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Urban Legend

The box-office success of Scream pumped new blood into the slasher-flick genre and sparked a wave of infectious imitators. Urban Legend stars Alicia Witt as a cynical coed on the reclusive campus of Pendleton College. After a classmate is axed (Natasha Gregson Wagner doing the Drew Barrymore honors in the film's one truly innovative sequence), Witt's Natalie becomes the focal point for the killer's grisly affections as she is witness to several student-body terminations. Of course the college's stodgy administration dismisses each incident as a hoax (when the bodies are nowhere to be found), an accident, or suicide. Only Jared Leto's student reporter, looking for his big story, lends Natalie an attentive ear.

The cast, made up primarily of beautiful young TV personas with marginal talents, does include Robert Englund (a/k/a Mr. Freddy Krueger) as a professor of contemporary myths and legends and Loretta Devine doing her best Foxy Brown as the head of campus security. The slick, noirish visuals also go a long way to hold this patchwork chiller together, but when the identity of the killer, who looks like an anorectic Nanook of the North, is revealed, Urban Legend swan-dives from potentially hip cliché into sheer ridiculousness.

-- Tom Meek