URBAN LEGENDS: BLOODY MARY (2005) is a sad, boring, joyless exercise— except for one brief moment of glory
#31DaysOfHorror: October 12
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
The Plot
The film opens with a flashback to homecoming night, 1969. When she sneaks off with her boyfriend and sees her unconscious friends being forced into cars, a sweet girl named Mary is surprised to find that her boyfriend and football-playing friends are date-rapists. She runs away; they fight; he punches her and she hits her head and goes down hard. He stuffs her in a trunk.
35 years later, Kate Mara and her friends are playing a game of Bloody Mary at a sleepover and they accidentally awaken the spirit of the Mary who died in the basement of their high school. She starts killing people and making it look like they died in urban legends come to life…
My Review
For this #31DaysOfHorror, I stumbled into Urban Legend/s as my franchise of choice for the month. (I usually try to explore a film and at least a few sequels in depth each time I do this challenge). First, I rewatched the original Urban Legend and found it lacking, not nearly as much of a guilty-pleasure fun time as I remembered. Then, I watched Urban Legends: Final Cut for the first time, and despite the film’s terrible reputation, I really enjoyed picking apart its use of Alfred Hitchcock homages as a commentary on horror film’s function as folklore.
So, it was with some trepidation that I approached Urban Legends: Bloody Mary, a straight-to-DVD sequel made five years after Final Cut. This sequel was directed by Mary Lambert, best-known in horror as the director of the excellent Pet Semetary; she’s also directed a ton of great music videos including Madonna’s “Material Girl” and “Like a Prayer.”
Since watching Urban Legends: Bloody Mary, I have since learned that Mary Lambert directed the SyFy original movie Mega Shark vs. Gatoroid. Which isn’t too surprising. Because Urban Legends: Bloody Mary is bad.
We will return to the scene above in a minute… But where to even begin with this disaster?
With many horror franchises, there is a reasonable expectation that each successive installment will bear at least a passing resemblance to what has come before. Audiences are, on some level, returning to the property because they want more of what they already know they like. Yes, franchises should also provide something new or interesting so people know why they should see the new film rather than just rewatching the old ones they love, but there should generally be somewhat of a familiar format. When franchises completely abandon their tried-and-true formula, as when Halloween 3: Season of the Witch had nothing to do with Michael Myers, audiences are very unhappy. Conversely, it’s not until Friday the 13th: Part 3 that Jason Vorhees even picks up a hockey mask, solidifying his iconic status.
So how does the Urban Legends franchise handle its third installment? By completely ditching the metafictional, reality-grounded approach of the first two films and going supernatural. It’s pretty clear that Urban Legends: Bloody Mary is very much influenced by the J-Horror cycle that was gripping the horror genre in the mid-00s, whereas the first two movies were influenced by the slasher revival of the 90s. Instead of a very-real serial killer carrying out murders based on urban legends, we have a very-fake-looking vengeful spirit carrying out grudge-based murders that bear passing resemblances to urban legends.
The trouble is… whereas the other films reveled in the cliché and used that to try to make a point about horror film as folklore, here it’s patently ridiculous. For one, the makeup and special effects are so inconsistent that the ghost looks like a completely different spirit in each scene, to the point where I was convinced for about 45 minutes in the middle of the movie that I’d missed something and that there was actually an army of ghosts. The gash on her head changes size, shape, and location. Sometimes she has blue contacts in and sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she’s pale and sometimes she’s glowing red. Sometimes half her face is a skull. Sometimes she looks like a bored kindergarten teacher who’s been made to dress up for an amateur scare-house in an elementary school.
In addition to not being able to keep a handle on its supernatural killer, Urban Legends: Bloody Mary also has major issues keeping a hold of its tone. Despite their other problems, Urban Legend and Urban Legends: Final Cut always know what kind of movies they are — shamelessly fun slashers that riff on conventions and execute things well. The urban legends they act out are all roughly the same level of scary — creepy tales with a moral about a killer that could really exist.
Bloody Mary has no idea what it wants to be. In addition to re-using the “humans can lick too” urban legend that was already the inspiration for the Psycho homage in Final Cut, the urban legends in Bloody Mary range in scariness from “if you pee on an electrified fence, a ghost might turn it on and you might get electrocuted…”
…to “sometimes a ghost increases the intensity of the tanning bed and you might get fried to a crisp…” (Bloody Mary scooped the similar scene in Final Destination 3 by several months, although the Final Destination 3 scene is infinitely more clever about it).
…to the familiar tale about how “sometimes a spider crawls in your mouth and lays hundreds of thousands of eggs and a sickening amount of spiders will burst out of a cyst on your cheek the next morning and they’ll just keep coming until you peel your own face off in terror, having lost the will to live, only to find that your entire skull is just a writhing mass of spiders.”
— Gif not available, because, fuck absolutely everything about this scene. —
If it’s not clear from this #31DaysOfHorror project, I watch a lot of horror movies. I can handle pretty much everything. I could not handle this. It goes on for five full minutes, no exaggeration, as CGI spiders just… keep… coming. The sound they make as they squirm out of the hole in the character’s cheek is disgusting. The image of them swarming her body, although the CGI is embarrassing, is still sickening. And then she peels off her face to reveal MORE SPIDERS! Did I mention there are a full FIVE minutes of this?! That’s an eternity. I had to keep the movie open in a separate tab and surf Facebook for a few minutes.
And, oh yeah, the movie bravely takes on the urban legend about how, if you kill a girl on Homecoming, she’ll come back from the dead thirty-six years later (only if three friends at a sleepover say “Bloody Mary” three times, of course) and she’ll kill the kids of everyone involved in her murder, and then she’ll find you, and she’ll, uh, belch dirt and rocks at you until she sucks you into a mirror-dimension, I guess? Hasn’t everyone heard that one? It happened to my friend’s uncle’s boss’s employee’s nephew’s friend!
What even is there to say?
We do owe Urban Legends: Bloody Mary our undying gratitude, however. I mention in my headline that there is one brief moment of glory in this sad, boring, lifeless affair, and it’s this — while Kate Mara is technically billed as the star of the film, there is one actress, in one scene, that steals the entire movie from her, with only one line.
Yes, that’s right. Urban Legends: Bloody Mary is the film debut of future Academy Award-winning actress Rooney Mara, as Classroom Girl #1. (OK, fine, she hasn’t won yet, technically, but I’m just assuming). So, honestly, the whole thing was worth it.
I said I was going to watch this whole franchise. It has just come to my attention that there was a fourth Urban Legends movie produced, but before release, the franchise affiliation was dropped from the name. Instead, it was released as Ghosts of Goldfield, starring Kellan Lutz and Roddy Piper. I’m sorry, but... I can’t.
But where can I watch it? Urban Legends: Bloody Mary is available for streaming on Amazon, with a fullscreen subscription. But seriously… this one is for Rooney Mara completionists only.
