John Neville – Through the Shattered Lens

I’m not always successful, but I spend a fairly large part of my life trying to make my wife happy. One of the ways I do that is I try to find movies for us to watch that she will enjoy, and that I will have at least some interest in. So anytime I can find a movie starring Alicia Witt, most notable in our household for her voluminous work with the Hallmark Channel, I’m definitely heading in the right direction. I was looking through her filmography on IMDB the other day and noticed she was in URBAN LEGEND. I remember the movie coming out in the late 90’s, but I had never seen it, and I had no idea she was the primary lead! It being the spooky season, I thought now was the perfect time for the two of us to cuddle up on the couch with some popcorn and enjoy the show!

Alicia Witt is Natalie Simon, a student with a dark, secretive past, who begins to suspect that a series of gruesome murders on the campus of Pendleton College are being committed by a killer obsessed with “urban legends.” Each murder seems to take a cue from those scary stories that pretty much all of us grew up hearing, and maybe even believing. As her friends are being picked off one by one, Natalie must do everything to find the killer before she becomes the next victim!

I must admit I had fun with this one. We watched it on a night where we just wanted to relax and see a bunch of obnoxious college students getting whacked in a variety of ways while we try to figure out who the killer is. I remember when SCREAM came out back in 1996 when I was 22 years old. Like so many others, I saw it in the theater and loved it. URBAN LEGEND is in that same tradition. It gives us some suspicious characters and some interesting murders inspired by stories I heard as a kid, and that late-90’s nostalgia kicked right in for me.

It was also fun looking back at the popular young cast whose careers have gone a variety of ways since the movie was made. Along with Witt, our cast of potential killers and victims include Jared Leto, Rebecca Gayheart, Joshua Jackson, and Tara Reid. I really enjoyed seeing veteran genre actors pop up as the movie goes along. The opening scene with Brad Dourif is very effective and lets us know immediately that we can’t trust our normal expectations. Robert Englund is also on hand to provide a creepy and suspicious professor. Heck, Danielle Harris is also in the cast, which was right at the beginning of her extensive career in horror movies.

Until I watched this movie, I didn’t realize just how universal some urban legends really are! A couple of freaky ones I remember as a kid include the story of the gang initiation where potential members drive around with their lights off just waiting for someone to flash their lights at them. Even more disturbing is the one where someone hides under your car ready to slice your Achilles tendon. Each of those stories are represented here. Building a scary movie around those legends, and many more, is a darn clever idea, and I enjoyed seeing what the filmmakers might come up with next.

URBAN LEGEND isn’t a horror masterpiece. It’s not very original, and it’s full of dumb characters making dumb decisions. But I still had a good time with it. For me, it’s a fun little slasher that takes an interesting premise and provides a few cheap scares. And most importantly, it made my wife happy, and that means a lot!

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Oh please, Harvard Man sucks.

I watched this 2002 film for one reason and one reason only. It stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and I used love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, now that I think about it, my love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer has led to me watching a lot of really bad movies. Seriously, somebody give Nichols Brendon a role in a good movie and do it now! I’m tired of reading about him getting arrested at conventions.

But anyway, in Harvard Man, Sarah plays Cindy Bandolini, a student at Harvard. Her father is a gangster and he’s played Gianni Russo, who is best known for playing Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather. Cindy is also dating the star of Harvard’s basketball team, Alan Jenson (Adrian Grenier). Cindy knows that Alan’s parents have just lost their farm to a tornado. She tells Alan that if he’ll throw an upcoming basketball game, her father will pay him $100,000. However, Mr. Bandolini isn’t really in on the deal. Instead, Cindy has set it up herself with the help of two of her father’s associates, Teddy (Eric Stoltz) and Teddy’s girlfriend, Kelly (Rebecca Gayheart).

But what Cindy doesn’t know is that both Teddy and Kelly work for the FBI. She also doesn’t know that Teddy and Kelly are engaging in threesomes with a philosophy professor, Chesney Cort (Joey Lauren Adams) and that Chesney is also having an affair with Alan.

Got all that?

Good. Of course, it doesn’t really make that much of a difference because Alan is such a passive character that you get the feeling that he really doesn’t care what happens one way or another. About halfway through the film, he takes a massive dose of LSD and he spends the rest of the film tripping while all of the various characters chase him across Boston.

And then Al Franken shows up, playing himself. As Alan wanders across campus, Al Franken walks up to him and says, “Hi, I’m Al Franken.” It turns out that the future senator is showing his daughter around Harvard and wants to ask Alan what the campus is like nowadays. As future President Franken speaks in his nasal tones, we get all sorts of fun distortion effects so, if you’ve ever wanted to see Al Franken with a big googly face, Harvard Man is the film for you. Al Franken’s scenes are, however, partially redeemed by the way that the actress playing his daughter rolls her eyes at her desperately uncool dad.

And, of course, while this is going on, we get random scenes of Joey Lauren Adams giving an endless lecture about ethics. Why, exactly? I imagine it has something to do with fooling critics like me and making us mistake Harvard Man for a movie with a brain.

Harvard Man is a pretentious mess of a film but it’s a fascinating example of what happens when every single role in a movie is miscast. Eric Stoltz and Rebecca Gayheart are the least believable FBI agents ever. You don’t believe for a second that short and scrawny Adrian Grenier could be a basketball star. Joey Lauren Adams comes across like she’d be lucky to teach at Greendale Community College, much less Harvard. Al Franken makes for a remarkably unconvincing Al Franken. And, as much as I loved her in Buffy, Cruel Intentions, and Ringer, I do have to say Sarah Michelle Geller is one of the least convincing Italians that I have ever seen on-screen.

Harvard Man is an incredibly bad film but at least you get to see Al Franken with a googly face,