Ok, ok... I hear you. You guys have been pestering me, essentially begging for another long rambling post about a series of movies that devolved into low-rent, straight-to-video sequels of a moderate success... specifically one where I watched these titles months ago and am foggy on some of the details.
Well you're all in luck because with the new remake (reboot? Re... 'imagining ' ..?) of The Crow having recently come out starring a mullet with a collection of infuriating tattoos, and something called an FKA Twigs, I was reminded of that period where I leapt into the whole history of
The Crow.
I guess I decided to embark on this senseless endeavor when the original movie popped up on TV one day, or when the trailer for the remake appeared online... or likely both happened around the same time and I realized I'd never read the original comic. So I picked that up one day. It was an interesting experience because even though I hadn't seen the original movie in years, I realized I knew that movie very well, and the comic was certainly similar, but had some notable narrative differences.
The backstory on the book is that writer/artist James O'Barr started working on this story as a way to cope with the death of his fiancée from a drunk driver. He poured his anger into this story of revenge and created this undead character who took on the thuggish dicks who killed him and the woman he loved the year prior. That's basically the same plot, but in the book there's no grand crime ring as a movie villain, Eric and Shelly have no last names that we ever hear of, he's a mechanic not a rock star, they were killed randomly on the side of the road not targeted and thrown out of a tower, they lived in a little suburban home, he was never friends with the young girl, Shelly is a more developed character, there was no cop to buddy up with, the crow itself was just symbolic and it didn't hold his literal power of invincibility and it was never wounded or killed to take that power away, but it does talk in his visions, and there were visions of a Skull Cowboy on a train who was a sort of shepherd to the afterlife.
As is the case with many comic series that are later collected into graphic novel form, the narrative is a little more episodic. I got the sense that each issue was generally a little bit of backstory punctuated with the Crow finding and killing one of the gang members responsible for his and his fiancée's death. Whereas a lot of those details probably could have been left intact, the general narrative is very sparse and doesn't feel like the ultimate payoff means much more than any of the revenge killings that end each individual issue. Thus is the weekly comic series as a form.
But it's an engaging and easy read, and it looks great. O'Barr's art work is pretty distinct, which is an achievement in comics. He had a real way with portraying a full world and expressing light, and reflection, and shadow and highlights with nothing but black ink on white paper for stark reality and pale watercolors for the ethereal scenes. This book is very compelling, and other writers and artists (Todd MacFarlane among them) have made subsequent The Crow comics and 'literary' novels, and O'Barr himself has written and illustrated, and also just written a few subsequent The Crow comics, but never really made anything else of note. From what I gather even his biggest Crow fans don't care for the strangely little material he has published outside of this series since then. He's been working on some big epic long awaited project called Sundown that he said is coming soon for decades now, but only a few images have ever been seen.
The movie (
The Crow from
1994) is probably most famous for the tragic, on-set death of its star Brandon Lee, which we were all reminded of when that Alec Baldwin/Rust tragedy took place. And it's worth noting that James O'Barr was friends with Brandon Lee since the early days of casting and production on the movie and says that the compounding of grief lead him into addiction and depression that could explain why he didn't publish or complete many projects after The Crow.
It's always sad to remember that awful element of this production, and the irony of the movie coming out after his death when he starred as a resurrected victim wasn't lost on anyone. But when you rewatch the movie it's pretty remarkable, and sad all over again, because Brandon Lee was a true star in the making. This was his first and only leading role in a mainstream, big-ish budget film and he carries this thing beautifully. The potentially silly dialogue somehow completely works coming out of his mouth. Quippy one liners that sound like he's quoting song lyrics (which is taken directly from the comic series) are entirely carried by his considerable charisma, and somehow this lithe glam/Goth rock look works for an intimidating action hero, also as it did in the book. We all kind of think of that as a given now, but it must have been extremely unlikely at the time.
Of course, there were many difficulties with completing it after the death of the lead actor. They did indeed shoot scenes with the aforementioned Skull Cowboy, with Michael Berryman in a whole bunch of makeup (I guess he wasn't weird enough for the first time in his life), but those sequences were never completed and instead were removed entirely (some footage is on youtube). New rewrites were commissioned including the young girl's voice over to explain some of the missing material (her rudimentary explanation sort of becomes hallmark of all the subsequent Crow materials), new scenes without the title character were shot, and at least one moment was completed with (maybe the first?) CGI face replacement where Brandon Lee's face was placed on stunt double (and future John Wick series director) Chad Stahelski's body... which looks remarkably good. Really, you'd never notice, which is not true for most of the times you see this technique today.
There was great trepidation about whether or not to even finish the movie, but these decisions were made once the film was taken over by Harvey and Bob Weinstein at their surging small studio Miramax, which explains a lot of what will happened later.... with the movies, that is... not the other stuff.
