Okay, so who saw Scream, had a couple of beers, and decided it would be fun to write a screenplay?

I should have known what I was in for when the preview actually boasted "from the makers of I Know What You Did Last Summer."

So the basic premise is that we have a killer who is using urban legends to kill his victims. Fair enough. Our first story is the guy in the backseat of the car with an axe.

Okay, I'm with you.

We've all heard this story, and odds are it freaked us out at the time. A psychotic killer hides in the back seat of a car and chops up the driver when they are all alone. It's the stuff nightmares are made of.

Unfortunately, when we are forced to watch it actually play out in a movie, we suddenly realize that it is physically impossible to swing an axe from the backseat of a car and bury it in the driver's skull without being noticed!

Try it sometime, you can't do it!

I sure couldn't!

In Halloween we were all terrified of a psycho who hid behind a William Shatner mask. In Friday the 13th we all wanted to see what was behind the hockey mask, and in Scream we wanted to see who was behind the ghost face.

It all worked.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (shudder) stretched the boundaries of the thing with a scary fisherman. Okay, scary fisherman. I'll buy that I suppose.

Now Urban Legend comes along with a scary Eskimo? What the hell? It's like everybody in the whole movie is being chased by a crazed arctic Jawa or something.

Somebody went to the cat scare animal shelter for this movie. For the love of God people, does everybody in the heroine's whole world have to greet her by jumping in from offscreen and setting off an orchestra hit? Come on people! Do something that is actually suspenseful for once rather than just trying to startle us at our basest human involuntary response level.

And what's the deal with Jared Leto's eye kerning? The whole movie I just wanted to slam the cursor between those things and hit the space bar five times. He's only a few pica from being a cyclops.

I will say this though, Urban Legend has a good ending. Not a well written one by any means, but a satisfying one. If you are tempted to leave about twenty minutes into the film, stick around, the conclusion is worth it.

Urban Legend left absolutely no chance for a sequel.

No sir.

Not a chance.

Look for I Know What Urban Legend You Heard Last Summer in six months.

I think I'm getting old.

After about twenty minutes of this movie, I started to hear "What-EVER!" appended onto every line that everybody said. Teenagers freak me out.

I like to think that I have a pretty good handle on pop culture, but I fear that my grasp on what the kids are into these days slipping away. Did you know that it was a joke when Damon tried to start his car and the radio came on? It was pointed out to me that that kid stars on Dawson's Creek, and the song on the radio was the theme song. I didn't get it. These kids today and their television sets and their transistor radios...

Was it just me, or was anybody else influenced to run out and buy a LOT of Noxzema after they saw this movie. Wow! What an ending! It almost made sitting through the rest of this horrible film worthwhile. Sure it didn't make sense logically that Rebecca Gayheart would have killed all those people who weren't involved with the crime that she sites as her motive, especially so long after it happened, but weren't you just ecstatic when you saw the Noxzema Girl pulling out a scalpel and poking it into Alica Witt's soft belly like Dr. Giggles? Worth the price of admission by itself.

But alas, a good story is like a good lawsuit. It needs precedents to hold up. Sure it was fun to see Ms. Sorority Sister Lois from Scream II turning into a frizzy haired psychopath, but it would have been even better if we had some clues that foreshadowed she might be the killer without giving it away.

That's good writing.

Bad writing is when a character is all sweet and nice and a little boy-crazy until the split-second where she suddenly becomes Mallory Knox. Speaking of which, I would have bought the eenie-meenie-miney-moe gunplay borrowed from Natural Born Killers if, again, it had been foreshadowed earlier in the film somehow. I keep talking Scream like it's the bible of teen horror flicks, but if Stu or Billy had done the same routine at the end of that movie, I would have accepted it because they were firmly established movie buffs.

I hope it was, in fact, a reference to NBK, and they didn't just hope that we wouldn't notice that we've seen it before.

And don't even get me started on the epilogue scene. Couldn't they have just left it at the body floating in the river and started writing their shitty sequel from there? No, they have to have this pointless last chapter to drive home the terrifying irony of the whole thing.

Where did this thing take place? From the looks of it, it was in the same college recreation area that the kids had been at the beginning of the movie, and from the looks of ol' Brenda, it had to be about a week later. Did nobody remember her? Was everybody out of town when the slayings took place?

And what ever happened to that poor stuttering gas station guy? Is he still in jail at the end of the movie? Way to tie up those loose ends.