Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

On a dark and stormy night, a young woman is driving down an abandoned road when she realizes she's almost out of gas. She manages to make it to a gas station, where the stuttering attendant asks her to come inside, saying her credit card's been declined and someone from the company is on the phone. A little freaked out by his stutter and the manic glint in his eye, the girl grabs some pepper spray, heads inside, and picks up the phone only to discover there's no one on the other end. The guy locks the door and approaches her, unable to utter a single word, and the girl blasts him with the pepper spray and makes a break for her car. Shaken and sobbing, but seemingly driving away to safety, she doesn't hear the attendant's shout of "Someone's in the backseat!" and realizes he was trying to help her only when she glances in the mirror and sees someone swinging an ax at her head.

Sound familiar? It should. The story of the killer in the backseat is one of those urban legends, those scary stories that are circulated for years and are supposedly true because a friend of a friend's cousin knows this guy who met this girl who swears it happened to someone she knows. This is the concept of 1998's Urban Legend: a murderer is killing people based on popular urban legends. It's a great premise for a film, one I'm surprised no one had thought of before, and it makes for some creative deaths. I mean, there's only so many times you can see a young girl run through the woods before being hacked up by Jason or Michael or any of the other slashers, right?

Urban Legend has some of the trappings of teen horror films, particularly post-Scream: a huge cast of college students, most of whom are there solely to be killed off; one person who figures out the killer's motive, only to be laughed at or dismissed as loony tunes; and, of course, a cast of then-hot young Hollywood stars, including Joshua Jackson (Dawson's Creek), Jared Leto (My So-Called Life), and Tara Reid (American Pie).

For some reason, Alicia Witt was chosen to be the lead, Natalie, and she's a likeable enough heroine, nothing particularly special but she gets the job done. The same goes for the rest of the cast; no one really stands out, either for being so excellent or being so atrocious. Having Brad Dourif (the voice of Chucky in Child's Play) and Robert Englund (Freddy in Nightmare on Elm Street) was a nice touch, though. There were also some nice little in-jokes, like when Jackson's character turns on the car to hear "I Don't Want to Wait", the theme song from Dawson's Creek, blare from the radio.

A quick glance at other critics' reviews of the film reveals that Urban Legend is even less well-loved than I'd thought, with ratings ranging from two stars down to zero. It's hard to argue with many of the primary criticisms of the film. The killer does indeed have superhuman strength with no explanation, the movie relies on blasts of music for a lot of its scares, there's surprisingly little blood and gore for a slasher, and the rest of the film's 90 minutes never really live up to its opening scene. But approximately 85 of those minutes are enjoyable, and sometimes that's all I ask of a horror flick.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups