Main cast: Leslie Durward (Rachel) and Jason Gaignard (Marcus Moore)
Director: Ethan Evans
The White Dress is a take on the urban legend of a young lady that buys a lovely dress from a vintage boutique, not realizing that it was worn by a corpse and sold off by an unscrupulous mortuary staff.
You know, the Chinese in my part of the world has this superstition that it is bad luck to wear clothes that had been worn by someone else, especially by dead people, so in a way, that means nobody that take that superstition to heart will ever find themselves in such a situation. Who says the old folks were a complete bunch of senile coots? Perhaps they did know something about the world that the smart alecks of today don’t, hmm.
Anyway, while the original urban legend had the poor dear dying from exposure to the poisonous embalming fluid on the dress, that kind of comparatively uneventful fate won’t do for Urban Legend. So, let’s make the whole thing scarier and more sinister by adding in some lady in white elements from another urban legend!
In this one, our shy darling Rachel only wants something nice to wear on prom and maybe get to spend some time with that young lady she has a big crush on. As if by magic, she lays her eyes on a gorgeous white lacy dress, and just has to buy it.
Soon, she is besieged by the greatest terror known to man, jump scares in the dark, along with other strange happenings. She also starts to look more and more like a poster girl for bad make up, I mean, a corpse. What is happening, oh dear?
This episode actually makes me feel really bad for Rachel and her BFF–a different young lady, not the one Rachel has a crush on—because they are both disarmingly sweet and nice people that certainly don’t deserve the crap that lands on their faces.
Sadly for them, this is an episode where the closest thing to a villain goes off unpunished even a bit, while the nice folks get into all kinds of unpleasant goop without fully understanding what is happening to them. Ugh, I know life can be unfair, but it also sucks to have that seep into a fictitious medium!
Anyway, this episode isn’t very memorable or particularly scary, mostly because like the previous episodes, a lot of it feels like just basic urban legend elements served without much innovation and freshness attached to the presentation.
However, it also gets me to feel a big ouch for Rachel and her BFF, mostly because of the likable performance by the two actors playing these characters. The fact that the episode can get under my skin somewhat makes it far more solid than the two episodes that came before it.
So, three oogies it is then for this episode.
