It also keeps a relatively solid pace, running 100 minutes and never really tiring or feeling slack. The film is packed with startling loud moments, and fairly decent photography. Everyone is playing their role perfectly to the demands of the film.ĭirector Jamie Blanks works at a similar level as director.
Alicia Witt (Cybill) is an engaging enough albeit generic lead as Natalie, and her university friends are played by the likes of Joshua Jackson ( Dawson’s Creek), Jared Leto (then best known for My So-Called Life), Rebecca Gayheart ( Earth 2), and Michael Rosenbaum (later to co-star in Smallville). It boasts a cast with some flashy and obvious cameos – Robert Englund, Brad Dourif, and John Neville, for example – and some leads cribbed from popular teen television shows. When other students are killed one by one, Natalie races with student journalist Paul Gardner (Jared Leto) to identify the murderer. Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt) is a student at Pendleton University when one of her class is horrifically murdered in an act deliberately orchestrated to resemble an urban legend.
Is it quality cinema? Probably (okay, certainly) not, but I cannot deny this re-watch had a surprising entertainment value to it. It feels in the main like a naively charming slice of nostalgia a sort of simple jump-and-scare relic that Hollywood simply does not attempt to make any more. Returning to the film a few decades later, and it is strangely much more watchable than it used to be. Urban Legend was one of the also-rans of the period: while it scored two direct-to-video sequels, it never really captured the audience’s enthusiasm and received middling-to-poor reviews at the time. Script error: No such module "Unsubst".The mid-to-late 1990s witnessed a revival of slasher films, spearheaded and largely inspired by Wes Craven’s post-modernist feature Scream.
Urban Legend (1998) Main article: Urban Legend (film)Ī college student suspects a series of bizarre deaths are connected to certain urban legends. Moritz and Richard Luke RothschildĪaron Merrell, Louis Phillips and Scott Messer Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson Gina Matthews, Michael McDonnell and Neal H.