Urban Legends: Bloody Mary Movie Review

The Urban Legend series ran out of urban legends to play with about midway through the second film, but that hasn't stopped them from wrapping up the thing with a lame, yet not wholly unwatchable, third film.

A gang of nobodies populates the movie, which is only tenuously related to the prior two films. Here, the story is all about Bloody Mary (whose legend was critical to the first film), a spirit who would appear if her name was chanted three (or five) times while staring into a mirror. Urban Legends 3 tells us Mary's backstory: In 1969, she was drugged and inadvertently killed by her highschool dance date, and her body was locked in a trunk inside the high school.

Fast forward to today, when, for some reason, Mary's ghost has decided to get vengeance, only she's taking it out on the students of today (for reasons we'll discover later). Pity poor Samantha (Kate Mara), though: She's having cruel visions of Mary and her misdeeds. But no one will believe her!

While the former films have revolved around a serial killer who's using the urban legend motif to execute his crimes, Mary is content to jump right off into supernatural terror a la The Ring, a film which it mimics quite well, right down to the ghostly girl whose mystery must be solved to stop the curse. (It soon becomes blatantly obvious that the script has nothing to do with the actual Urban Legend series, and it was only through some tacked-on references that the movie became able to claim to be part of the series at all... thus, ostensibly, boosting rentals of the direct-to-video DVD.)

Surprisingly, the actors (largely unknowns) manage to rise above some really shoddy writing, which has both humans and ghosts behaving completely irrationally. The movie's third act twist, which offers a real-world killer working alongside Mary's spirit. He's obviously someone involved in the original murder of Mary, but how is killing people today going to help cover that up? And how come a rotting corpse, left in an unlocked closet in a high school, has gone undiscovered since 1969? Now there's an urban legend for ya.