Slasher movies have been a Hollywood staple ever since John Carpenter proved you could make one cheaply, without major stars, and still score a runaway hit. Then Friday The 13th showed that audiences were willing to pay for more of the same (done with considerably less sophistication), and a cottage industry was born. By the time of Scream, the movies had become more than a little cartoonish, with machete-wielding hockey aficionados giving way to glorified Scooby Doo villains who gave lengthy speeches outlining their nefarious schemes. In its rush to replicate that films success, Hollywood left no stone unturned and created some of the most obnoxious villains that ever graced the screen. Take Urban Legend, whose bug-eyed female villain decides to avenge her boyfriends death by killing people using urban legends, including The Babysitter and the Tale of the Hook. When her identity is discovered, shes shot twice, thrown through a window, sent through a windshield at high speed and drowned, yet still manages to return in a surprise ending. With one scene of knockabout looning for every dose of effects-dripping monstrousness, wrote Kim Newman, the films provide the MTV generation with something to watch every 3 minutes but are unable to get seriously scary, or even seriously funny. Urban Legend seems mild compared to some of Hollywoods slasher movie missteps, most of which are so lame they dont even merit so-bad-theyre-good status.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
