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In which a maniac is reinacting the urban legends of the title, centering on our Plucky Heroine (Alica Witt). We get The Hook, The Poodle in the Microwave, The Caller in the House, and even Pop Rocks and Soda. All done with a wink wink and a nudge nudge at the audience, as if to say, "See how clever we are?"

The resurrection of the slasher movie is an interesting case study in how dissecting the golden goose to see how it lays the golden eggs isn't necessarily the best thing to do. All of the post-Scream slasher movies know what gives that marginal subgenre whatever power it might have: Mythic resonance. They even know what myths they trade on: the eponymous Urban Legends of this film's title. But they don't know how to make the leap from the mundane to the miraculous. I suppose I shouldn't be too harsh. After all, there are only two movies in the entire dubious history of the slasher movie ever to make that jump: John Carpenter's Halloween and Bob Clark's Black Christmas, two films that are remarkably similar. Even Hitchcock's Psycho makes the classic mistake of the slasher movie. What prevents the miracle of transubstantiation, in which the ordinary slasher movie is transmogrified into a terrifying mythic exerience? What is that classic mistake? Simple: they explain too goddamn much. They bend over backwards to explain away the miracle. These are movies for people who like to preface their summary of movies with the phrase "...turns out what happened was..." They don't understand that terror stems from the unknown. "Was he really the Boogey Man?" asks Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween; "Yes, yes he was," answers Donald Pleasance. Black Christmas never even bothers to identify it's mysterious killer and leaves the audience deeply unsettled by the unresolved enigma at its heart.

Movies like Urban Legend construct elaborate back-stories rooted in the sins of the past, much like the Wilkie Collins-style old dark house gothics of the 19th century. Often, as in Urban Legend, they frame them in such a way that the retribution for those sins can be enacted in grisly and elaborately bizarre set pieces--in much the manner of, say, The Abominable Dr. Phibes or Seven. In doing so, they rob the bank of the imagination. They remove the prime motivating force of fear and get the audience guessing about things like the identity and motives of the killer (which are the proper perview of the mystery or the whodunnit, not the horror movie). As an exemplar of this trend, Urban Legend is about average. It has a good cast of fresh faces (particularly the wonderful Alicia Witt). It has that grand old man of the slasher movie, Robert Englund, on hand as a red herring. It is far too clever for its own good and has a denoument that is harder to swallow than most slasher movies, based on the eventual identity of the killer (who is so obvious a choice, the audience should guess it about half way through the movie). In other words, it's crap. It's crap that's amiable and inoffensive, crap that causes no real pain in the audience for watching it. But , let's face it, crap is crap, and a diet of crap is no one's idea of a good time. Especially not mine.