Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #140: Urban Legend (1998)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and disgraced former Noxema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

Because this is the spooky season, I have been given permission by the generous patron commissioning the Gayheart series to skip ahead in Gayheart’s filmography and write about fright flicks like 1997’s Scream 2 and 1998’s Urban Legend. 

Urban Legend will always occupy a special place in my heart because when I just started out as a film critic in Wisconsin back in the late 1990s I was asked by a small nearby college if I wanted to come and talk about urban legends, possibly around the time Urban Legend was released. 

I was a hungry young man, eager to make a name for myself so I said yes to just about anything. I don’t know what I expected but when I got to the college, I was led to a nondescript room in a nondescript dorm where a group of college kids in their pajamas sat on the floor, some with sodas. 

It quickly became apparent that I was visiting this school not as a distinguished guest but rather as an uncompensated babysitter tasked with keeping these teenagers occupied for an hour or so by bullshitting about the topic of urban legends and, by extension, the shitty movie Urban Legend. I didn’t even get a slice of pizza or twenty bucks the way I would have if I were an actual babysitter, and not a film critic unexpectedly pressed into that role. 

The thrillogy!

Memories! Precious, precious memories! As is so often the case with this most Proustian of pop culture websites, memories are what attracted me to re-visit Urban Legend. Because I had already seen Urban Legend, and consequently could speak knowledgeably about it to bored college kids, I knew who the killer was. 

It’s easy to feel powerless in Donald Trump’s America but I am telling you, friend, that knowing the twist ending to Urban Legend made me feel like a God. A GOD! And because that is a good feeling, I am going to share it with you. 

Before I even begin to describe the movie I am going to reveal the killer: Rebecca Gayheart! 

Wow! I bet you did NOT see that coming! But the suspiciously extensive IMDB trivia section for the movie explains why, actually, you’re the dumb one for thinking this is an implausibility: “One of the most common complaints about the film is how Brenda (Gayheart’s character) is able to pull off many of the kills and traps that she does, including rigging a body in a tree and taking down victims much larger than she is, despite having the skinny build of Rebecca Gayheart. The ending reveals that the entire movie is being told between people as something that happened to "a friend of a friend" who went to the school... in other words, an urban legend. And like any urban legend, details are likely to have been altered in the retelling, exaggerating the killer's prowess and the brutality of the kills, if it even happened in the first place.”

Whoah. Who’s the idiot now, dumb-dumb? It’s you! Here you are, annoyed that Urban Legend is insultingly implausible and its big twist makes no sense when it was an urban legend all along! Or a madman’s dream. 

Needless to say, very few people are smart enough to understand Urban Legend. I certainly am not. I thought it was hot garbage in 1998 and I thought it was lukewarm re-heated garbage today. 

Urban Legend is like Scream but with contemporary folklore in place of movies and also terrible. Like Scream it opens with a flashy set-piece involving a superstar guest victim who is the scion of a prominent acting dynasty. 

In Scream the guest victim was of course Drew Barrymore. In Urban Legend, it’s Natalie Wood’s daughter Natasha Gregson-Wagner as Pendleton University students Michelle Mancini. 

Michelle begins the film driving alone on a proverbial dark and stormy night, singing along to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” badly and incorrectly. I’m singling out Gregson-Wagner’s realistically sub-par rendition of Jim Steinman’s classic exercise in romantic melodrama because it feels spontaneous and real and possibly improvised in a way that makes everything that follows feel even more artificial and fake. 

The unfortunate young college student runs out of gas and stops in at a spooky gas station run by a twitchy, terrified/terrifying attendant played by an uncredited Brad Dourif. The attendant tells the teen that there’s something wrong with her credit card and she needs to come into the station and resolve the situation but when she comes inside she freaks and flees in terror. 

With his wild-eyed glare, scraggly hair, nervous stammer and overall air of unhinged intensity, the gas station attendant’s Deranged Axe Murderer vibe masks the fact that he’s actually acting weird to protect the luckless motorist from the actual axe murderer lurking in the back seat of her car, waiting to strike. 

This is, of course, a variation on the “Killer in the backseat” urban legend, clumsily conceived and poorly executed. It’s endured because it speaks to contemporary anxieties but also because it’s just a crackling good yarn. That’s true of pretty much all urban legends that stick: they’re good stories. The same cannot be said of Urban Legend. Urban Legend clumsily shoe-horns as many urban legends as possible into a plot that subsequently functions stutteringly as a contemporary folklore-dissemination machine rather than a horror movie or coherent narrative.

The wildly derivative mystery slasher traffics in the cheap but potent buzz of recognition in a way designed to make audiences feel smart and informed without actually asking anything of them beyond being vaguely familiar with the kinds of urban legends seemingly everyone knows.

The action then switches to Pendleton University, where Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt) and best friend Brenda Bates (Rebecca Gayheart) are taking a class in urban legends taught by Robert Englund’s Professor Creepy Von Spookenstein. Okay, that’s not actually his name but it might as well be. It’s certainly his vibe.

Natalie’s social circle soon begins dying horrible deaths in ways that mirror popular urban legends. But who is the killer? Is it moody journalism student Damon Brooks (Jared Leto, in an early performance that provides a fascinating glimpse into the unfathomably obnoxious performer the future Academy Award winner would one day become), who wants a killer story so bad he might just murder for it? Or could it be jackass film junkie and fraternity prankster Damon Brooks (Joshua Jackson)? Alternately, could the sinister Professor played by a horror icon be behind the murders? 

Nope. It’s Gayheart’s character. That has already been established. Are you not paying attention?

If you’re a horror movie aficionado who is strictly in it for the kills Urban Legend was made with you in mind. Once the plot kicks in, it’s basically kill after kill after kill, as a hooded figure in a winter coat with the strength and stamina  of an NFL linebacker and the know-how and resources of a big-budget Hollywood special effects crew murders a broad cross section of the school’s students and faculty. 

But the killing is so monotonous and poorly staged that I found myself pining for any distractions, whether in the form of break-dancing sequences, comic relief, parkour, clumsy chess metaphors, basically anything other than kids getting slaughtered. 

Urban Legend exists as a clumsy clearinghouse for stories everyone knows and some folks are foolish enough to imagine are true, and really happened to a friend of a friend of a friend but also for a twist that is as audacious as it is stupid and impossible. 

Gayheart throws herself into her gamine beauty’s villainy with full-throated conviction. Her impossibly gorgeous eyes radiate pure insanity as she explains to Natalie that she decided to murder everyone at Pendleton University as a means of exacting revenge on Michelle for accidentally killing her fiancé with her car along with Michelle in an urban legends-themed stunt gone horribly awry. . 

Natalie gets a year of probation for her role in the death of Brenda’s fiancé. In a sinister parallel, just three years later Gayheart struck and killed a nine year old boy with her car and was sentenced to three years of probation for vehicular homicide. 

Urban Legend was so successful at the box-office, grossing over seventy million dollars on a modest budget, that it inspired a pair of sequels and a forthcoming reboot to be written and directed by horror wunderkind Colin Minihan. 

I am inherently skeptical of remakes but Urban Legend is exactly the kind of movie that should be remade. It’s got great name recognition and a fun premise it handles badly. Best of all, its terrible execution leaves nothing but room for improvement. 

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