Urban Legend

Plot synopsis:
On a dark and rainy night, a young woman, named Michelle Mancini (Natasha Gregson Wagner), is driving her pickup truck, listening to a college campus radio DJ. After nearly colliding with another car, she realizes that she is almost out of gas and pulls into the nearest gas station, a creepy looking, run-down place in the middle of nowhere. The strange-looking attendant offers to fill up her car, and Michelle offers to pay by credit card. After a minute, the attendant convinces Michelle that her credit card is not working and wants her to come into his office to speak to the credit card company on the phone. However, when Michelle gets inside the station and picks up the phone, there is no one on the other line. The attendant approaches her and excitedly stutters, but he cannot say anything clearly. The fearful woman sprays mace in his face and manages to run back to her truck and speeds away while the attendant remains behind and yells after her that he's only trying to help her and screaming, "SOMEONE'S IN THE BACK SEAT!" On the road, Michelle relaxes a little bit until someone sits up in the back seat and swings an axe at her.That same night, inside a coffee shop lounge at Pendleton University, college student Parker Riley (Michael Rosenbaum) is telling an urban legend called the 'Stanley Hall Massacre' about 25 years ago when a crazy professor killed a dozen students at a closed down dorm on campus. Two of the students, Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt) and Brenda Bates (Rebecca Gayheart), listen with skepticism while they listen to Parker's girlfriend, Sasha Thomas (Tara Reid), who operates a local radio call-in show, finish her broadcast. Paul Gardener (Jared Leto), a pompous college reporter, joins the group and sneers at Parker's yarn. Brenda is obviously attracted to Paul. Natalie and Brenda walk towards the closed down Stanley Hall dorm building, where they suggest they chant Bloody Mary as a gag, when they are surprised by Damon Brooks (Joshua Jackson), a misfit student who taunts them over going inside the boarded up building. Natalie and Brenda split up where Natalie goes home to her dorm room where she interrupts her Goth girl roommate, Tosh Guaneri (Danielle Harris), having sex with a Goth guy.The next day in class, Professor William Wexler (Robert Englund) is discussing folklore and urban legends. Damon, the class goof-off, walks up to the front of the class and tries drinking soda and pop rocks candy to prove the urban legend that his stomach will not explode. He then feigns going into a seizure and playing dead much to the annoyance of Wexler and the amusement of his friends. Later that day, Natalie and Brenda see Paul distributing out newspapers detailing about the decapitation murder the previous night in which the stuffy Dean Adams (John Neviulle) and the campus security guard, Reese Wilson (Loretta Devine), seizes copies of the school paper about the recent murder. Paul protests to the dean about a possible murder on the campus. But Adams tells Paul that there is no killer and the only crazy person is him.Later that day, Natalie, Brenda, Paul, Parker, Sasha, and Damon meet where they discuss the murder. Natalie claims not to know the murder victim, but she has in her procession a high school yearbook which shows that Natalie and Michelle were captains of their cheerleading squad. That evening, Damon arrives at Natalie's dorm room to console her and takes her someplace in his car to talk. After driving to a secluded part in the nearby woods, Natalie is angry to discover that Damon only wants to talk to her to persuade her for some need of loving. After Natalie becomes angry and demands that Damon take her home, he exits the car to the call of nature when someone attacks him with a rope. When Natalie goes to check on him, the killer, wearing a heavy hooded winter overcoat, attacks her. As she tries to drive away, Damon, tied to a rope attached to the bumper of the car is hoisted up and choked to death. His body lands on top of the car, forcing Natalie to get out and run. Natalie goes to the campus security office and tells Reese about the killing, but when the both arrive at the scene, the body and Damon's car are gone.The next day, after failing to locate Damon, Natalie's friends are skeptic to her claims of a murder and think that Damons disappearance is one of his practical jokes. Natalie goes to the library to research urban legends by reading a book titled 'The Encyclopedia of Urban Legends'. While Natalie is in the library, Tosh meets a fellow Goth guy online and they plan to meet. When she returns from the bathroom to get ready for her date, the killer is waiting for her in the room and attacks. Natalie walks into the room and assumes the noises are of Tosh having sex again. The killer pulls out the electrical plugs for the lights in the room, and Natalie goes to bed, not realizing that Tosh is being strangled to death. The next morning, Natalie wakes up and sees her roommate dead from slashed wrists and a message left by the killer written on a wall in blood saying: "Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the lights?"Everyone thinks that Tosh committed suicide and the message on the wall was "a very morbid suicide note". Natalie convinces Paul that Tosh's death was not a suicide and they look for evidence about the Stanley Hall Massacre, but they find no evidence and all the old newspaper clippings