Rad or Bad? — Urban Legend (1998)
I will probably go to my grave defending Urban Legend as an actual good movie. If someone today were to look it up and check its Rotten Tomato score, they would see it sits at a paltry 20%, with a 37% audience score. In other words, more people think this movie sucks than think it’s good. But, I’m here today to defend this movie and its honor and not let it fall be buried in a grave full of rotten tomatoes. So, let’s go through the rad and the bad of the movie.
THE RAD
— It gave us blonde Joshua Jackson! And a meta shout out to Dawson’s Creek whenever he starts his car and the theme song starts playing.
— META!!! A quick history lesson, when Scream came out in 1996, it was a fucking hit. It was so good, in fact, that it made slashers cool again and it made being meta even cooler. That movie birthed Halloween: H20, Urban Legend, Cherry Falls, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Valentine, and Bride of Chucky. This means every slasher movie after that featured white teenagers who were hip as shit and weren’t as scared as they would’ve been in the 80s. You might think that formula would get stale after a while, but guess what? IT FUCKING DIDN’T. I’m 1000000% here for meta horror movies
— Jared Leto actually gave a great performance. Forget the Jared Leto you know today, this was pre-method, cookie-cutter ass Jared Leto and I loved every bit of it.
— Inventive kills. A movie based on urban legends was bound to have really great kills. The best one being Michael Rosenbaum’s character being drowned with Draino.
THE BAD
— Probably one of the worst “final girls” ever. She’s about as interesting as a Saltine cracker.
— They made Rebecca Gayheart, bless her beautiful soul, an over-the-top caricature once her identity is revealed. Seriously, watch it. They tried to make her a female version of Stu from Scream.
— The final showdown is major butt. The whole movie leading up to the end is really, really great. But then the ending falls off faster than McGregor in the ring.
FINAL VERDICT: RAD!!!
