Urban Legend (1998)

New York Times
"...URBAN LEGEND is a teen-age moviegoer's dream....This one feels fresh....Nice work..." 09/25/1998 p.E15

The New York Times 7 of 10
Urban Legend is a teen-age moviegoer's dream. It has familiar young television stars, familiar older stars with cult followings...an edgy sense of humor, a tricky plot and characters too genre-savvy for their own good. Maybe there will be an oversaturation of Scream-inspired horror films someday soon, but this one feels fresh. - Anita Gates
 
ReelViews 6 of 10
Resurrected by the Wes Craven/Kevin Williamson collaboration, Scream, the slasher flick is alive and kicking in the late 1990s. There are, of course, several notable differences between the '80s version of the genre and the '90s revival. First and foremost, all overt sex and nudity has been removed from the screen (you don't have to be a virgin to survive). Secondly, '90s horror movies have attempted to beef up their backstories. It's no longer just about some implacable guy in a mask who wanders around eviscerating unsuspecting teens. Take the latest example, Urban Legend, which possesses a fascinating core idea (a serial killer who delights in re-creating the most grisly of modern myths). Unfortunately, as all film-goers know and this movie once again demonstrates, a solid premise does not guarantee a good story...Almost every known horror cliche is present. The car won't start. The phones don't work. Pointless scares are generated by sudden staccato bursts of music. The killer is the Person You Don't Suspect. And there's always at least one return engagement for a supposedly-dead villain. As interesting as the urban legend premise is, it's not enough to sustain the movie. Ultimately, there's an inverse relationship between the body count and the level of suspense. With each death, the film becomes less interesting. By the end, it's just a routine slasher flick with a too-predictable final "twist." - James Berardinelli
 
The Onion A.V. Club 5 of 10
With the possible exception of Pulp Fiction and Clerks, no film of the '90s inspired quite as many people to make quite as many bad, bad movies as Scream. And while the seemingly endless procession of Scream rip-offs is good news for members of the Dawson's Creek cast and people who enjoy gazing upon the cleavage of mid-level starlets, most of these films bear the same relationship to Scream that Slumber Party Massacre bore to the original Halloween. The latest and quite possibly weakest bastard child of Scream, Urban Legend, stars Alicia Witt as a perky, bland college student whose friends are killed one after another in the style of popular urban legends...Urban Legend has an undeniably clever premise, which plays on a sort of cultural mythology shared by the filmmakers and the ostensibly media-savvy audience, but it fails to do anything interesting with it. Urban legends draw their appeal from their exclusiveness, from the idea that they exist in a sort of cultural vacuum, ignored by traditional electronic media but thriving as a sort of post-technological American folklore. But as used in Urban Legend, this shared folklore is nothing more than the basis for a slew of bloody, unimaginative setpieces...Urban Legend is awash in red herrings, but it's difficult to care about the fate of Witt and her friends, since none of the characters seem to have any reason to exist other than to propel its convoluted plot. - Nathan Rabin