Urban Legend (Film Review)

1998 TriStar Pictures
Directed by: Jamie Blanks; Written by: Silvio Horta
Starring: Jared Leto, Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Joshua Jackson, Loretta Devine, Tara Reid, Michael Rosenbaum, and Robert Englund
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 100 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 5/10

You know the one: a driver is approached by someone scary, and the driver panics and drives away. However, it turns out the frightening person was trying to warn the driver that there's a killer in the driver's backseat. It's a classic urban legend, and it's visualized in 1998's Urban Legend's opening scene.
Sometimes when the legend is told, the driver escapes with their life. Sometimes they are murdered. In Urban Legend, it's the latter. In fact, the murder occurs by axe, while the car is barreling down the highway at high speed, during a late night rain storm. If you're sitting in the backseat and not wearing your seatbelt, in a car that's moving quickly through a rain storm, it's probably a bad idea to chop off your driver's head with an axe. You'll probably, you know, go flying through a window as the car careens out of control. Not in Urban Legend. Instead:

Atmospheric, rainy shot from front of fast-moving car, as silhouette of an axe rises above driver's head. 

Cut to: 

Shot of axe slicing through head and bursting through the bloody driver's side window of not moving car. End scene. 

Urban Legend is that kind of movie.
Throw logic, good sense, and good taste out the window. Throw out any imaginative interpretation of any urban legend you've ever heard. Silvio Horta's screenplay's got your bare bones versions of some, and that's it. We're put on the college campus of Pendleton University, population a bunch of students who look like models. Director, Jamie Blanks, does a great job a creating a fun, yet horrific atmosphere, making it feel as if Pendleton is on an island surrounded by a vast sea of forested, northeast horrorscape, a regular Miskatonic. Christopher Young's sweeping gothic soundtrack enhances this feeling all the more. Yet this movie is just so very, very dumb.
Alicia Witt stars as Natalie, a young woman with some untold past trauma who seems to be the only one to notice that things seem amiss at Pendleton. It seems to her that bodies are piling up, and no one cares. Jared Leto's campus reporter, Paul, thinks the campus has a dark history that's been covered up, but the school administration doesn't want him looking into it. Natalie's other friends, Rebecca Gayheart's Brenda, Michael Rosenbaum's Parker, Joshua Jackson's Damon, and Tara Reid's Sasha, just want to party! Are maybe, just maybe, one of them just wants to murder!
The pieces are here for a fun time, and the movie, at best, is dumb fun. Unfortunately, it's often too dumb, and it feels like only Gayheart, Jackson, and sometimes Rosenbaum understand just what kind of movie they're in. At worst, which the movie is at often, Urban Legend feels like a low-rent Scream knockoff, with an excellent musical score and atmosphere that's completely wasted (along with an appearance by the original Freddy Krueger himself!), befitting its movie poster that features the classic symmetry of "six character heads + make room for boobs."