Urban Legend

Urban Legend

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DVD Reviews of Urban Legend

DVD Review: Not what it aspires to be.
Summary: 2 Stars

To be quite honest, I wanted to like "Urban Legend." I wanted to be surprised by it, like I was genuinely surprised the first time I saw "Scream" (the first, not the next 8,000). It looked like it had a very original storyline with likeable characters and a little bit of blood and gore mixed in for good measure. Instead, I found myself sneering at every little trick and cliche that came up, and trust me on this: this movie is FULL of cliches. Practically everything you've ever seen done in any other horror movie is done in this one; they just use the difference in plot as an excuse to make it seem fresh and kosher. And all those tired old horror habits tend to rag a movie down nowadays.

The so-called suspense all begins when a girl, typical college groupie, is driving in her sport utility vehicle on a dark and stormy road on a, no surprise here, rainy night. She stops at a gas station when she runs out of gas, and soon she thinks she is going to be killed by the gas station attendant, who has the patented deranged psycho man look to him. When he tries to warn her that someone is in the back of her car, she runs away. Now tell me something (and I'm sure I'll be getting a lot of email on this one): if someone from a gas station were to take you inside the garage and lock you in it, and the phone were dead, would you not think he was going to kill you there? But, so the plot goes, and soon, our little girl is dead in her car, the victim of a killer in her backseat.

Jump ahead a couple of hours to Pendelton University, where kids lead happy, carefree lives, the janitors all look creepy and suspicious, right away, we're introduced to all the little college groupies that will fall victim to the bloodshed. There's Natalie, who is innocent and sweet, and seems to be more affected by the murder of the girl than anyone else. And Brenda, who wants nothing more than to be there for her friend, unless she's chasing after the journalist, Paul, who is harshly punished by the dean for running a story on the murder. Of course, the dean is only following the typical 90's horror cliche of not giving a damn about his students in order to keep the story moving; nothing wrong in doing that.

And so, all the bodies start piling up, with your average of three or four people actually managing to steer clear of the killer's grasp. They begin finding clues, like anyone in any other movie does, and once they put the pieces together, there's a whole different puzzle they have to solve over again. Not at all confusing, though; this is a teen/college kid splatter flick, so it needs to be on a strictly juvenile level.

There is an unbelievable amount of cliche throughout the movie. So many times throughout I kept thinking over and over in my head the different scenes and storylines from the Scream movies, but at least in those movies the people in charge actually did something about the possibility of danger instead of waiting for more bodies to drop. I know they had to borrow some lines of dialogue; it all just seemed way to copycat to me, which is not a good thing. This movie really did have some potential at being fresh and new, but for me, it just didn't live up to that potential.

Yet, despite all of this rif-raf in the beginning and middle, the ending seemed to be the only redeeming feature. I don't want to give away any of the twists and turns it takes (even if there are only one or two), but there does seem to be a bit of originality in it. To keep it mild, listen in for the killer's motive, and more importantly, who the killer turns out to be and what becomes of them at the very tail end of the film.

And this is going to sound even crazier, but I'll probably end up seeing the sequel, "Urban Legends," just to see if they can think of anything different for that one. If you see the first one, you'll understand why I say that, because the ending leaves for so many goodies; I just hope that they will be realized. This movie is not that bad, but it's not that good, either. Reserved for those who have never seen a horror movie in their life, and want to make that first big jump into the world of Rated-R.

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