Movie Review - Urban Legends: Bloody Mary

I think we're all familiar with the urban legend of Bloody Mary. Go in your bathroom when it's late at night, turn off the lights, possibly light just a single candle, and perform circus tricks until Bloody Mary appears. The exact ritual to summon this so-called Bloody Mary has many variants. Are you supposed to turn thirteen times? Are you supposed to chant "Bloody Mary" three times? Are you supposed to exclaim, "Mary Worth, I killed your child?" Or are you supposed to fool yourself into thinking there actually is a Blood Mary?

Yeah, it's all bogus. But for some reason I'm fascinated with the Bloody Mary urban legend. Ever since I first learned about it when I was around ten-years-old, Bloody Mary has been an intriguing concept to me. Maybe the urban legend fascinates me because of how scary it could be if it were real. Just imagine it: you can summon a supposedly vengeful spirit via your bathroom's mirror? Awesome!

But like I said, there's really nothing to it. It's just a ritualistic test of courage and bravery. There aren't really any consequences for chanting at the mirror; it's all about working up guts to chant in the dark in the first place. But even if the urban legend is just that, an urban legend, it's a fascinating slumber party dare. In fact, there have been quite a few adaptations and parodies of this urban legend, most notably the horror film Candyman and the South Park episode "Hell on Earth 2006." In this episode, Bloody Mary is replaced with the late rapper Biggie Smalls. If you're interested, you can read more about the Bloody Mary urban legend here.

Have I ever attempted the ritual? Once, and something did happen: my feet got tired from standing and waiting. But otherwise nothing of note occurred. But to be honest, I'd rather stare at my reflection in a mirror for an hour and a half than to watch this movie. Let's just get Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005) behind us right now!

Have you ever watched a movie that you knew would be terrible just because of how the title looks? This is one of those movies! Check it out.



This can't be serious! This is the title card?! Are we watching a horror movie, or an average kid's submission to film editing 101?



Oh, okay. The "Bloody Mary" subtitle wasn't fully put into place when I made the last screen capture. But still, this font doesn't strike me as particularly scary. In fact, it reminds me too much of computer-based classes. Either way, this movie already is in trouble if the title cards are laughable.

The film opens with a shot of the graveyard, for no reason, and instantly jumps to a Salt Lake City high school circa 1969. Remember that year, guys? Good times, right? A trio of friends, Mary, Grace, and Gina, all have dates with three popular jocks in their high school. They attend homecoming. Give the filmmakers credit for trying to make the homecoming as stereotypically 60's as possible! Mary's date apparently dumped his old flame to be with Mary. Dawn, the old flame, looks on with disgust.



Unfortunately, this movie hammers in the fact that all high school jocks are evil, conniving and amoral. For example, take the girls' dates: they spike their drinks. That's right: they slip Mickey!



Mary doesn't drink, but that won't make a difference as we'll find out. The roofie must taste good, because Grace and Gina down their drinks immediately. Then a song plays in the homecoming, a hilariously cheesy song that tragically remained in my head after I finished watching this movie. Remember this song, folks! Mary and her friends are taken by the jocks to a car. Because Mary didn't drink she is very aware of the situation. Dawn is there to taunt Mary, and Mary knees her 'date' in the groin. She runs back into the school. At least, she tries to run, but she runs very slowly. I could walk faster than her run! You don't need high heels, Mary; you're in danger. Just take off your shoes if they're slowing you down so much! Whatever, at least you'll definitely do something smart, like go back to the homecoming and seek help. There's safety in numbers, after all!



... Or you could run into a dead end storage room like the stupid moron you are. That works for the film, apparently! The jock corners her and grabs her. Mary bites his knuckle something fierce, and the jock Falcon-punches her. Mary spins, strikes her temple on the edge of a desk, and apparently dies instantly. Wow, that must have been a serious punch if she died that easily! The jock panics, and places Mary in a large chest. He locks said chest, and that is how Mary became missing circa 1969.

Yes, this Mary is our film's "Bloody Mary."

This sequence is revealed to be a scary story told by three weird-looking girls at a slumber party. The ugliest chick of the three is the most skeptical.