The movie, against all odds, is actually good. There's kind of a more satisfying narrative to the film than the book, but the narrative is still pretty spare. This movie is about style, mood, atmosphere, tone, music, and its cast. James O'Barr was apparently in charge of the soundtrack which sets the same kinda tone audibly that he painted in black on his white comic pages along with the lyrics he quoted alongside those images, and Alex Proyas who had been making music videos up until this point creates a kind of amazing living comic book along with the terrific cinematographer Darius Wolski. The use of practical models and sets built on stages and backlots soaked in constant rain with lightning effects and sweeping camera moves, are all in service of making this a version of a classic moody Gothic. It's got a LOT of Burton's Batman in its DNA (with a touch of Blade Runner) but more adult obviously with it's intense violence, and oddly enough it predates David Fincher doing Seven by a year, even though it feels like a riff on a Fincher urban aesthetic if you watch it today.
The changes to the material mostly work well; the name 'Eric Draven' somehow doesn't sound stupid in the context of this film, opening with the crime scene post-murder and then going to flashbacks earlier on feels more dramatic, it's much more dramatic to see them thrown from a tower than killed on the side of the road, the Skull Cowboy scenes looked kinda dumb from the footage I saw so leaving them out seems wise, making Eric a musician makes a lot of sense if he's gonna be speaking in what are essentially song lyrics, making his deceased fiancée appear in visions feels essential to the drama, making Eric have a prior relationship with this girl whose mother he kinda liberates from this crime circle and addiction gives the plot a drive and progress that the comic doesn't really have, having him befriend a detective allows him a humanity even as undead killing machine that he doesn't really have in the book, having a big grand villain as the head of the gang gives the movie a build to a climax that doesn't exist in the comic, the way that plays out where he thinks he's done because he killed the last of the guy's who was directly involved with the murder but he then realizes his new quest is to save the young girl and take out the big bad guy adds a lot to the final act, and making that physical crow his weak point gives him a weakness when the story really needs him to have a vulnerability... and while the book is starkly serious, this movie is actually wickedly funny at many moments.
It's not by any means perfect, but I find this movie extremely watchable and enjoyable. Brandon Lee really carries it but the supporting cast is filled with all of these great character actors too. Even in really small roles you recognize almost everyone, and it's really well put together. I don't think my affection is just from nostalgia . I think it's truly a minor miracle that this film is as good as it is, considering the circumstances. And in spite of, and probably because of, the tragic backstory this movie proved to be a box office hit, a home video hit, and defined the look of every Goth kid at the mall in the 90s.
The Crow came out well before I could have seen something like that in a theater. I'm sure I watched it on VHS at home at an age that would have been considered far too young by most standards and would have made other parents judge mine very harshly (they were always cool like that). Then I'd watch it over and over again on cable. I loved it for the style and atmosphere, and Brandon Lee most of all, but this hyper violent movie became a defining piece of pop culture art for the young and angsty. It was iconic in the way that the word is actually supposed to be used; which is to say it was a representative symbol of a larger culture and genre. The look of the character was even ripped off by WWE(F?) in the form of pro wrestler Sting who denies it, but clearly was directly using the look of the Crow character for his character... plus 100 pounds of muscle.. which James O'Barr is very aware of, and not all that pleased about.
But The Crow's impact, beyond being it's own thing, is kind of as the bridge from Batman to The Matrix (with Alex Proyas' own Dark City in between) and all of those movies that fit that style post-Matrix also owe a debt to The Crow, as do pretty much all of those late 90s/early 2000s that sold millions of jukebox soundtracks, as The Crow was one of the first of those to really take off, going triple platinum and setting the template for a new avenue by which a movie could make loads of money for a studio.
So naturally, with it's box office success and penetration into pop culture, a sequel was in order...
It seems that a lot of different approaches were attempted, and the unmade, almost made, and never-were-gonna-be-made versions of the movies in this series are more interesting and entertaining to read about than some of the completed films are to watch. In this case James O'Barr was asked to come up with a story or some sort of idea, but depending on who you listen (or when you listen to O'Barr) his treatment was either just rejected, or he declined to be involved due to his grief over losing his friend Brandon Lee.
So instead we have
The Crow: City of Angels. This one was written by David S. Goyer, whose name many people may know, particularly if they are familiar with comic book based movies. But at this point he was primarily known for smaller exploitation movies with Charles Band and Jean Claude Van Damme. The Weinsteins then hired Tim Pope, who was a very prolific music video director and had made a notable short film, but had never made a feature at this point (or since...). Clearly they were trying to recapture some of the ingredients that went into the first movie, but also decided that they didn't want to step on the original. This was going to be a new story and not a reprisal of Brandon Lee's character. Apparently Goyer and Pope were pretty sensitive to the perceived heresy of sullying the first movie, and were plugged into the youth culture of the time to some degree, to the point that they were visiting message boards to see what fans would and would not want to see in a new Crow movie.
