Everybody's heard them ... yet they have no traceable source. There's no proof they really happened ... yet they can't necessarily be proven false. They're urban legends, contemporary tall tales and bits of macabre mythology that emerge from the underground and take on colorful lives of their own. Like a virus they spread quickly, develop a stubborn staying power as they are passed by whisper from person to person, then come to rest firmly wedged in our collective consciousness. Did Mikey from the Life cereal commercials really die of a lethal combination of Pop Rocks and Pepsi? Are there really mutant alligators living in the sewers of New York City? And everyone knows about the babysitter who received crank calls threatening the children under her care who then traced the calls to the upstairs bedroom. They range from the silly to the sickening - now, in TriStar Pictures' Urban Legend, a group of students is about to find out that urban legends can be fatal.
Behind the gothic stone facade and pretentious air of history and tradition at New England's Pendleton College-just named the safest university in the country-classic urban legends are being realized with fatal results. But who is doing it? And why? As Pendleton's American Folklore instructor, Professor Wexler (Nightmare on Elm Street's Robert Englund), cautions, urban legends by definition are said to contain hidden moral admonitions for their victims. Unfortunately, some of us have to learn our lessons the hard way.
First, Pendleton student Michelle Mancini loses her head -- courtesy of a well sharpened ax. Then the campus' platinum-haired practical joker, Damon (Joshua Jackson), is left dangling on a date -- from a tree, that is. Beautiful and assertive student Natalie (Alicia Witt) suspects a bizarre link between the murders. Soon, one by one, students, faculty-even pets-are dying off in a variety of sadistic and wickedly flamboyant ways. Did an old lady really try to dry her wet cat in the microwave? Just how 'severe' is the damage suffered from those tire spikes you're warned not to drive over in parking lots? Are kidneys really extracted from unwilling victims and sold on the black market? Some unlucky souls at Pendleton College are finding out - the chosen few who are bringing legend to life.
Unfortunately, even as increasing numbers of the college community lay dead around them, Natalie's friends are too preoccupied with other things to consider the deaths might be more than coincidence. Paul (Jared Leto), an aggressive journalist at the school paper, is only interested in a story based on facts that will hopefully win him the student Pulitzer Prize. Brenda (Rebecca Gayheart), though concerned for Natalie, is more interested in flirting with Paul. Sasha (Tara Reid), the host of a sex advice show on campus radio, is less concerned with the impending danger than with working her way through the Kama Sutra with her fraternity stud boyfriend, Parker (Michael Rosenbaum).
When Natalie sets out to uncover the killer -- and get to the bottom of Pendleton's own 30-year-old urban legend about a massacre of students at the hand of an abnormal psych professor - she discovers his demented purpose to fashion the ultimate urban legend, with none other than her lifeless body as its centerpiece.
(15 votes)
2.
When New England college student Natalie finds herself at the center of a series of sadistic murders seemingly inspired by urban legends, she resolves to find the truth about Pendleton's own legend - a 25-year-old story of a student massacre at the hands of an abnormal psych professor. As the fraternities prepare to celebrate the macabre anniversary, Natalie discovers that she is the focus of the crazed killer's intentions in the ultimate urban legend - the story of her own horrific murder.
(15 votes)
3.
An attractive young woman is driving her car on a dark country road and singing along to the radio. She's running out of gas and so she pulls into a gas station (run by a jittery, stuttering Brad Dourif) but then flees what seems to be an attack, only to find the real threat in her backseat: a hooded killer with an axe who takes her head off with a well-aimed swing. You've heard the story before? Not surprising, given that it's one of the more famous urban legends borrowed for Urban Legend, a post-Scream exercise in self-referential horror. The students at an ivy-covered New England college are turning up dead, the victims of a serial killer who murders in the fashion of the "apocryphal" modern myths. It's all for the benefit of good girl with a dark secret Alicia Witt, the sole witness to most of the killings. Doe-eyed Rebecca Gayheart, as her gullible best friend, and Jared Leto, the ambitious campus journalist who tracks down the secret that hangs over the school, lead a cast of pretty young women, hunky guys and campus characters, notably the suspicious professor Robert Englund, a genre legend in his own right as the star of seven Nightmare on Elm Street films. Take away the cheeky remarks and self-awareness and it's a throwback to the 1970s' rash of teen slasher movies, where sexually active teens are sliced, diced and otherwise slaughtered in elaborate and ingenious ways. The increasingly preposterous film is no Scream but the modestly stylish production has its moments. --Sean Axmaker
(15 votes)
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