Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (R)
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This 2005 direct-to-video movie is the third movie in the Urban Legend franchise, following The Final Cut. It's not really related in any way to either of the first two movies, though it does insert a vague allusion to the first one. But it's really different. For one thing, it's not really a slasher film, because it has a supernatural element. (I mean... slasher films can be supernatural, but this... I dunno, it's just different.) But it's also not really a supernatural film, because there's a real, live, killer. It's like the movie is trying to be both genres at once, without doing either one properly. Also... it feels like anything resembling urban legends are just shoehorned in, as an excuse to ride the coattails of the earlier movies. (One of the urban legends in this movie was even used in the previous movie, so here it's just redundant.) And as for Bloody Mary... I mean, she is the supernatural element, but the movie is so not about her. It really does the character a grave disservice.
Anyway, it begins in 1969, at a homecoming dance, or prom, or whatever. There are three jocks who give their dates drinks spiked with a date rape drug. One of them, Mary Banner, remains sober enough to see what's happening to her friends, and runs away. Her date chases her, and ends up accidentally killing her... apparently. He locks her in a trunk in a storage room, thinking she's dead, but we later learn she was still alive... and then died because she couldn't get out of the trunk. And the body isn't found for over thirty years.
The movie then flashes forward to the present, when we see that all that was a story being told by one of three girls having a slumber party, since none of them had dates to their own school dance or whatever. At this point, I first began to realize how horrible this movie is. It's like a cliched... whatever. The writing is terrible and it just seemed like it only existed to ogle the girls. I will say that after the slumber party, it did get somewhat better, though there were still plenty of scenes that just made me roll my eyes at how bad they were. Anyway, only one of the girls from the slumber party turned out to be a major character. That was Sam Owens (Kate Mara). She has a brother named David, and in a minor role, a mom named Pam (Nancy Everhard, who was vaguely familiar to me from Reasonable Doubts). Sam and David also have a stepfather named Bill. Anyway... the morning after the slumber party, the three girls go missing. It soon turns out that some jocks had kidnapped them as a prank, and the girls manage to get home. However, people involved in the prank start being killed, one by one. Sam and David begin investigating this, but meanwhile, the other kids at school seem to think the two of them are behind it. Sam has occasional visions of Bloody Mary, so it seems like the ghost of Mary Banner may be the one killing people. Personally, I had a different suspicion all along.
Well... I am failing to mention various characters of some importance. But I don't really think it matters much. The whole plot is just so ill-defined. I think it's safe to say that the ghost actually exists, and may have killed at least one person. But as I said, there's also a living killer. And I have no idea how many people were killed by the ghost and how many by the living person. Honestly, I'm not even sure the movie's writers know. Or care. (Which is extra sad because one of the writers is Mike Dougherty, of Trick 'r Treat fame. Seriously, he can do better than this.) But whatever. I've seen the movie, and I guess I've written my review, and now hopefully I never have to think about it again.