Samantha is the film's heroine, and she and her two friends talk about Bloody Mary. Meanwhile, Samantha's mother talks to her husband (but not Samantha's biological father), Bill Owens. Bill Owens is running for mayor!



This whole scene serves as exposition: the mother and Bill reveal to the viewers that the three girls are staying home instead of going to a homecoming dance. The three girls expose that, because of Samantha's outspoken newspaper entries and her out-of-context use of an embarrassing picture of three popular jocks from their grade, the three girls are marked men. They couldn't secure a date to homecoming at all because of Samantha.

The girls then talk about the actual, actual Bloody Mary urban legend. The Ugly One even namedrops Candyman while criticizing the Bloody Mary urban legend. Big mistake, guys; never, never, never directly mention a better movie in your crappy movie, or else the audience will want to jump ship and watch the superior film! Don't pull an Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.

The three girls lie on the floor and engage in one of the film's many painfully goofy scenes. Samantha says "Bloody Mary" three times between pauses, and each time they erupt in giggles that were obviously inserted during post-production via ADR. It's ridiculous. Just because Sammy says "Bloody Mary" they giggle like airheaded simpletons! If they're that easily amused by two words, then perhaps they should try some other words.

"Canned peas!" [giggles] "Rear-view mirror!" [giggles] "Basketball hoop!"[giggles]

Already this is the big showstopper for me. These girls are so ecstatic and giddy over just saying Bloody Mary, on the floor, nowhere near the damn bathroom! WHY ARE THEY SO EASILY AMUSED BY THE NAME BLOODY MARY?!



Just like Betelgeuse, Mary appears outside of the house after Samantha's giggle-inducing chant. What? The urban legend specifically requires you to be inside the bathroom, in front of the mirror. What the hell? But Mary doesn't enter the house; it's David, Samantha's fraternal twin brother. In basic terms this means that although they're twins, they are not identical. David mentions Candyman, and claims that it ripped off Bloody Mary, not the other way around. So this movie not only mentions a better film, but it has the gall to bag on it? Sheesh. David returned from homecoming out of boredom. The teenagers further cement the fact that the jocks blacklisted the girls because of Samantha's newspaper article with the embarrassing picture.

Here's a fun fact: if you fear for a picture that could damage your public image, then.... don't take any pictures of yourself that could damage your public image. That's easy enough.

Later, the girls are lying on the floor and attempt to sleep. Someone, or something, makes a noise and is about to enter the house. The girls scream and we immediately cut to the following morning, where Samantha and David's mother is at a blender. Mommy and David have a very freaky exchange. Especially freaky is the mother's nonchalant comment.

Mother: "So, how was it?"
David: "Just like yours, I'm sure."
Mother: "Something tells me you didn't wake up naked in Tijuana."

Whoa. This mother either has an awesome sense of humor, or.... she's awesomely blunt and honest. Wowzer! It's evident that David dislikes Bill. The child disliking the stepmother/stepfather is common, and it's seen here in full effect.

But a bigger problem is immediately discovered: Samantha and her two friends are missing! What follows is a montage of cheap camera fades. The characters constantly talk about the missing girls and walk around, all while the camera fades into different cuts. I get it, time is passing! You don't have to show off a basic camera technique you just learned.

Unfortunately, the girls are still missing even when David goes back to school. In his class, two jocks exchange notes that ask, "Do you think the girls are okay?" A third jock takes the letter and crumples it, and sits with his girlfriend. His girlfriend, Heather, asks, "Do you think they'll be okay?" "Yeah," is what the jock answers.

After school, Samantha returns home! Samantha and her friends don't remember what happened (yet), but they woke up in the basement of an old abandoned mill, and escaped. They had Rohypnol in their system but were not abused in any significant way. They were just abducted. Odd...

Do you think it could be the jocks who kidnapped them and placed them in the mill because of Smantha's newspaper? Gee!

Samantha tries to do her homework, but she can't focus. She is haunted by Mary. The first thing one immediately notices is that Mary is not scary.



