An urban legend is a story that has been widely passed around, accepted as fact by a certain majority of the population and which is totally and utterly false.  Chemicals in a pool will turn purple when in contact with urine.  Humans use only 10% of their brains.  Men think about sex every seven seconds.  Snuff films have been found showing people murdered for entertainment.  All totally and unequivocally false…along with everything you’ve ever been warned about in a chain letter! Usually these stories are morality plays, designed to strike at certain socially inbred fears, however at times they are nothing more than gullibility detectors.

Could anyone POSSIBLY believe that Chinese restaurants contacted American animal shelters looking for dog donations to meet the demand of hungry diners? Unfortunately…yes.  Those that did believe this, however, are the same complete and utter morons that still think someone is selling baby cats who are stuck inside glass bottles and fed through tubes.  Dear God people…for just a moment let’s all use our brains.  But having holes poked in so many of these ridiculous stories, there are still those urban legends which are based on truth…or at least hold some semblance of veracity.  There really was a guy who peed in the coffee pot at work when he became disgruntled, some thieves in Japan really did send a thank you note to the bank they robbed, and it is true that Wes Craven’s film Scream really did set in motion a truly sub-par movement in the world of horror films.

You see, prior to Scream a horror film was judged by the coolness of its killer, by the extent of its gore, or at the very least by the amount of skin shown by its young victims.  We weren’t concerned with twists and turns, elaborately staged unveilings or the polished script of a “smart” and “tense” thriller.  But Scream, as it strove to lampoon the things we had come to know and love in horror cinema, actually exaggerated the meager twist endings and the iconic visual of a costumed madman.  Suddenly the very things that we loved so much because they seemed so overused and cliché (inducing a tongue in cheek feeling into the majority of the 80’s horror fare), were suddenly being purposefully scripted, diligently crafted and totally overblown.  One of the most extreme cases of this was Urban Legend.

As a bunch of college kids are being taught about urban legends and their place in 20^th century communication (yeah right…I didn’t have THAT class in my catalog), someone begins offing students in the manner of these very legends.  Everything from flashing your lights and being killed by a gang initiate to finding a murderer in the back seat of your car suddenly becomes all too real a concern for Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt) when she begins to see the patterns in the recent series of slayings.  But when no one around her wants to believe (or admit!) what is going on, it will be up to her to figure out the killer’s next move and try to survive the bloody rampage.

That’s about it.  Nothing else needed to get the ball rolling.  A clever idea (like a guy in a fisherman suit who saw you killing someone) is really the bread and butter of this film, and truthfully not a lot more is offered to the real horror fan.  I could go on and on about the misdirection, the murders, the plot devices or anything else, but all you really need to know is that there is going to be a “big” reveal at the end which is supposed to have made the contrived scripting totally worthwhile.  But these films all forgot that simple is most often better and that we watch thrillers to be surprised…but horror films to jump out of our seats and yell at people not to go in the basement.

Freddy is so awesome because he kills kids in their dreams…because that is what he does!  Michael Myers slaughters people on Halloween because of some flimsy backstory about his slutty sister…or maybe just because he likes it.  Jason just wants to take some basic and well deserved revenge on those who killed not only him, but his mother.  These guys don’t need a 10 minute reveal at the end of the film to explain passionately why everything we have seen is suspect and everything we thought we knew turns out to be something else entirely!  No!  All these guys need is 85 minutes of your undivided attention while they promise to stick a knife in that one blonde bimbo character that none of us can stand.

On the surface, Urban Legend at least still manages to work in some great horror moments such as stalking through abandoned buildings and beheading drivers from the backseat.  But upon a closer look, even these moments all drop the ball in their delivery.  The abandoned stalking is broadcast across airwaves to allow us the reactions and one-liners of other characters (not needed) and absolutely none of the killings (even an up-close beheading) manage to deliver any decent amounts of gore or shock.  To be blunt, there is nothing here to raise this movie above its peers of that time, and even less to make it relevant today.  Urban Legend is simply one of the evolutionary stages in the horror historical legend…and not a terribly interesting one.

While not nearly as bad as any of the “I Know What You Did Last Summer But I Don’t Have The Foggiest Why You Are Watching This Movie” flicks, Urban Legend is still an exercise in that over-creative and annoyingly purposeful movie-making.  While horror is about letting your hair down and having a ball while limbs are being torn off of bothersome people, these films are just too wrapped up in being creative and throwing it in your face at the end that the killer isn’t the guy you thought, but actually the mustachioed midget transsexual who used to be the campaign manager for the Congressman of the State where the actual killer was scorned by a bully who is allergic to ice-cream.  THE VERY ICE CREAM THAT WAS USED TO KILL HIM 20 YEARS LATER!  Wow…let’s give it all a rest now and go back to a psycho who kills for no damn reason at all.

As far as the Blu-ray release goes…it doesn’t make the movie itself any more entertaining.  It does however manage to spice up the visuals a little bit.  The age of this release combined with the general darkness of its rainy-night scenes allow some of the imperfections on the original print to still pop up here and there on this high def version, but as most films on this format do by default, it still presents a more crisp and dynamic picture.  The sound is better by leaps and bounds from the old DVD copy sitting on your shelf, and will allow you to hear that lengthy admission by the killer clearly and cleanly.  A rather mediocre making-of and a decent commentary are the only extras here, cheating most of us out of the only reason to invest in this Blu-ray…for studios to take advantage of this release to spoil us with more bonus material!

If you loved this film back in the day, then by all means snatch up this high definition version and toss out that old disc.  But if you are looking to go back and catch up on some stuff you may have missed, or if you are an emerging horror fan trying to find their way through the history of our favorite genre…then there isn’t a lot worth spending your time on here.  About the only thing I got out of revisiting this film was that I still find Alicia Witt to be smokin’ hot, and I still think Rebecca Gayheart is downright annoying.

-aaron-