Ah, that's better: a classic late 90s slasher, one of the post-Scream attempts to revitalize the genre. Urban Legend came out in 1998 - also known as the year I met Mr. Mouse - and it has all the 90s hits: gas at $1.14/gallon! Girls with dark lipstick! Pagers! Internet via phone line modems! Slide projectors! Boot-cut jeans! And it has an outstanding cast: Jared Leto, Alicia Witt, Joshua Jackson (with a hilarious Dawson's Creek joke), Tara Reid (before all the surgery), Michael Rosenbaum and Rebecca Gayheart (I coveted her hair), plus Robert Englund (Freddy himself) and a pre-Deadwood Brad Dourif. Just outstanding!
It was a dark and stormy night in Maine. (And hallelujah that no one really attempted a Maine accent.) A Pendleton college girl gets axe-murdered to start things off. And later, her murder comes up when a college professor (Englund) is teaching his class on urban legends. As someone starts picking off college kids, our Final Girl Alicia Witt (no one care what her character name is, right?) realizes that the killings are patterned after various urban legends. For some reason.
At this point in my notes I decided to guess who the killer is: I picked Jared Leto because he was kind of weird and bossy and has a crush on Alicia, so he's killing all the people around her. I also noted that: no one uses glass mugs at frat parties. They use red Solo cups.
This is a slasher, so here's how everyone dies SPOILERS FOR A TWENTY-FOUR YEAR OLD MOVIE: beheaded with an axe from the backseat; hung in the woods; strangled while roommate is in the next bed; run over in parking garage and impaled on tire spikes; pop rocks and Drano (plus dog in the microwave); stabbed; axe-murdered on air; stabbed and stuffed in a trunk.
Is this a horror movie? Technically, but it's more silly than scary and not at all gory, axe-murders notwithstanding. Still, I enjoyed it lots more than that Resident Evil nonsense. Viva la 90s slashers!
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