Believe it or not, Samantha is frightened by this patently unscary apparition. But guess what? The jocks were the culprits. How shocking. Samantha remembers, and David is furious. David tries to threaten the jocks, but the jocks and their self-appointed leader scoff.

One of the jocks heads to a tanning salon, and finally this is when the film resembles a slasher film. He enters the tanning salon, at the time being run by a stereotypically ditsy valley girl. Make a drinking game of her; drink every time she says "Shut up!" and "Totally!" This woman is either really good at portraying horrendously awful, airheaded broads, or she's just a really bad actress. This jock gets in a tanning bed, while the chick sets the appropriate temperature and talks on the phone with her, like, OMG BFF. The same song that played at Mary's ill-fated homecoming 'mysteriously' plays, as the tanning bed's temperature 'mysteriously' increases drastically, to the maximum degree. The jock fries to death.

Here's my question: what tanning salon has "extra crispy" as a setting? Do tanning salons really have such extreme temperatures? I'm not familiar with tanning salons, so if anyone can vouch for them please tell me. Otherwise I find this hard to believe.

At the funeral, the head jock glares at David. He's convinced that David is the murderer. After the service, Samantha eavesdrops on her high school's Coach Jacoby laying a flower on a gravestone marked Mary Banner.

That night, Heather comes over to Samantha and David's house, and enters through the back door. I guess the front door is unpopular in this film, because the back door is used frequently! Anyway, Heather brings homework for Samantha, as well as exposition. "I know things have been difficult for us. It was so much easier when we were kids. God, Samantha, we were so close. What happened to us?" Maybe what happened is you became the girlfriend of a total schmuck. Heather then tries to excuse the prank as mild at best. I don't care what you say, if you drugged me and placed me in a locked abandoned mill, I will do everything in my power to press charges. There is a difference between a prank and trauma. I make pranks all the time. That is not a prank.

But there's another reason why Heather is in this scene. Heather says, "This has all happened before. We'll talk about it tomorrow. Make sure you do your history homework. I'm sorry." Samantha opens her history textbook and finds an envelope slipped in, an ominous envelope sent to Heather.

What follows is another death scene. Heather is sleeping at night, and above her bed is a rather unsettling doll. What should crawl out of the doll's mouth but a spider! But this spider isn't the least bit scary. You know why? Because it's obviously CGI! I mean, ridiculously CGI. Without a sense of realism, I'm not disturbed by this at all. And I'm arachnophobic! Because it's low-quality CGI and not realistic at all, this spider doesn't unsettle me in the least. Sadly, the CGI special effects in this movie are dreadful, and that's a shame because if the special effects were realistic, this next death would've been pretty cool. Heather wakes up the next morning to her alarm clock. What song does her alarm clock play? Why, the same song that played at Mary's dance and at the time of Tanned Jock's death, of course! Heather gets up, puts on her shoes and takes off her bra (?). But her back is turned on the camera. Heather, you're supposed to be facing me when you get ready in the morning, you know? It's not too late to redeem yourself! Just turn around and--oh, you just put on a new bra. Okay. Whatever. Wait a minute, you put on a new bra but not a new underwear? Um... gross.

Anyway, Heather combs her hair at a mirror, and notices an unsightly growth on her left cheek. She attempts to pop it.



It gets better for our next victim! The spider crawls out of the burst skin, and crawls around Heather's face before she stomps and kills the spider.



But that doesn't work, because then a nest's worth of spiders exit Heather's flesh and crawl all over her body!



Samantha arrives at Heather's house, and tries to get inside. By now we're all wondering where the hell are Heather's parents, because they're obviously not there and they only make one non-speaking cameo later on. But whatever. While Samantha bangs on the door, Heather is inside, antagonized by the spiders. Heather then slams her head against the mirror, but I don't know why. Was it the spiders that made her do that, or did she bash against the mirror by her own will? It's never explained, but who cares? As the spiders continue to crawl all over her body, Heather realizes that she has two large shards of mirror glass stuck in her temple. She scrapes the glass from her head, but in the process she, quite literally, tears her face off, as even more spiders escape through her naked forehead. She bleeds and cries and cries until she finally dies. Samantha finally figures to use a different means of entrance, but she's way too late. She sees Heather's body and the spiders.