So they went into this with the best intentions, and many cult fans will tell you that this would have been a masterwork if only Goyer and Pope were allowed to do everything they wanted... and there are good elements here, and the result isn't aaaaallllll that bad...
But... they also shoot this thing in murky brown, sepia tones in opposition to the high contrast of dark blacks and blown out white reflections of wet surfaces and bright yellow flames in the first movie. They give their lead, the supposedly intimidating avenging gothic hero, a crop-top belly shirt and the same haircut that Rachel Leigh Cook would sport in Josie and the Pussycats. Hell, even the familiar Crow make up looks stupid on the miscast French actor with a Spanish name playing an LA native. They may have had some good ideas that were butchered along the way, but they started with some bad bones on which to rest the carcass of this Weinstein hatchet job anyway.
I only recently saw the whole thing, but definitely saw parts of this movie after it came to cable in the late 90s, but more than the movie itself I recall seeing the 'making of/behind the scenes' things that HBO used to run. It always looked like a cheaper, if well meaning, knockoff of the first one... which is exactly what it ended up being.
Of course, the basic beats of the story are more or less the same; a guy is killed alongside the person he loves the most at the hand of criminals, then later comes back from the dead to seek revenge. When the formula is the same, it becomes all about the details. The first film is so stylistically and entertainingly satisfying that it feels more profound than its well worn revenge fantasy plot really is. As Roger Ebert used to like to say, "It's not so much WHAT a movie is about, but HOW it is about it..." And this one gets lost in some very silly details, making the mistake of coming up with new silly ideas and also trying to ape its predecessor. It's kind of tough to evaluate certain parts of this movie because we now know that the director claims that the movie was taken away from him...But what we are left with is in keeping with how we think of cheaper sequels of this era.
The Crow: City of Angels begins by moving us to a new character in a new city, and making it all but explicit that this is set in a future dystopian LA (leave the obvious jokes about present dystopian LA aside), where the first one presented a version of a crime ridden Detroit but never meant for it to take place in any reality or specific time or place (please leave the jokes about current crime ridden Detroit aside).
In a nice nod to the original Crow comics, the lead character this time is a mechanic instead of a musician, and this time it's his son who is killed by criminals instead of a romantic partner, which... makes sense. What greater sadness could inspire the spirit to return than that? The name of the main character this time out is Ashe Corven. I can't really specify why, but this name just sounds much dumber than Eric Draven to me. They're both shallow and obvious allusions, but one just seems to work while the other doesn't.
The movie, as it turned out, is hampered by stylistic shallowness, budgetary issues, and an obvious attempt to rehash the original. Instead of reflective wet pavement everything is covered in broken glass. The action generally takes place at one real location under a bridge and then a few sets that have been strewn with way too much phony looking garbage, broken glass, and filth. There are swooping camera moves over models that look ok, but where you had those moody Goth songs on the first soundtrack, this one has Rob Zombie and other songs from the emerging Nu Metal movement, and a performance at a street festival by the Deftones (which really dates it... what a late 90s thing to do). The fight scenes are as terribly choreographed as the one liners that interjected are written, they have the main character befriend a kid in a move that only serves to remind you of the first movie, all homes and businesses seem to exist in abandoned warehouses shrouded in smog, and the gang is made up of colorful sleazy bad guys with weird names and costumes like a more 'serious' version of the Warriors. Kinda like the first movie but way more absurd, and they're lead by a bad guy whose girlfriend is exotic and has interest in the occult; as another obvious rip from the first movie.
Oh and remember that one cool moment in the first movie where Eric lights up a Crow logo after dispatching a bad guy? Well some version of that happens at least 3 times in this movie; in broken glass, in a pool of blood, and in flowers.
The kind of writing that worked once before really needs a touch that this movie just doesn't have. The one liners fall flat, the moments of pathos and humanity that work so well in the first are just kinda all over the place and not properly balanced, and all the explanations of any kind of rules or lore just are stated bluntly and feel like nonsense and screenwriter shortcuts. When the lead bad guy says 'Find the girl who gave you that tattoo, if she left his mark on you they must be connected' it just doesn't sound like anything other than what a lazy writer would lazily write for his underdeveloped character to say to explain a plot device that he didn't fully think through...because he's lazy.
But... I will say, it's entertaining enough. There is an aesthetic, and the cast seems to be having fun. Iggy Pop may be a terrible actor, but he slots into this world perfectly (he was the model for Eric's body type in the original comic) and a young Thomas Jane in a ridiculous costume where he's half glam rocker and half Alex from A Clockwork Orange (complete with a cod piece and a painted on eyelash.. it's THAT on the nose) has fun in a ridiculous scene at a peep show that David S Goyer would later recycle for his script for Blade 2.