in the library from 1972 where the killings took place are gone. Natalie and Paul run into the creepy-looking janitor where they ask him questions about the Stanley Hall Massacre and the janitor tells them to talk to Wexler. Natalie and Paul sneak into Wexler's office for evidence and are caught by the professor. Brought before Dean Adams, Paul asks about the Stanley Hall Massacre, but the dean avoids the question by telling Paul that he's fired from the school newspaper and tells both of them to stop investigating something that never happened. Adams further tells Natalie that she has a criminal records for "reckless endangerment" and served a year of probation and that she too is to stop investigating the urban legend about the Stanley Hall Massacre if she wants to stay at the college. Outside, Paul becomes angry when Natalie continues to avoid his questions about her past or if she knew Michelle.Later, Natalie walks into the campus swimming pool where Brenda is doing laps when she thinks she sees the killer approach. But the figure in the winter coat is only a fellow colleague. In the locker room, Natalie confides in Brenda that she did know Michelle. She tells the story of how she and Michelle were out driving one night on a dark road without their cars headlights on when a passing car flashed them and, with Michelle driving, the chased down the car in which the car went off the road and the driver was killed.That evening, Dead Adams is in the parking garage to drive home when the killer ambushes him and kills him by slashing his ankles and driving over him with his own car. At a fraternity party where Parker is throwing, Paul arrives with an old newspaper article given to him by the janitor which tells that Wexler was the sole survivor of the 1972 Stanley Hall Massacre and that he may be responsible for the killings. When Natalie admits to having feelings for Paul, they kiss. Brenda sees this and in a jealous rage, leaves the party.A little later, during the party, Parker gets a phone call and is told about what happened to his pet dog (it was cooked in a kitchen microwave over as another urban legends). He runs into a nearby bathroom to throw up when the killer attacks him and kills him by pouring pop rocks and liquid draino drown his throat.While Natalie is trying to reach Paul who ran off, Sasha is attacked at the radio station by the killer who chases her through the building with an axe. Natalie hears Sasha screaming over the radio and runs over to the station but is too late as the killer catches up to Sasha and axes her to death. Meanwhile, Reese searches Wexler's office but finds the floor covered with blood. She calls the police, but because of a serious thunderstorm, the roads are washed out. Reese goes off to find the killer on her own.Natalie runs into Paul outside her doom room and becomes suspicious to where he went during the time Sasha was killed. They both find Brenda, in which they become suspicious about her. They drive away from the campus to look for help when they stop at another gas station. While Paul goes to a phone to call the police, Brenda and Natalie notice a strange odor and upon opening the car truck, discover the dead and mangled body of Professor Wexler. They both run away and into the nearby woods where they both split up. On a back road, Natalie is picked up by the eerie janitor (Julian Richings). But the killer chases them in another car and the janitors truck runs off the road in which the janitor hits his head and is killed.Natalie returns to the campus and tries calling for help on a police phone, but she hears screams from inside the abandoned Stanley Hall building where there is a light on the third floor. Natalie breaks in to look around and finds the dead bodies of Parker, Adams, and Damon. She finds Brenda lying motionless on a bed in a room lit with hundreds of different candles. But before she can react, Natalie is knocked out. Waking up later, Natalie finds herself tied to the bed with the killer standing over here in which the hood comes off to reveal..... Brenda. No longer acting like the casualty nice and friendly girl as seen thorough the movie, the sneering and wild-eyed Brenda explains to Natalie that the boy who was killed in the accident by Michelle and Natalie years before was Brenda's boyfriend. Brenda befriended Natalie this whole time to torment her with this urban legends as her insane way of getting even with her. Just as Brenda is about to kill Natalie by removing her kidneys as the "kidney heist" urban legends, Reese appears to come to Natalie's rescue, but Brenda attacks Reese with a knife and wrestles her gun away. Just then, Paul appears applauding Brenda for her revenge plan and offers wanting a part of it for the credit for his career. But Brenda is not fooled and before she can shoot either one of them, Reese revives and shoots Brenda.However, as Paul and Natalie are driving away to find help and safety, Brenda sits up in the back seat of their car and attacks them in the same manner she killed Michelle in the opening scene. Paul smashes the car into a guardrail and Brenda smashes through the windshield and off a bridge into a river far below.Some time later at another college campus, a group of college students are discussing the recent Pendleton Massacre and about the urban legends, when one student, whom is the alive and well Brenda with a different haircult, offers to tell them the real story about all it.

