Urban Legend

Bomb Rating: 

If I ever meet director Jamie Blanks my first question will be, "Are your lips permanently attached to Kevin Williamson's ass or can you take a break and talk to me for a second?"

Two words for the idiots who made this "Scream" rip-off: shower scenes. Any horror film aficionado in his right mind knows that a tolerable horror film never fails to send its young, buxom heroine into the shower at whatever time seems least appropriate. Killer on the loose? Heat been turned off in your building in the dead of winter? An eerie silence permeating your entire dorm floor? Hell, get out of those duds, girl, and start soaping up those breasts!

Given that "Urban Legend" has about as many surprises as a porn film ("Oh look, somebody ejaculated!" simply becomes "Oh look, somebody's been decapitated!"), it's spit in the face of the horror film Gods that neither Natalie (Alicia Witt) nor Brenda (Rebecca Gayheart) nor Parker (Loretta Devine) takes a much-needed shower break during the entire ordeal.

I mean, as long as we're beating the crap out of every other horror film cliché we might as well hit that one too -- a few times, in fact. How else to survive a movie in which the killer's weapon of choice is an ax, for Christ's sake? How much creativity does it take to try another tool? Hoe? Hedge clippers? Garden weasel?

If I ever meet director Jamie Blanks my first question will be, "Are your lips permanently attached to Kevin Williamson's ass or can you take a break and talk to me for a second?" Replace all the talk of horror films in "Scream" with talk of urban legends and you have "Urban Legend" -- precisely. As if "I Know What You Did Last Summer" didn't already work hard enough to reinvent the reinvented wheel. Too bad there's no Oscar for redundancy. You could give it to Blanks. Twice.

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