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Date Posted: 07:55:49 06/08/01 Fri
Author: Griff
Subject: Okay, so I haven't exactly been churning 'em out lately. But here's my latest...


URBAN LEGEND


There’s actually a kind of arrogance at work in a movie as formulaic and dog-tired as Urban Legend, which includes every single cliché known to slasher films with not a speck of wit to be found. The arrogance is the film-makers assuming that audience is going to be scared by such hackneyed routines as the hand-on-the-shoulder gag and the character-turns-round-and-bumps-into-someone bit, or that they’ll laugh at the post-Scream genre-referencing ‘in-jokes’ like the casting of Robert Englund. But as knowing as this movie would like to think it is, it just doesn’t have the brains to get away with it.

Like Scream, this movie isn’t well written enough to laugh at itself and use the formula at the same time. Whereas, say, Buffy, The X Files and The Simpsons are incredibly deft at poking fun at their own conventions without making themselves seem silly, Urban Legend merely emphasises just how much this genre has had its day. There’s not a flicker of originality here, not a glimmer of invention, not a hint of creativity. Even down to the demographic-friendly casting of actors from such teen drivel as Dawson’s Creek and Zoe, Duncan, Jack and Jane, it’s been done a hundred times. The one good idea – a serial killer recreating urban legends – is wasted because the dialogue is so agonisingly clunky.

The film is so idiotic that it can’t even use cliches like false scares correctly. For instance, the killer wears a hooded parka – scary! – because of course in films like this they have to wear a mask of some kind. Anyway, one of the non-characters, played by the lovely Alicia Witt, sees a parka-clad figure enter a swimming pool building, walk purposefully towards a swimmer and stand there menacingly... but not to worry, it’s just someone with a swimsuit underneath, not the killer after all! But why the fuck would someone, on a hot day, in a heated pool, walk in wearing a parka??? Watching films like this is a chore because your intelligence is insulted every step of the way.

But pathetic red herrings and false accusations are the order of the day. Half the characters own a parka with a furry hood to try and put us off the scent, when the only scent is the one of reeking horseshite that permeates the entire film. The direction is lacklustre and the editing is sloppy and apathetic, resulting in a movie so badly structured that one scene just kind of flops into the next, with no kind of impetus or momentum. That’s what really gets me about this film – it’s incredibly lazy. It doesn’t try. The brief flashes of so-called post-modernism are there only because Kevin Williamson has given the writers of these films licence to crib from every one of their predecessors as it’s now seen as some kind of witty homage. By the writers, at least.

Is this really what passes for horror these days? A teenage cast, killings-a-plenty, a few in-jokes (Joshua Jackson turns on the radio, hears the theme tune to Dawson’s Creek and switches it off again), an arbitrary unmasking and loads of stupid dialogue that doesn’t so much advance the plot as send it plodding round in circles? I thought we’d seen the last of this shite in the ‘80s. At least that cycle of slasher films was crap just because they were badly made and predictable – now the movies are both those things but somehow delude themselves that they’re in on the joke, when really they're the butt of it.



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