next statistic...

The problem with this kind of movie is that it looks great on paper but always falls down in the final analysis. First time director jamie Banks should perhaps be commended for managing to keep the suspense and tension flowing for as long as he does..shortly before he is hung, drawn and quartered for the abysmal red-herring strewn final quarter. Banks uses just about every known horror cliche in the book ad borrows liberally from other movies in the genre but manages to hold it together well for at least three quarters of the film, offering up a few scares and a number of tense and creepy moments for you viewing ‘pleasure’. You have the car not starting, the dead phone lines, the uneccessary shock music tactics, the killer is the person you would least expect and of course the obligatory nod at other classics of the genre including a scene ‘borrowed’ straight out of Halloween and the inclusion of Robert Englund(Freddy Kreuger himself) as a professor of urban legends and the prime suspect. Still, unoriginal and derivitive it may be, but for the most part it works...

...until inexplicably it turns into a disaster zone in the final quarter. I have no clue what Jamie Banks was trying to do here unless it really was to cause his movie to self-destruct - if so, he did a damn fine job. The final half hour is a jumbled mess of preposterous plot twists, hideous over-acting from the lightweight cast and ridiculous attempts to fool the viewer as to the identity of the killer. Halfway through this final mess and I really couldn’t give a damn who the killer was I just wanted i
t all to end, which is a real shame when the rest of the movie was pretty good. Anyone who has seen the ending to Scary Movie which lampoons the kind of red herring endings this type of movie tries to throw at us should look at Urban Legends for an even better parody. Scarily, it is highly unlikely that Banks actually wanted his ending to come across as a parody - the rest of the movie was all very serious so why start lampooning yourself towards the end? Its a deeply disappointing pay-off and one which crushes any hope of a decent rating for this movie.

As to the quality of acting...I think you probably know what to expect in a slasher movie by now. Rubbish wouldn't be too harsh a criticsm of any of them and this is no exception. Banks assembles a cast of pretty faces who learnt their trade on American television shows such as Beverly Hills 90210 and each performance echoes this unfortunately. Admittedly they aren't given that much to work with,especially in the hammy final half hour, but please...we've all had enough of directors casting pretty faces who can scream in these movies...to say its getting a little dull would be the understatement of the year. Not that you could expect a decent bunch of actors to even drea of taking such charicatured parts but even so...it would be nice to see it happen maybe once in my lifetime.

Urban Legend could have been better, in fact it should have been better and for an hour it looked as though it might be. There was never any hint of it offering anything new to the genre but it did look as though it was about to give us an enjoyable hack and slash romp nonetheless until it all goes wrong. Its impossible to recommend it under such circumstances, far better to watch Scream if you want to see a parody of the genre rather than a movie which does it completely by accident and falls flat on its face in the process.

Summary: