Directed by Mary Lambert

Starring Kate Mara, Robert Vito and Tina Lifford

In 1969, a high school girl named Mary Banner is killed in an accident at prom in 1969 and hidden in a trunk to hide the body.  Decades later, Mary’s ghost is freed when a bunch of silly school girls play “Bloody Mary” and wake her up.  

Some legends can’t be buried.

Forgoing the slasher roots of the two previous films in the series, Bloody Mary, as you’d expect, is more supernatural in nature and only works with just the one legend instead of using a bunch of legends that no one’s ever heard of before.  After the flashback opening establishes who “Mary” is, the film fast forwards 35 years later where a high school girl finishes telling the opening story to her friends at a sleepover.  The party gets spooky when one of the girls does the Bloody Mary chant and now we know who to blame when bad things start happening, right?  They pass out and wake up a day later not knowing what happened, though one of the girls, Samantha, with her brother, David, think it was a prank by the football team.

Sam and David delve further into the latest events and come upon a story from years past of the same thing happening in 1969, with girls going missing and showing up later.  Except for Mary, who was presumed missing.  Sam also conveniently has dreams where she learns more about Mary and the events surrounding her alleged disappearance.  Ugggh.  Meanwhile, several of the students involved in the latest prank are getting killed off in hilarious and gruesome ways.  Sam and David discover a connection between the two kidnappings except now there’s a masked man going around trying to silence anyone from spreading the truth.

A ghost, a terribly masked killer, a group of hot teens getting killed, plot revealing dreams and a secret cover up…this film has everything!  Everything you’ve seen before that is.  I think it was a bad sign early on to see the movie make the allegation that the film Candyman was just really the “Bloody Mary” story.  True,  people have been saying that since the movie came out but at least it made for a good, scary film!  Which is not something I can say about this film.  In fact, there are moments where the film almost slips into parody and did so seamlessly.  That’s not a good sign at all.

If there was one thing I can say that I enjoyed, and that’s not to mean you should watch the movie for this reason, it’s that the kills were at least funny as hell.  A girl not only has awful CGI’d spiders coming out of a cut in her cheek, but she then smashes her face into a mirror and has two gigantic shards sticking out of her head for her to then slice part of her face off.  One guy whizzes on an electric fence and gets blown ten feet away when the ghost turns on the power.  Another guy gets burned to a crisp in a tanning booth.  And maybe the oddest one was Mary, a ghost we are told, who uses a broken bottle to stab a victim multiple times.  Hilarious.

Aside from a few brief moments where the special effects weren’t too bad, there’s nothing about the film that can make me recommend it.  It’s dull, uninspired and unnecessary.  

TL;DR

Story: 2 – Ghost has beef about being dead, kills a few people until she gets saved.  The end.  Pffft.

Blood – 3 – Not terribly gory except for the mirror shards in the face, which doesn’t look great anyway.

Nudity: 7 – There are several scenes with girls showing off cleavage or walking around in their underwear.  Also a little bit of side boob.

Overall: 2 – I barely cared for the first film, hoped that a new angle could help the series but it’s just as bad as anything else in the trilogy.  Avoid it like the others.

Trivia

– The film was initially meant to be a standalone film but later got the Urban Legend title tacked on later in post production.

– Kate Mara’s sister Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) has a cameo as a student in the film.