Rish Outfield's reviews
Generally, the tyranist and I agree on these horror movies, but every once in a while, there comes something like Urban Legend, a movie where we got something totally different out of the film. While tyranist found it to be a hip, entertaining, spooky, and well-made thriller, I found it to be bland, derivative, uninspired and mediocre film. While I found far too many items stolen from I Know What You Did Last Summer to be considered coincidence (for example, everyone has the same outfit as the killer, the red herrings that rang all-too-familiar, the killer's motive, and the whole urban legend aspect), he felt it was not a rip-off at all. While he liked several of the characters, there was only one that even approached likability in the film I saw (and it wasn't Alicia Witt). And while he seemed satisfied by the film, I saw an unoriginal, predictable, anti-climactic ending, and limped out of the theatre thinking, "Wow, I spent twelve dollars on...that." Now, I'm not saying that tyranist is completely wrong (although he thinks Deborah Foreman is a Scream Queen and I don't) and I'm completely right (the truth is probably somewhere in between), I just felt I needed to stress our differences. Besides, Siskel and Ebert disagree ALL the time, and they seem to be still very much in love. And the movie wasn't the worst I've seen, I just found it fair at best. Robert Englund is cool to see, right?
Best Scare: The two main girls do the traditional "Bloody Mary" chant, and ‘something' answers them.
I'd Recommend It To: Indiscriminate horror fans...especially those who can see it in the theatre.
Note: Perhaps I was overly critical in this review, as Urban Legend doesn't seem so bad next to most of the 80's slashers we've been watching lately.

The tyranist's thoughts
Before I get distracted, let me say that I thought this was actually a fun movie to watch. It wasn't particularly original or even frightening, but I had a lot of fun watching how they interpreted different urban legends. In a way I liked it as a fun return to the carefree slasher pics of yore. But on to business. Rish and I debated for at least a half an hour about whether or not this one gets a skull for "Owes everything to/rips off earlier film." It so clearly mimics I Know What You Did Last Summer and owes its very existence to that movie that it is almost a shoo-in for that category. If, however, you view Urban Legend as a particularly well put together sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer, the skull loses some of its meaning. The filmmakers were clearly trying to make a movie as similar but original as possible and we felt like they succeeded just enough to stave of the extra skull. Still, if you can't handle a lot of similarities between two films that are supposed to be different stay away.
P.S. (written about two months after the above)
Having finally seen I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and remembering my comments about Urban Legend I feel the need to say that I liked Urban Legend more than 'I Still Know' and feel completely vindicated in calling it a sequel to the first movie.