Excellent but underrated film

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

And, yeah, this is a spoiler SUPER alert, do NOT read further if you haven't seen the movie! First off, I am not a fan of the slasher movie genre. As RavenGlamDVDCollector, I do go after the pretty girls, though. My gripe with slashers is of course that blood and glamor doesn't mix. Who wants to see a pretty girl cut up? (That is, of course, a stupid question that I do not want to hear the answer to) I'm a big Rebecca Gayheart fan ever since her BEVERLY HILLS 90210 days, she was sorely missed by me when her character was killed off in that series, and so it came to pass that RavenGlam research showed the incredibly hot young cast of URBAN LEGEND. There are two sequels, direct-to-video, that seem entirely less promising, but URBAN LEGEND the original sure has a lot of pretty girls, with Tara Reid thrown in for good measure. Alicia Witt I knew from BODIES, REST & MOTION in a short but vivid sequence, aside from an absolutely vague memory of the kid in 90's sitcom CYBILL It is way beneath me to discuss the bloody scenes in this movie. They are extremely far-fetched, and as it turns out, FINAL SPOILER ALERT, committed by best friend Brenda. However berserk any human might get, and, yes, we all have it in us to kill, but come on! Rebecca Gayheart could execute that big blonde guy by hanging him? The bloody strangulation scene deemed as a 'suicide' is a symptom of a terminally-ill plot. And everybody wears that freaking abysmal style of coat. Even next to an indoor swimming pool when it was clearly shown to be a normal day, nobody else was remotely dressed for winter, and that thing was designed for Eskimos.The potholes in the plot are big enough for two army trucks to disappear into with no survivors.Best thing about the movie, Alicia Witt. Okay, I do agree, she wasn't scared enough, but in some scared scenes, she was just ooh-shame-what-a-beautiful-scared-bunny, let-me-hug-ya! Tara Reid was an absolute disappointment, I am very sorry to say, she could have done a lot better. And speaking of Tara, the trailer shows a bikini dance flash or something like that, just mere seconds, but there is no such scene in the movie, and no deleted scene on the DVD.As for Rebecca, I suppose you gave it a good shot, but, really!

Urban Legend (1998): Dir: Jamie Blanks / Cast: Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Jared Leto, Robert Englund, Tara Reid: Another slasher film out to educate the public on various methods to kill people. It is a film about untrue events that bare probability. It involves the killing of teenagers based upon urban legends. Robert Englund plays a professor who teaches a class on the subject, and his urban legend involving a babysitter receiving threatening phone calls was presented in a superior horror film called When a Stranger Calls with Carol Kane as the sitter. Director Jamie Blanks does a fine job at concealing the killer's identity. It is well made but written as an executioner's handbook. When A Stranger Calls or Halloween have the suspense that this film lacks. We are required to blame the murders on Englund because of his notorious career as Freddy Krueger. Can a guy not get an even break? The young cast wander about aimlessly waiting for their roles to spark life despite the fact that the only thing to spark out of their lives is a very gruesome death. Among the wasted cast are Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart and Jared Leto and their roles consist of running, screaming and being murdered in some fashion that is unfortunately more creative than anything else the film has to offer, which isn't much. Yet another puke fest in all of its gory sick details. Score: 3 / 10

When a series of strange deaths occur on the campus of Pendleton College, student Natalie begins to suspect that there is a bizarre link - someone is taking urban legends and making them a reality. Her classmates Brenda & Damon insist the deaths are just coincidence. But when Natalie gets too close to discovering the killer's real identity she realises that she could be the next victim.This film starred: Alicia Witt, Jared Leto & Rebecca Gayheart.Urban Legend is a poor film in my opinion and not one that I would probably watch again, it was sloppy in some scenes and is slow and boring in others. Overall I don't enjoy it and wouldn't recommend it, it tries to be clever with it's twists, but most of the time the twist is what you were expecting to happen anyway.**/***** Poor.

Someone has set out to make a book of urban legends come true. A woman (Natasha Gregson Wagner) in the film's effective beginning is driving in a heavy rain storm to the college where the film takes place. She thinks she has escaped a Psycho (Brad Dourif) at a gas station only to find the real killer in the back seat with an ax. The film centers on a small group of friends and Natalie (Witt) seems to be at the center of it as her room mate (Danielle Harris) is killed while she is going to sleep. Half the time this slasher film delivers quite nicely. Director Jamie Blanks and Cinematographer James Chressanthis make the film look great with interesting framing and effective moody atmosphere. Like the opening sequence, and the pursuit and death of Sasha (Tara Reid), the film delivers with solid suspense and good kills. Unfortunately, the film is also unbalanced. The deaths of professor Wexler (Robert Englund) and Parker (Michael Rosenbaum) are weak and unconvincing. The movie bounces back and forth between some really good set pieces and some clumsy ones. Blanks is going for a classy horror film here but he seems to be unsure if he is pulling it off. There are many times when the audience must throw logic completely out the window or the plot doesn't work at all. The scary looking killer wears a big coat with a hood, yet we see no less than 4 other characters with the exact same coat in their possession. This cheapens the movie and so does the lapses in logic of the script. The overall effectiveness of the film still works with above average suspense and some great kills. These nice moments are mixed in with cheap effects like a friend coming up behind another character and creating a false scare. This is "Urban Legend" in a nutshell. There are a lot of good things and some bad ones. At its best, it has some good scares and some solid slasher action; you just have to take the more immature moments as well.