Forgotten Frights is back! To celebrate the second anniversary of our annual horror movie roundup, every weekday for the next month we're going to sound off on a scary good sequel (or, if we want some cheese with our corn syrup, a schlocky second), ruminating on the returns of our favorite monsters, murderers, heroes (or heroines), creepies, crawlies, chills and thrills.
What came before it: Urban Legend. The 1998 slasher flick about a parka-clad killer offing college kids by bringing modern myths (i.e. Boyfriend Hanging from Tree, Kidney Heist) to life.
What remains: Aside from Reese (Loretta Devine), a.k.a. the best Foxy Brown-obsessed movie security guard ever, none of the original's characters return. Instead, we follow a set of film students (including Matt "Warner Huntington III/Alaric Saltzman" Davis, Once Upon a Time's Jennifer Morrison and Joey Lawrence) who are getting tortured by a new urban legend-obsessed killer in a fencing mask. What's more, Morrison's character has center her final year film on, you guessed it, an urban legend-obsessed killer.
Why it deserves a second (or third, or fourth) chance:
- Like the first one, it's straight-up PG-13 '90s slasher stuff. The kills are more clever than brutal and the costumes are laughably dated (what modern, pseudo-popular college girls rock pigtails legitimately these days?).
- In addition to Davis, Morrison and Lawrence, the all-star cast also includes Eva Mendes, Yani Gelman (Pretty Little Liars, The Lizzie McGuire Movie), Anson Mount (Crossroads) and Anthony Anderson.
- The urban legends used for the death scenes are more elaborate and, given the whole film within a film thing, meta. I particularly love the scene that takes place inside an abandoned mining ride. Are those body parts part of the shoot, or are they real?
- The opening sequence is a fun fake-out that could easily have been a jokey outtake of the plane scene from the first Final Destination film.
- Please just look at the poster and how it unintentionally matches our Forgotten Frights II logo.
- The ending ties everything together in the most campy way and features a surprise cameo. Don't get too excited though. It's not Robert Englund or Brad Dourif, who both made brief appearances as a professor and a gas station attendant in the first film.
- It won the Teen Choice Award for "Choice Horror/Thriller." I mean, how can you argue with that?