This is probably the best and most creative death in the movie, but it's ruined because 1) what urban legend is this? I never heard of it! And 2) the CGI spiders are ugly. Couldn't they have used some real spiders? Obviously it makes sense to have a CGI spider leave Heather's face, but what about when they're crawling over her body? Why not use any delena cancerides? Those spiders are ugly as sin and large, but they're harmless to humans. It worked wonders for the movie Arachnophobia, so why couldn't a similar treatment work here? The CGI is just ugly and breaks the would-be illusion.

Actually, this movie would have still sucked if the special effects were better. Never mind.

At Heather's funeral, the leader jock glares once again at David and Samantha. At science class the following day, Samantha sits between her two friends. You know, the ones who were kidnapped? The three girls that were kidnapped, yet two of them were borderline written out of the film entirely and only one remained important? Those two, yup! Unfortunately, Samantha's friends obviously snub her; they get up and move to a different seat. At first I wondered why, because they should be comforting each other after what they been through together, right? But now I believe that the two friends blame Samantha for what happened, because it all started with Samantha posting that picture in the newspaper. Still, this sudden change of attitude doesn't exactly settle well with me.

Oh, and Bloody Mary appears behind Samantha for a second before Samantha looks again, finding nothing. And, yes, Bloody Mary looks as goofy now as she did before. Movie, you can do this all you want; a girl who kinda looks like Johnny Depp and wearing white makeup with a fake gash on her head is not scary.

The remaining jocks (two) talk to each other, and agree that the Owens are behind this. But who's eavesdropping on the conversation? None other than Coach Jacoby! Remember him from Tanned Jock's funeral, where he placed a flower on Mary's gravestone? Oooh, the plot thickens.



By the way, it should be noted that Coach Jacoby always wears black. Remember that.

Let's meet our next victim!



He is instructed to bring gas cans to Leader Jock. Rocky Horror Jock is stopped on his way there by an apparition of Mary, unscary as ever. She vanishes as soon as Rocky Horror Jock gets out of the car, of course, so he discredits the encounter as a trick of the light.

Now, this death is by far my favorite in the movie, just because of how ridiculous, short, and unpretentious it is. A chronic drinker, Rocky Horror Jock has to take a leak. Where does he decide to take a leak? By a high voltage electric fence.

Yes, you read me right! Clearly this idiot was never fortunate enough to watch The Ren & Stimpy Show.



As Rocky Horror Jock lets fly, his car's radio mysteriously activates. Guess what it plays? The song that plays whenever a character dies! What else? Rocky Horror Jock shrugs it off and continues to urinate. Just how much was he saving in his bladder, anyway?

People, I don't know for sure if the whizzing on an electric fence myth is true or not (I haven't watched that Mythbusters episode). But just to be safe, wouldn't it be a good idea to do your business anywhere that doesn't have a DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE sign? That'd be like, "Hey, there's raw sewage on this ground. Let's put a lemonade stand here!" Buffoons, I say. I wonder what kind of voltage we're looking at here, anyway. Say, 1.21 gigawats?



And wouldn't you know it, the fence is activated, and Rocky Horror Jock becomes a Roman candle! Electrocuted, he dies even before he lands on the ground. He peed himself to death.



We jump from one urban legend to another! Have you ever heard the one about the guy who was drinking a bottle of beer, and found a ringed finger in said bottle? No? Neither have I. But it's in this movie! Rocky Horror Jock's ringed finger is cut off and nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, classes are canceled! Yay! Samantha and David finally talk about the envelope Heather had left Samantha. It's a clue about Mary Banner. In order to find more information about the two found friends of Mary Banner (remember, Mary was never found!), they have to break into the school and use a computer. Why couldn't they use their own? "Because we have dial-up!" Okay, I guess that's reason enough to break into a school. Heh. Breaking into a school instead of breaking out. They find out that Gina, one of Mary's friends, committed suicide. Fortunately, Grace is still alive. Coach Jacoby suspiciously enters and demands them to leave. The fraternal twins arrive at Grace's house.



