From Mary Lambert, director of the halfway decent Pet Semetary and the awful Pet Semetary II comes the third film in the Urban Legends series (it's really a sequel in name only, and the first to go straight to video), Urban Legends – Bloody Mary.

The film begins in 1969 where three young ladies are drugged at the homecoming prom by their jock dates. Mary Banner (Lillith Fields) manages to escape from them and runs back into the school, but her boyfriend gives chase and winds up cornering her in a back store room. He punches her, she falls down and knocks her head pretty hard. Panicked, he puts her in a chest in the corner of the room, locks it, and leaves her there to die alone.

Fast forward to 2005 and three brand new girls find themselves on the receiving end of some eerily similar treatment from a trio of football players. One of the girls, Samantha (Kate Mara of Nip & Tuck), wrote an article on how football players were awarded school credit just for showing up to practice and they didn't take too kindly to that. What did the big dumb jocks do in retaliation? On the night of the homecoming prom they drugged the three girls and left them in the basement of an old abandoned building, sending their friends and families into a panic.

Soon, the guilty parties start showing up dead in some rather unusual ways that seem to live up to a few of the tales that have been told as of late. You see, the three girls were having a slumber party and discussing urban legends, the legend of Bloody Mary in particular, and when they spoke her name three times they unwittingly unleashed the fury of the ghost of Mary Banner who is out to get revenge on the people involved in her death by killing off their children. Samantha and her brother, David (Robert Vito), track down the only remaining girl from that fateful night way back in 1969, Grace Taylor (Tina Lifford of Hostage), to see if she can help, but it might already be too late to stop Bloody Mary from exacting her revenge.

Pretty much a combination of Ju-On and Prom Night II, this one doesn't tread much new ground or really try anything we haven't seen before. The acting is decidedly average and the direction, while perfectly competent for a low budget straight to video horror film, hits us a few too many times with some rapid fire editing and reverse negative frames that instead of building suspense basically ruin whatever elements of tension where there in the first place.

The saving grace of the film comes in the form of a few grisly kill scenes. Bloody Mary lives up to her namesake when she ends up taking matters into her own hands and the death by spiders scene and the death by broken bottle scene are pretty gory, even if the spiders are obviously CGI (and poor CGI at that). There's also a death by electric fence scene in the film that impressed me so much (or at least, made me laugh so much) that I rewound to watch it twice. In the 'weird deaths' department, the film does deliver.

Sadly, that isn't enough to make this one much more than a standard slasher movie. The influence of the Japanese new wave of horror movie making is evident but unfortunately the subtlety usually associated with those films is thrown out the window in favor of some disposable characters, a predictable plot (I figured out 'whodunnit' about forty minutes in) and an over reliance on style over substance.

Video:

Urban Legends – Bloody Mary gets a 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that doesn't do a half bad job of representing the movie on DVD. There are a few scenes where the colors look to be intentionally muted and a couple of the darker scenes exhibit a bit more film grain than you might expect to see but other than that, the image is pretty clean. Some mild edge enhancement is present throughout but there aren't any problems with mpeg compression artifacts. Skin tones look realistic and natural and the bloody reds used throughout the film look distinct and strong.