Tags: revenge, gothic, murder, violence, flashback

Review:
And yet, most of them made a profit, perhaps BECAUSE they were flashier and sexier than those earlier pictures, and because they were designed for a wider demographic than 'mere' horror fans.Jamie Blanks' URBAN LEGEND is a case in point: Most reviews ran the gamut from harsh dismissal to faint praise, yet the movie is a visual treat, as creepy and atmospheric as any of the films which inspired it.
Blanks orchestrates proceedings with consummate skill, but he refuses to indulge the kind of transgressive gore that once distinguished this downmarket subgenre (where's Tom Savini when you really need him?!).As expected, the talented young cast - including Jared Leto, Rebecca Gayheart and Tara Reid - is pleasingly photogenic, and there are lengthy appearances by TV favorites Michael Rosenbaum ("Smallville") and Joshua Jackson (watch out for the terrific "Dawson's Creek" gag!).
I don't think this one quite ranks up to the SCREAM movies, but I think it was better than the I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER movies.College student Natalie Simon, (Alicia Witt) mourning over the recent murder of an old friend, finds herself in great danger after a large number of students are being murdered.
Yet another film to capitalise on the hunger for cynical, humorous slasher movies with whodunnit asides in the late '90s (started by Wes Craven's Scream), Urban Legend is a fairly entertaining but wholly derivative example of the genre.
Urban Legend is a great movie with a good twist at the end.
Thus, if you are a horror fan who wants an entertaining thriller Urban Legend is a good shot.
But we didn't stop at that, we were now presented with Urban Legend.The film begins on a dark and stormy night as college student Michelle Mancini realizes she is near empty while driving in her car.
It's over written at times and has every predictable moment: the friends don't believe in a ghost story, a couple people get killed off but everyone thinks it's a prank/fake death, a classic chase scene with a big breasted girl in a skimpy costume, the creepy janitor, the smart girl that no one believes is all of a sudden right about all the murders and of course a mega twist ending that no one will ever see coming!
OK, Urban Legend isn't a horrible movie, while it has all these predictable moments and clichés, it's still actually fun to watch and a good part of the memory of good teen slasher films that came out of the 1990's.6/10.
Unfortunately, Urban Legend suffers from a rather disjointed plot, and the fact that as a pseudo-mystery, they've eliminated most of the suspects by the end of the movie, so you pretty much know who is responsible.
The days of low-budget slasher films appear to be back with Urban Legend, a mildly entertaining but mostly lame variation on Scream with an attractive cast of young TV stars.The plot centers on a series of campus murders in the mold of urban legends, most of which will be familiar even to the younger audience this is pandering to.
Experienced viewers will spot the killer's identity (and motive) early on, and those that don't will be fooled only because the conclusion is so completely ludicrous, not to mention mostly impossible.Of course, most of this would be easily overlooked if Urban Legend was scary, but time and again, director Jamie Banks telegraphs the surprises far ahead, and doesn't know how to time the shocks.
Following a series of strange murders, a group of students at a college campus set out to investigate the crimes and their seeming connection to the killer when they find out the killer is basing their crimes on urban legends and set out to stop the rampage.This is far better than its reputation would have it.
Among the better features here is the fact that back when this movie came out the gimmick of using the deaths based on urban legends allowed for some pretty inventive and original kills.
The opening backseat driver decapitation is a great one to open a film on, the dead boyfriend suspended over a fleeing car in the woods offers some rather nice suspense with the killer appearing and continually trying to break into the car and the sex/strangulation misidentification is really cool mainly because the circumstances needed to make it true, from the back-story needed to make sure she shouldn't see anything, the killer gaining access to the room without violent means, and the actual sounds of the incident, are all mixed together and makes a marvelous scene.
But her former friend's murder is based on a urban legend, which this killer is re-creating from these eerie tales.Directed by Jamie Blanks (Valentine) made an entertaining horror film with some clever touches of suspense and black comedy.
But "Urban Legend" is one of those movies, you could tell that the cast & crew has a great time making this.
Needless to say, the premise is a tremendous waste of a great idea.It appears that the movie tried to parody itself near the end, when one of the characters asks "Where's the twist?", but Craven's successful "Scream" did it far better with much more wit.Save your time and money by avoiding this ho-hum, saw it all before, half-baked flick..
If you like really predictable "horror" films then give this a whirl, you can see every drawn out waste of celluloid coming a mile off, and even though the deaths are all authentic "Urban Legends" that have been passed down over the years, I'm sure we wont be hearing any more about this one.Seriously, its worse than Ultraviolet..
Urban Legend does just that, taking a brilliant premise, casting a group of untalented 20-somethings, giving them hip one-liners and bland dialogue, thereby creating a carbon copy of last year's I Know What You Did Last Summer and 1996's Scream.