Hey, look! Grace Taylor kinda looks like Foxy Brown. David even makes this direct connection. Grace is a reeferhead, exploitation poster child, and can draw future events. Amazing what losing a best friend can do to you! Grace believes that Mary is responsible for the murders. Holy crap, you mean a character in this movie actually knows what's going on? Grace pulls a Darth Vader and says that Mary's life force is strong. The big reveal: the victims are the offspring of the jocks who wronged Mary and her friends. "But that's impossible! Why would [Mary] be killing us? Why not just go after the people who actually did this to her?" Samantha asks. "The children will always suffer the sins of their fathers," replies Grace. Mary and David are safe, though; Dawn is not their mother, so they won't be killed by Mary. Nice!



Samantha and David leave. Samantha believes Grace, but David is more skeptical. David did swipe some of Grace's paintings; the handwriting on the paintings matches the handwriting on the paintings perfectly, and the depictions of the artwork uncannily match the recent events.

Samantha and David fear for Buck (the name of Leader Jock)'s safety. That's nice; even though Buck committed an evil prank on Sam and her family, the Owens twins still feel for the amoral jock.

Samantha and David find Buck at the high school parking lot. What a great place to chill with a beer can, right? On school grounds! There Buck confesses that he and his buds did, in fact, pull the prank on Samantha and her all-but-forgotten friends. Buck reveals something more: his father is Coach Jacoby, and Coach Jacoby was (fasp!) one of the jocks of the 1969 incident! It was Coach Jacoby who told Buck how he and his buds would have handled Samantha after the newspaper episode. Jeez. Buck decides to take his dog and leave town until the murders blow over. Samantha and David return home, and Bill Owens (their stepfather) expresses great concern over what's going on.

Buck and his dog are staying at a seedy motel room for the night. Buck's girlfriend and close buds have been brutally killed. How does he cope with this? By watching pornography on a TV with crap reception, of course! Haven't you ever done the same?! Buck is drinking beer and eating chips, but he runs out of chips and goes to the candy machine outside. He reaches his hand in and--okay, we know what urban legend is this. But surprisingly, the falling machine doesn't kill him! He avoids it entirely. There's a very random dog farting joke when Buck returns to the room (?), and he allows said dog to lick his hand one more time before he falls asleep.

Later, Buck wakes up and lowers his hand, allowing his hand to be licked by what he assumes to be the dog. One unscary ghost face on the TV later, Buck hears dripping noises in the closet. He gets up, opens the door, and finds his murdered dog, hanged and dripping in blood. In his fright, Buck looks to a message written in blood: "People can lick too." That's yet another urban legend.

Buck tries to exit the room, but the door is locked! BOOKMAN!!! DAMN YOU, BOOKMAN!!! Actually, it's Mary. A song plays on the TV, and you know what song it is by now. So let's cut the nonsense and get straight to the death. Mary now appears more grotesque than she did in the past for some odd reason, but is still not scary. The stock scare tactics employed (jump cuts, cheap special effects, closeups, growling) are tired and boring. Mary shows Buck his beer bottle, and Rocky Horror Jock's ringed finger is in it. Buck screams for the last time, before Mary shatters the beer bottle and uses it as the murder weapon.

The next day at school... okay, the students in this school must be frightened. Four murders within a week? Anyway, Samantha and David bump into Samantha's two friends from the beginning of the movie. Yeah, remember them? The two characters who were abducted along with Sam, but were practically written off? These two friends spend their last minute on camera to give the twins the news: Buck is dead. Coach Jacoby is crying.



David wants the mystery to be solved, and he still doesn't believe that Mary is the murder. However, he wants hard evidence. So on his own he drives to Grace's house once again. Grace finally gives a vital clue when David compares Grace's appearance with Foxy Brown. If you want to find the culprits from 1969, look up the school archives.

And no one thought of doing this sooner, because...?

