Rated R Runtime: 93 minutes Release: 2005
Urban Legends: Bloody Mary
Warning: there are a few plot spoilers below.
The Story:
Its not a good thing when I can't stop thinking about how improbable something is within the first five minutes of a movie. As this flick opens we see a High School Homecoming Dance taking place in Utah, 1969.....a group of horny guys are putting the moves on a group of girls....and one of the girls seems to be the only black student at the school. In 1969.....and these girls are not only apparently good close friends with her, the guys are perfectly willing to get with her. Things like that are possible, sure, and its not like these people are Klan members or anything, but it sure made me think "That's highly unlikely.".
But I'm not concerned with commenting on race relations in some town in Utah in 1969. I'm concerned with what happens next at this fictional homecoming dance. Mary Banner and her friends aren't on the "in" crowd in their high school, but the football team jocks seem to have taken a shine to them. Well, its all a ruse. The jocks give the three girls they're with some spiked punch, but Mary doesn't drink hers. So when she sees the guys hauling her incapacitated friends into a car she realizes what's going on and runs for it. One of the jocks catches up with her a storage room in the high school and after a short struggle locks her in a trunk....where eventually she asphyxiates....
Welcome to the same town in Utah in the present. Samantha Owen and two of her friends (one of which, the blonde, looks waaaaay to old to be playing a high school age girl in any universe) are having a sleepover and telling, you guessed it, Urban legend stories....particularly about Bloody Mary, though they think it was ripped off from the movie Candyman. Sam's fraternal twin brother, David sets them straight on which came first. But its homecoming night and the girls aren't at the school's dance since they're not in the favor of the "in" crowd. Samantha herself is unpopular because she writes for the school paper and she printed a photo that I guess made the jocks look stupid. They're kind of pissed about it, and they pull a prank on Sam and her friends reminiscent of the one that happened to Mary Banner; Come morning, Sam's mother, her stepfather, Bill, and David can't find the girls. They've gone missing from the house but reappear a few days later claiming to have little memory of what happened. But Sam confides in David. Buck, Roger and a few of the other football jocks drugged them and dumped them at some remote location as a way to get back at Sam. David confronts Buck and his friends about the abduction, but they blow him off. Buck even tells his friends a bit later not to worry because "Those bitches won't tell anyone!".
Lets stop there for a moment, shall we. I want you to think about what I just wrote. I'm not making it up, that's what happened in the flick. *sigh*....do I have to go through how fantastically stupid this is already? Already I'm supposed to believe that these jocks somehow came into Samantha's house while her family was home, talked the girls into somehow taking some sort of date rape drug, while her family was home, spirited all three of them out of the house while her family was home to some far off location and just left them there for several days...and Samantha won't for some reason tell the police. Right. Was the director and the scriptwriter aware that kidnapping is a felony? We're to believe that even if Samantha won't say what really happened that her two friends wouldn't? No way, I'm throwing the bull[unwrite] flag on the play right now and this is in the first ten minutes of the movie.
The jocks are unconcerned about this, but they start to get concerned when they start dying. The ghost of Mary Banner comes back to town and she's out for revenge on the children of the jocks that caused her premature departure from this mortal coil. They all just happen to be the jocks that inhabit the present day high school. Roger gets Kentucky Fried in a tanning bed, some other guy, whose name I didn't get gets electrocuted while taking a whiz on an electric fence and Buck literally gets his ass kicked by Mary close up and personal. And just so we know that there are queen bitches in this movie too, Heather, a girlfriend of the jocks meets an untimely death at the hands....or rather....legs of about 300 spiders. Sam and David begin their own investigation of these strange deaths (Sam sees Mary's ghost several times, so she knows Mary is doing this, David is a bit more skeptical) which leads them to Grace, the only surviving girl from the 1969 prank. (The black chick)
Give me a straight up slasher movie over this any day. I can buy that a hockey masked misanthrope is killing obnoxious teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake more than I can buy that no one has solved Mary Banner's case. Even Grace, who is now a middle aged reefer smoking hoochie mama tells David he can find out who was behind the disappearance (and subsequent death) of Mary by looking at the archived photos of the '69 homecoming in the freaking school library! Grace also tells Sam that Mary's spirit will rest once she's properly buried. She has a tombstone and grave but her body is still in the trunk in the storage room in the high school. What the hell? So I guess in 30 plus years no one EVER went anywhere close to that storage room because I'm 100% certain that dead bodies stink really bad when they decompose.
