September 25, 1998
By Ted Anthony
AP NATIONAL WRITER
Memo to the makers of the new blood-and-guts flick ``Urban Legend'': I know what you did last summer. And you really should have kept it to yourself.
Perhaps the most unpleasant and gratuitously violent movie to come down the pike in years, the campus-slasher movie ``Urban Legend'' is aggressively, oozingly bad. Here are just a few reasons why:
-A small dog gets nuked in a frat-house microwave.
-Nubile college girls with Wonderbra figures try not to spill out of the latest collegiate fashions while being gutted (and manage to keep their eyeliner and perm ringlets just so during the whole thing). Post-sensitive hunks and fraternity troglodytes look on with concern.
-After three murders, the heroine utters: ``I just gotta be alone right now.''
-Everyone on campus seems to own an oversize dark parka just like the one the killer wears. (Directors should be fined for such unfettered fake foreshadowing.)
-One young woman does exercise laps in an abandoned campus pool (yeah, right) - IN A BIKINI.
You get the idea.
The plot, if you can call it that: Impossibly attractive young adults (neo-Brat Packers Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Jared Leto, Michael Rosenbaum, Joshua Jackson, Tara Reid) at New England's isolated Pendleton College discover their ranks shrinking rapidly at the hands of a murderer who uses old urban legends as a template for chaos.
And - quelle shock! - the 25th anniversary of another legendary dormitory massacre in Stanley Hall is almost upon us. What's more, the 1973 murders were ``covered up'' - by the simple process of hiding the 1973 bound volume of the student newspaper. Clearly a conspiracy at the highest levels.
Could the professor who teaches the folklore class be behind this fresh mayhem? After all, he's played by Robert ``Freddy Krueger'' En-glund. Is the culprit one of our Ivory Soap protagonists? Or perhaps the cadaverous janitor (Julian Richings) who looks like an extra from ``The Crucible''? Maybe the crusty dean (John Neville, late of ``The X-Files'')? Or ALL OF THEM?
It's hard to understand how the public airing of the Starr report and its explicit nonviolent sexual content alarms mainstream Americans while this sort of unrepentant violence is mass-marketed with glossy glee. Talk about Hollywood playing into the hands of the conservative right.
Splatter movies can be, and often are, delightful. But the best of 'em - ``The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,'' the first ``Halloween,'' even the first ``Nightmare on Elm Street'' - have something going on behind the gore.
Wes Craven's ``Scream'' and ``Scream 2,'' for example, were smart; the violence had a purpose. Blood was used as a backdrop to examine some fascinating corners of American culture's prurient side. They were self-referential, and adeptly so.
``Urban Legend'' tries to do the same but ends up a 10th-generation photocopy of ``Scream'' dumbed down for the ``Dawson's Creek'' set. The pop-culture markers sprinkled throughout are cheap highs designed to co-opt audiences into the mediocrity. Most laughably, ``Urban Legend'' tries to piggyback onto an issue - campus safety, of all things.
The one urban legend in the film that has legs - the old rumor that Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials supposedly died from a lethal combination of cola and Pop Rocks candy - isn't even exploited to its tragicomic potential.
More entertaining is Loretta Devine as Reese, the Pam Grier-worshipping campus rent-a-cop with an attitude. And Witt's irritable nose-ringed goth roommate shows promise but dies too early.
As the film closes, a survivor ruminates: ``This'll become a legend, too, you know.'' Nope. Ain't gonna happen. Because this isn't entertainment. It's the cinematic equivalent of Pepsi with your Pop Rocks - three meals a day. Tums, please.
``Urban Legend'' is directed by Jamie Blanks from a Silvio Horta screenplay. It is rated R.
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