Meanwhile, back at the Owens Residence! Samantha is going through all of her pictures, intending to find a clue or something. But then her storage chest starts shaking, and Samantha has a vision: Mary Banner is locked in the chest in the school storage, and crying for Willy (her amoral date) to free her. Samantha gets closer to the chest in her room, opens it, and suddenly finds herself in another vision: she is sitting on the floor in the school's storage, and the chest opens up to reveal Mary. The light has a strobe effect which is annoying. Did the movie's props and effects come straight from Spencer Gifts? Mary crawls out of the box, and wiggles her fingers in front of Samantha and--

HOLY MOLY, DOES THIS MOVIE SUCK! I HATE THIS GODAWFUL FLICK!

"BOOGIE BOOGIE BOOGIE!"

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Could this movie insult an audience's intelligence any further? What am I, two? You're having Mary wiggle her fingers at the camera? Seriously? Just who the hell do you think I am, you sad bucket of snot? Do you think I'm a soulless bum who gets scared over waggling fingers? Why aren't you taking it one step further, Mary, and drape a bed sheet over your body and go, "OooooOOOOooooo?" This is the pits. This is really, really awful.

After this pathetically wimpy vision, Samantha attempts to call David. But David doesn't answer his cell phone because he found old photographs of Mary and her friends, as well as their dates. Looking through that year's yearbook, David realizes that Mary's date was "Holy [crap]!" Yeah, he doesn't say. He knows, but he doesn't say. He leaves the school and heads back home.

Samantha goes to Grace, and Grace tells Samantha that Mary must be properly buried. Although Mary has a gravestone, Mary's body isn't in the grave. It's still missing. Samantha has an idea of where it could be.

David goes back home (a stupid idea, in my opinion) and searches for Samantha, but she's not there. He grabs a baseball bat and searches the house. Samantha calls and leaves a voice message, but the phone is hidden. When David finds the phone, a man in black clothes and a concealing hat plus hoodie suffocates David with a plastic bag, as Samantha leaves crucial details in the voicemail.

Samantha convinces Grace to drive her to the high school. Samantha sneaks in and locates the storage room. She breaks off the lock, opens the box, and finds Mary's corpse inside.

Are you freakin' kidding me?!? You mean to tell me that for nearly forty years, that box has been left completely alone, and Mary's corpse was never discovered?! That is such BS! The corpse would smell, but even if you think the smell isn't a good enough argument, then how about this? This is a storage room, for crying out loud! You mean to tell me that for four decades, no one even gave that mysterious crate in a public school's storage room a second thought?! That's the dumbest crap I ever heard from a movie in a long time! I can't let that slide, that's just way too far-fetched. It's stupid!

"But, Joe!" someone might argue. "What about 'The Crate' in Creepshow?"

Okay, that story in Creepshow can be excused. I can buy it. Why? The crate was in a college, yes, but it was in a much more secluded location. It was under stairs and well hidden in the shadows, beyond a grate that had to be removed in order to get to the crate. Not to mention it was only by extreme chance that a janitor discovered it. This storage room is completely different; this is just pushing it way too much for me.

Samantha bundles the corpse and avoids the man in black, the same man in black who killed David. Samantha is convinced that the man is Coach Jacoby. Samantha returns with Mary's body to Grace's Mystery Inc. Machine.



Grace is either heavily asleep or dead, because she doesn't stir or wake up at all. Samantha puts the body in the car and gets in the driver seat just in time to lock the door, which is great because the man in black arrives and claws at the door and window. On the way to the cemetery (Mary has to be buried, remember), Samantha calls stepdad Bill on the phone, and tells him where she is. The mother is mentioned, but vaguely; we don't know where the hell the mother is at the point. Once at the cemetery, Samantha leaves the motionless Grace in the van and takes the body to Mary's would-be grave. She starts digging when Bill shows up. Bill is the bad guy and Mary's date.

This isn't revealed until about a minute later, but it's so incredibly obvious, it's not even a spoiler. For one, his reaction is practically a comical "RUH-ROH!" when he sees Mary's corpse, and his vocal tone isn't trustworthy when he speaks to Samantha. So, yeah, Bill is the culprit who killed David, and aims to kill Samantha. He hits Samantha on the head with the shovel, but she doesn't black out. Before Bill can do more damage, Grace finally comes to and intervenes. She fights Bill as much as she can, but she's no match for the bad acting stepfather. He punches her in the face and she's out. Again. So much for that! He takes the shovel and hunts for Samantha, who ran deeper into the graveyard to hide.