The battleship sized plot holes I've already raved about are bad enough, but there are some things in this movie, that while minor, irk me even more. Like we're never told what happened to Mary's family? Surely they would have demanded an investigation, which of course would have ended up in Bill being caught as the one who locked her in the trunk. Oh, did I spoil that for you? I don't actually feel to worried about that because you'll know it's Bill way before you get to the end. One reason is because Mary calls him "Willy" in the flashback scenes and also because after the supernatural stuff starts happening you won't really see any other adults that have an integral part in the story. You know its not the coach, because his son, Buck even tells Sam that his father was one of the guys involved in the '69 crap but not the one that did anything to Mary. This is also one of those movie towns where people that grew up there NEVER leave. Do people actually stay in one town that much? I guess so, Grace did and she's the only black person in the entire movie.
Bloody Mary looks good, the effects are decent and the picture is crystal clear. Too bad they didn't try to fix the plot. Its a shame because this movie could have been a little bit scary....Mary's appearance reminded of the Ring a lot, but its too little piled up on too little.
Best Lines: “Far out!"- Grace when Mary's ghost makes her appearance.
Are you kidding me?
1.) Buck is mentally crippled. A girl insults him by saying he got 700 total on his SAT's and he gets mad and asks "What's that supposed to mean?". Buck it means you're an idiot and you just proved her point!
2.) I've never been in a tanning bed, it would be ludicrous. I'm black. But I'm not convinced as the movie would have it, that they are capable of Kentucky-frying a human being in a matter of minutes if turned up too high.
3.) There was a part in this movie where I really wanted Sam to just stand up and break her foot off in Heather's ass. Heather and Sam used to be friends, but Heather hangs out with the jocks now, and though she didn't have anything directly to do with them drugging Sam and her friends, she knew about it. Well, Heather tries to make peace with Sam claiming that no one was hurt during their prank, so Sam shouldn't be upset. Hello? Earth to Heather. They drugged Sam and essentially kidnapped her! David may have been unable to put Buck in his place, but if Sam were my sister and they pulled that kind of [unwrite], someone would have to be going out Godfather style.
4.) would you piss on a fence that has a sign saying "Danger: High Voltage" two feet away from you? If you would you deserve to get your dick lightning bolted off. They should have named this movie Urban Legends: The Darwin Awards.
5.) Utah must be on the wrong side of the millennium. David and Sam lament the fact that they need to use the school's internet connection because at home they only have a dialup. Damn, and they're step father is running for Mayor and they only have a dialup? I'm in the friggin' alps right now and I have DSL.
6.) What really makes this movie stupid is that it'd be too easy for almost anyone to solve the mystery. But that only makes you wonder why Bill finally snaps by the end and tries to do away with Sam and Grace. (He killed David for snooping to close already....ooops....hope I didn't ruin it for you) After all, NO ONE HAS BOTHERED TO FIND OUT THE TRUTH IN THIRTY FIVE YEARS! He could easily just say to anyone that asked "I don't know what happened to Mary Banner. she just ran off that night and I never saw her again!".
7.) If Mary's ghost wants revenge why didn't she go after Bill first?
Nudity and Sex: None.
Huh?:
Much to-do is made about Roger constantly going to the local tanning salon for a sun bath. But when we see him, he's well, white. As in like a sheet. I'd say the salon is ripping him off.
You're not very smart if you drink and drive. You're pretty stupid if you drink and drive and have a cooler full of beer in the bed of your pick up truck. You're a complete sh*thead if you drink and drive with a cooler full of beer in the back of your pickup truck and you put the empty cans in the bed too. Is this fool trying to get caught?
What I don't get is this...the jocks are mad at Sam because she made them look stupid or something in the school paper. Do jocks have that much power in High School? I knew a lot of them when I was in high school and they didn't seem that imposing to me.
At the end of the movie, Sam doesn't seem to upset that her fraternal twin brother was murdered by her stepfather. What a cold hearted bitch.
It happens a lot in these movies, and its always the same. Mary and her friends were unpopular in high school and ostracized. Sam and her friends are unpopular and ostracized. the problem is their all hot! Girls like that would have to have the personality of Gollum to be unpopular in High School.
Why is buck in a seedy hotel room drinking himself into oblivion before Mary comes for him. He doesn't know that there's a vengeful PMSing spirit out for his blood.....and isn't he like, in High School? Aren't his folks wondering where he is? I guess not since in this movie you can lock a girl up in a trunk in a high school and no one [unwrite]ing finds her for thirty five years.....
The Final Judgment: Though the movie looks good, and it has an okay premise, the plot holes and sheer ridiculousness of the situations really got my goat. The infernal Imps were throwing popcorn at the screen during the entire flick. they've decided on giving Urban Legend: Bloody Mary two devil heads.....and one is only because they at least had the guts to kill a dog for no good reason.
Starring: Kate Mara, Robert Vito, Tina Lifford, Ed Marinaro, lillith Fields
Directed by: Mary Lambert
Written by: Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris
