Second Viewing: Urban Legend (1998)

I want to like Urban Legend a lot more than I do. It’s got a truly appealing gimmicky premise, with a serial killer murdering people based on urban legends. I tend to enjoy these kinds of plots where a killer has a theme to all of his or her murders (the best will always be Theatre of Blood, where Vincent Price kills people based on Shakespeare death scenes).

And yet something about this movie really doesn’t work for me. The characters don’t help. The final girl, Natalie (Alicia Witt), isn’t particularly interesting, and she even seems downright dumb at times, because the script isn’t that great.

The supporting cast is probably a little better. Robert Englund makes his role feel like a lot more than a cameo, and even though Brad Dourif is essentially just a cameo, he really stands out in his scene, which is probably the most effective of the movie.

There are a few scenes in this movie that stand out as being pretty effective, but the overabundance of false jump scares really wore on me.

Rating: 4/10