"Urban Legend" is just like all the other horror movies ever made.
In the end all horror movies are just comedies with very few jokes."Urban Legend" was just as good or bad as all the other recent horror movies.
Urban Legend was an extremely piss-poor effort for a slasher movie trying lamely to emulate the success of scream.
Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, and Jared Leto duke it out for worst performance as three college kids who become scared over a killer repeating infamous urban legends (um, didn't we see that in Scream?).
Another movie tries to cash in on the recent success of teen horror/comedies like "Scream" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer".
The characters go through the whole movie telling each other these ghost stories, these "urban legends", while somebody acts them out by killing their peers in the fashion mentioned in the stories.
That is about as interesting as the film ever gets.The script is filled with corny, over-the-top dialogue and teen sex jokes ("Word of advice, back away from the volcano before it erupts") sure to make all the 13 year old boys giggle.The movie then drags on, people die, and those alive accuse all the wrong people until they either get picked off themselves or they discover the real one.
In are schlock films such as Urban Legends, wherein teenagers walk around darkly lit rooms and bump into each other, screaming and spouting ridiculous dialogue until they're bumped off by the mad slasher.
One of the many slick teen slashers featuring an impossibly photogenic cast to follow in the wake of Scream, Urban Legend sees a crazed killer at a college staging an elaborate series of murders based on popular contemporary folklore.This ridiculously impractical modus operandi relies heavily on sheer coincidence for success, and inevitably, the resultant film is highly preposterous.
Urban Legend's makers are, without a doubt, only too well aware of this fact, but soldier on regardless, relying on the probability that their target audience (indiscriminate teens) will be having too much fun to care (or even notice).And for the most part, the gamble seems to pay off—the eye candy cast (Jared Leto, Joshua Jackson and Michael Rosembaum for the girls; Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Danielle Harris and Tara Reid for the guys), enjoyable mechanical scares, frivolous in-jokes, and well handled action help detract from the general silliness, and director Jamie Blanks keeps things whipping along at a brisk enough pace to ensure that there's little opportunity to dissect the material and pose awkward questions (at least until the film has finished).It had been up to me, however, I'd have ramped up the violence (the film is surprisingly unbloody) and thrown in some gratuitous nudity in order to play it safe, for things do get EXTREMELY daft towards the end, and the slasher fans I know are always more forgiving if there's loads of blood 'n' guts and a few boobies on display (surely Reid could have been talked into getting them out for the lads)..
but it'll work just fine for a couple cheap horror thrills on a tuesday night.aside from occasional bad acting and some poorly timed one liners, this movie makes a decent attempt at riding off the "teen-horror" wave created by the scream franchise.
Urban Legend is pretty much like Scream, but a lot less meta and a bit more atmosphere, unfolding as you'd expect it to, with a group of college kids getting killed in bizarre circumstances that all relate to half whispered local myths.
****SPOILERS*** Blood soaked slasher flick with the unseen killer offing almost the entire student body of a New England collage that by the time the movie's finally over there isn't enough people left to form a burial detail.
Having not always been a Horror freak, I've missed out on Urban Legend till today, 14 years after it's been done, and boy did I ever miss out!What at first appears to be a classic Slasher/Teen sub-genre, quickly evolves and develops into a cleverly written and surprising whodunit thriller.
A killer who eliminates victims one by one in accordance with the scenery and background story of the famous urban legends we all know and love (and some that I personally have only learnt of through this film).
All not unlike the two famous Horror brands of the time, Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.All in all, Urban Legends is a great film using a great idea.
Rebecca Gayheart, her gullible best friend, and Jared Leto, the ambitious campus journalist who tracks down the secret that hangs over the school, lead a cast of pretty young women, good looking guys, and campus characters, notably the suspicious professor Robert Englund, a genre legend in his own right as the star of seven Nightmare on Elm Street films.
Take the plot, for instance, the movie wants to pass itself as being about a killer on campus that crafts murders according to the most known urban legends.
This is what horror and urban legends are about, and this film dares to take those stories and form them as a device for a slasher stalking people along a college campus using those devices but ultimately what large potential there is for a concept with many possibilities, it is ultimately thrown down the drain with your usual slasher movie fodder and terrible story with the cheesy surprise ending and large lapses in logic.
For all the the Screams, I know what you did last summers, and countless other horror films to come our way of late, this one was a little bit better.A mysterious killer duplicates mythical urban legends for the theme of their killings.
I think Urban Legend was the first "hip slasher" that started to feel like enough is enough.Looking back now, the movie doesn't seem all that bad.