"Samantha!" Bill exclaims as he searches for his stepdaughter. "Come on, sweetheart! I don't wanna hurt you! I just wanna talk!" Thankfully, Samantha isn't that stupid, and she remains elusive. "Samantha!" continues Bill. "I'm sorry I hit you! I... I have a problem with anger management, but I'm okay now!" HAHAHAHAHA! What the hell? That line is so stupid that it's awesome. It's definitely the best line in the movie! Haha! Wow. "I'm sorry I hit you! I... I have a problem with anger management, but I'm okay now!" So funny.

And can you believe it? Bill continues talking! "What's gonna happen to your mother if I go to jail?" he asks loudly. "Because she won't have David anymore! Because David is dead!" That did it. Samantha attacks Bill at that time, but, surprise, she's no match. He literally kicks her senseless, and is about to kill her, when, suddenly...

It's that song again! This is bad, because that song is stuck in my head now. I've heard it so many damn times while watching this movie twice for this review that I can't forget about it. Yikes. If you're curious to know what song they keep running into the ground in this movie, look up "I Will Always Be There" by Niki Haris.

Back to the movie! The song plays, and Bill is screwed. Mary appears, just as she appeared in the 1969 dance. Samantha and Grace watch as Mary kisses Bill. But after the kiss, Mary becomes scary. In theory. I say in theory because, well, just look.



But get this: the movie's special effects get even worse! Mary opens her mouth and unleashes, uh, supernatural breath that surrounds Bill.



This movie sucks, yeah. Thank goodness it's almost over. Bill is pulled to his death by Mary, and Mary presumably rests in peace. "Far out," is all Grace can say. Samantha falls asleep. The next morning, police are at the scene. Samantha is bandaged, but she'll live. Bill is dead. Grace is still a hippie. And David is still dead. No, seriously. David doesn't come back or gets mentioned any further or anything! David is dead, and guess what? Samantha doesn't react at all. She didn't question Bill's comment, or bring up David, or anything.

"Oh, my twin brother was killed? You don't say. What's for breakfast?"

Screw this dreck! And you know what song they play over the credits? THE FRIGGIN' MURDER SONG! Jeez!

SIGH. This movie, I tell you. This movie represents the absolute worst of the horror genre. The acting is dreadful, the special effects are even worse, the characters aren't interesting... you know, I truly didn't care who lived and who died. Samantha and David just didn't strike me as memorable.

Not to mention one of the biggest problems with this movie: it's all over the place. The plot has more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese. The movie doesn't exactly explain why Dawn was in on the 1969 incident. Nor does the movie give proper credit to Samantha's two friends. She and her two friends were kidnapped and left in an old mill, and yet only Samantha remains a major character. Why have her two friends if they wouldn't be utilized at all? It's a waste; the film could have just easily focused on Samantha instead of the three girls, and the film probably would have been less muddy. I also don't like how Samantha didn't react to being told that David was killed. What the hell? You'd think she would at least call the house. And where was her mother? And where were Heather's parents when she was killed?

But here's my biggest complaint. Why is this Bloody Mary movie so... un-Bloody Mary-like? Mary Banner didn't start appearing until after her name was said three times after Samantha [giggle]. They never were in a bathroom with a mirror, for crying out loud! This isn't the Bloody Mary I know!

This is from the same director of Stephen King's Pet Sematary. That's surprising, because Pet Sematary is definitely a better film. But you know what's also surprising? This movie was written by the same people who wrote X2. Now that is a kicker!

The worst offense of all is one simple fact that kills any horror movie: the movie is just not scary.


Thanks to YTMND user Wo1f for the scary guitar riff in the video, and thanks to Amanda for the negative Weegee edit!

Yeah, I know, the Doc Brown quote isn't correct. That was deliberate.