This third entry in the Urban Legend series is the first to go direct-to-video and was directed by Mary Lambert, who helmed both of the Pet Sematary movies. It owes a some its plotting and imagery to Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II and The Ring respectively, but at the same time it manages to be the best of the trio and if you don't think too much about it and can forgive a few of the pretty predictable twists it's actually a highly watchable mix of ghost story and slasher.

Things start off in 1969 as a trio of high school footballers drug-up some girls during the homecoming dance. However, they didn't manage to get Mary (Lillith Fields) who is accidentally killed and stuffed into a trunk in the storage room.

We flash forward to modern day and three girls having a slumber party start trying to scare each other with tales of urban legends. The name "Bloody Mary" comes-up and when they say her name three times (c'mon tell me you didn't try this when you were a kid) they unknowingly unleash the vengeful spirit of the ghostly Mary. Soon the girls go missing and eventually we learn it was just a prank played on them by some of the jocks in the school that were mad at one of the girls, Samantha (Katie Mara), who wrote a nasty article about them in the school paper.

This being a horror movie soon the jocks and anyone associated with the pranks start to get killed off in gruesome ways that mirror various urban legends. One of them is quite nicely roasted alive in a tanning bed, the girlfriend of one of them is given an awesome send-off that involves spiders bursting from her face and other nastiness, and the rest die in various other ways. It's up to Samantha and her brother David (Robert Vito) to try and figure out why Mary is doing these deeds and, with the help of hippie lady Grace (Tina Lifford), try and put her spirit to rest.

While the story here is pretty routine and is at times logically shaky, Urban Legends: Bloody Mary succeeds where the first two movies in the series failed by offering us enough pleasing deaths, solid acting, and black humour to work as pure, mindless entertainment. Lambert keeps things moving fairly quickly, the young cast hold their own (Vito makes a good impression and delivers his comedic lines well), our ghostly Bloody Mary looks pretty cool (even if it's a riff on the young girl in The Ring), and it manages to breathe some life into the series by taking it in a somewhat new direction.

Originally intended as a stand-alone movie the only real complaint I have with this is how they've tried to tie-in the other two films in the series by using newspaper clippings and having a mysterious hooded figure show-up for the somewhat weak finale. But apart from that I had a lot of fun watching this and would recommend it to anyone willing to shut off their brain for 93 minutes and enjoy the mayhem. (Chris Hartley, 8/8/05)

Directed By: Mary Lambert.
Written By: Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris.

Starring: Katie Mara, Robert Vito, Tina Lifford, Ed Marinaro.