But even at its worse, Urban Legend is a lot better than the pre-Scream slasher movies.
With all of the advancements in the horror genre during the nineties, mainly the SCREAM movies, Urban Legend joins the train.
Where this film derives its fun from is how the murders are committed; using old age urban legends, you know the kind you grew up telling around campfires.
With plenty of tense and fun moments, not to mention a relatively high body count, Urban Legend is a fun and witty twist to the horror genre.The movie goes wrong when it finds itself in the typical horror situations (girls going off by themselves, people being a little to curious about certain things, etc.)Although it does follow typical horror, this movie is fun and thus rates a 6/10.
Since that day I made it my mission in life to find a copy of my very own, I searched for months upon months to find one, but didn't, until one day I found a copy when on holiday in Whitby on one on those double film videos they're always putting leathal weapon films on (the other movie on the cassette was Urban legends: The final cut, which I hate.)Anyway, needless to say I love the film, its so much better than Scream (at least the murder scenes are well thought out) and the acting is great, especially by Rebecca Gayheart and Michael Rosenbaum.
Since that day I made it my mission in life to find a copy of my very own, I searched for months upon months to find one, but didn't, until one day I found a copy when on holiday in Whitby on one on those double film videos they're always putting leathal weapon films on (the other movie on the cassette was Urban legends: The final cut, which I hate.)Anyway, needless to say I love the film, its so much better than Scream (at least the murder scenes are well thought out) and the acting is great, especially by Rebecca Gayheart and Michael Rosonbaum.
Urban Legends is just another teen slasher horror movie, that we all feel we've seen before, most noticeably in the Scream trilogy.
But this time Urban Legends is one step ahead of the other horror movies, whereas the plot is no way original.
On a US High School, a killer starts slashing teenage students, based on the good old Urban Legends.
Oddly enough, after all these `qualities' that could also be called plagiarism, Urban Legends ends up being a surprisingly good horror movie, with a great Tv Show cast, and a plot full of hilarious lines.
That's probably where Urban Legends gets stronger: the killer is the very last character you may expect (although clues where falling down like rain), the twist in the very end is not only surprising and interesting, not mention humanly impossible or improbable.
This also, once again, shows how well the writer chose the legends.The acting is consistent and believable, particularly enjoyable performances come from Alicia Witt (a surprisingly unusual choice for a lead in a horror movie, but still an excellent choice), Joshua Jackson and Rebecca Gayheart - all respected actors and actresses in the teen commercial circle.
The director knows that in 'chase' scenes the viewer needs to know the full layout of a building to feel fear for a character's whereabouts (i.e if you know the door is only just around the corner the tension mounts when you know how close to surviving a characters is) - and so a lot of good, open shots are given on the screen.Over all, Urban Legend is a clever, frightening horror movie that boasts not only a good plot and original idea, but a brilliant score from Christopher Young..
Urban Legend is a clever, witty film which takes some of today's most famous myths (killer in the backseat, alligators in the sewers, the date rape drug, and more) and uses them to fashion a good scary story.
The whole plot is based as much on "Scream" as the killings on urban legends.
It looks like the director thinks that showing a bit of blood and gore, and 'spooky' music makes a film scary, and it just doesn't do it.The "Scream" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" films were far better at getting the audience involved with the characters - I really didn't care aboutanyone in this film.
The setting and story were perfect for a horror movie, its death scenes were very original, and its ending where they unveil the killer is so shocking.
When I heard about the movie URBAN LEGEND I was scared that the stories, were not going to live up to their true nature, on film.
Most people who have reviewed this movie commented on how it was a good idea, wasted on a bad film.
Urban Legend is a very, very bad movie..
Urban Legend was a very well done film...After Scream came out it would be very hard to keep a suspense feeling up, trying to make it as different of a movie yet keeping it on a guessing scale.
All in all Urban Legend is an excellent date movie, or a chance just to hang out with friends, but if you are looking for a fresh new addition to the slasher genre, I suggest that you look somewhere else.As for the people who are comparing this film to the Scream series, I must say that I see where you are coming from, but remember that Scream isn't as original as it seems either.
I feel that he is a very sincere actor, and that quality is hard to find now a days!Anyway back to the movie...I enjoyed it on a entertaining level, but I tend to be very critical of films...Regardless of what people say, I do not feel like this was a Scream rip-off.
Urban Legend was a great film.
This spin-off of Scream is the most original slasher film since that, telling the tale of a serial killer making urban legends become real on a college campus.
So don't listen to anyone to anyone who bad mouths this movie because it is a very good movie (I take horror movies very seriously) I've seen Urban Legend four times!.