• Director: Jamie Blanks
• With: Jared Leto, Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Robert Englund, Michael Rosenbaum, Joshua Jackson, Loretta Devine, Tara Reid, John Neville, Julian Richings, Danielle Harris
• Music by: Christopher Young
• Duration: 1h39
• Studio: Tristar Colombia
• Rating: 8/10

Synopsis:

Urban Legend tells the story of a group of pretty college students at a remote New England university. The focus of the story is Natalie, a beautiful, academically-gifted student who has a dark secret in her past. Natalie and her friends are all enrolled in the Folklore class being taught by Professor Wexler. Wexler regales his class with urban legends, which include Pendleton’s own urban legend about a Psych professor who murdered six students 25 years ago. When several students are found dead, Natalie is the first one to suspect there’s a killer on campus, especially after she has ties to all of the victims. Soon enough, she finds that her friends are being picked off one by one, and that her own murder will be the killer’s ultimate urban legend.

Review:

Surfing on the success of slasher mayhem such as Scream and I know what you did last Summer, Urban Legend has its own take on the genre. It even got some backlash for copying Scream (but admit it: every slasher movie is a copy of a previous movie, right? No Scream without Halloween, no Halloween without Psycho, no I Know… without Scream… no Urban Legend… you get my meaning!)

Urban Legends are myths told by campfires or other group meetings by teenagers to scare one another, otherwise also known as campfire tales… and they all have some mystery to them and a twist surprise ending… lots of these were told to scare teenagers so they’d behave like good boys and girls… among these urban legends there’s the escaped crazy man killing people, the hooked man killing people (often these people are teens having sex in a car 🤦‍♂️ how uncomfortable) or the babysit with the killer in the house… to name a few!

These stories are used as a background for the killer in this movie. Everything starts with the girl in her car, all by herself, on a dark and lonely road (singing Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler… Turnaround, Michelle!) while in the back there’s someone with an axe…

This killer has a very mean streak killing off a bunch of friends and the gothic roommate of Nathalie on the campus of Pendleton University. Together with the University’s newspaper star reporter, Paul, she is trying to find out who is out to kill her and her friends.

I think this slasher has quite a high bodycount with 9 deaths and the kills are pretty original (based upon the urban legends, of course)

No one’s safe in this slasher!

I honestly don’t get the bad reviews for this movie. Okay, I admit it: this is pure nostalgia for me… I may have said it before, I kind of got stuck in the nineties and this was one of the many (MANY!) movies I went to see in the cinema when I was a teenager myself (a good one, not one of the bad boys! 😏) so rewatching this is always a throwback to back when…

Jared Leto still looked like a preppy boy in this one (what went wrong) and has since then rejected this movie (why?) and I love how Robert Englund wanted to be in this one because he loved a lot of the actors as he’d seen them in other roles… oh and in Damon Brook’s (Joshua Jackson) car, when he (finally) manages to start it, you can hear a song that might sound familiar… well it’s the theme song from Dawson’s Creek starring… Joshua Jackson!

I know this movie spawned two sequels (Final Cut and Bloody Mary) but I don’t really remember those, I think they weren’t half as good as this one, tbh!

So beware: don’t signal other cars (they’ll chase and kill you), don’t eat pop rocks candy and then drink soda (it’ll burst your stomach), don’t look in the microwave, don’t mind the scratching on your car roof and most of all… don’t get in that car with the killer in the back!