Urban Legends is a pretty neat little film that explores the myths that probably surround most towns in America and indeed similar sized towns in my country Australia. The film opens up with a young lady driving through some back alley roads in America and as any respectable movie would have it, she stops at the local gas station. The creepy gas station attendant, whilst instantly repugnant tries to warn her there is someone in her back seat but it doesn’t go well and our initial heroine is killed by the dude in the back of her car.
We then shift focus to the university all the young people are attending. I didn’t manage to get what course they are doing but the lecturer (played by Robert Englund) is lecturing them on the Urban Legends that seem to have been going on around town for a fair while. So now we have a very stock standard horror movie premise, the serial killer on campus. There’s the usual college stereotypes in this film, the horny males, the females trying to resist their advances and of course no one knows whats going on as one by one, residents of the campus are killed.
While this doesn’t really provide anything particularly new to the seasoned horror viewer this movie is quite well done. Great production values, and the movie is quite well shot. There’s the usual teenage tropes present in many horror films and there’s the usual eye candy females (one of them being Tara Reid). Really this movie is basically Friday 13th but set in a university campus.
Over all this is a pretty cool film. There gore levels aren’t too high, so you can watch this with your non horror junkie friends without weirding them out. Overall this is not a classic of the genre but definitely worth a watch. On it’s original release in the late 90’s (1998) this movie grossed rather well at the box office pulling in $74 million dollars making it not only a quite watchable horror film but a mainstream success at the box office.
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