The lead male and female do their best. Vincent Perez is a perfectly decent actor and he tries, but he's just miscast. Mira Kirshner plays a grown up Sarah from the first movie even though she doesn't look or behave anything like the character, however she looks very natural in her Goth makeup and has a cool but somber feel about her in the movie.
All in all, a lot of these elements just feel like they could work better in a better overall film. This begs the question of what the original intent was, and while there have been some fan edits it seems that there's no official, unbastardized version.
The story is that director Tim Pope was locked out of the editing room by the Weinsteins and the film was completely taken away from him in post production. They were trying to make it resemble the first film as much as they could and repurposed scenes that were meant to be more narrative and cut them and added effects to turn them into flashbacks, for instance. They also evidently cut together what they called a 'director's cut' but the actual director had no involvement and refused to put his name on it for a home release. Pope had such a bad experience that he never directed another film ever again and went back to commercials and music videos.
So it would seem that the original vision would have been better, but would it actually have been any good? It's tough to say. I still found some enjoyment in this, but so many of my rambling complaints don't seem like they'd be fixable in a different edit. For instance, unless they shot an an entirely different ending and that footage is just hiding out somewhere, the climax is so silly and bland that it was always going to be underwhelming to the audience, no matter what order the scenes preceding it were presented... even if the horrible CGI in this scene had been improved.
This movie was not well received, it stands at a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes and Variety called it, "...stunningly awful." But it also made 25ish million dollars on a 13ish million dollar budget and opened at number 1 at the box office for its weekend. Naturally there was more to squeeze out of this property. The Weinsteins wanted it to be their flagship franchise and sell merchandise like the Crow sweatpants next to the Batman sweatpants at target (there was indeed a The Crow: City of Angels video game) so they weren't gonna let it die. And even though the rights were controlled by original producer Ed Pressman at his production company, those pesky Weinsteins controlled distribution and therefore had more power over the resulting projects than anyone would like. So they began developing another sequel...
This is the period where you start hearing about some of the fun and weird unmade ideas, but I'll get to those later.
And although it came out next in the timeline, I didn't watch the TV series until after I saw the sequel movies, so...
The next movie in the series is 2000's
The Crow: Salvation. This one begins with a knockoff of the credits from Seven followed by a scene of opposing groups protesting and celebrating the execution of a young man, respectively. We are repeatedly told that he's young (the execution is on his 21st birthday) but he looks much older than that. One of the early concepts was to capitalize on the success of the teen slasher craze and go with a much younger cast. This movie is apparently the result of that idea, but much like the other teen horror movies in the wake of scream, they cast a dude who was pushing 30 for their teen heartthrob lead.
We then meet the protagonist in his prison cell. His name is Alex Corvis because everyone who becomes the Crow has to already have a name that means 'crow' (this time it's the latino translation). He's sitting in his prison cell playing a symbolic game of chess with his lawyer. You see, he claims that he's innocent, but he's been convicted of killing his girlfriend. He didn't do it, it was the one-armed man! I mean, it was the scar-armed man! But the cops never found a guy with a zig zag scar on his forearm, so now he's minutes away from the electric chair.
The crowd outside the prison is riled up, and the news is there to interview them. But the only people that are being interviewed seem to be one old lady who is a big fan of executions, and a group of guys we know nothing about except for that we are immediately aware that they're obviously the ones who framed our hero (one of whom is that guy from Pet Semetary, another of whom is Bizarro Jerry, and another of whom is Walton Goggins in an early role for him, somehow with exactly the same hairline he has today). Why they'd show up and put themselves on TV is anyone's guess. Then there's the poor, dearly departed girl's dad who shows up in a limo with the poor dead girl's younger sister, played by Kirsten Dunst just a year before she'd star in Spider-Man.
It's no surprise that Alex is executed in a very dramatic electric chair sequence that takes place during a thunderstorm and uses silly stock zapping sound effects. He declares his innocence with his last words, and wouldn't you know it, the man with the forearm scar enters the room and rolls up his sleeve to show Alex just before he died that he's there... but of course nobody else sees it and we and Alex don't see his face.. what a 'shock' ... sorry...
Then, also as no surprise, Alex Corvis awakes in the morgue (the next day, as opposed to a year later) and escapes the prison. His face is all mangled and melted and somehow he just rips it off and his regular old face is underneath it, but with some Brandon Lee Crow like scarring. Yes, this version of the Crow makeup doesn't come from actually applying makeup to his face, but instead is made up of scars embedded into his face, which is not a terrible idea conceptually, but never looks any good. And for some reason a normal, white guy haircut + Crow face = stupid. Not sure why, but the haircut is crucial for the look.
He then follows the Crow because I guess he's seen the other movies and knows that it's supposed to be his guide and finds some very convenient evidence of corruption for framing him or something, because you know how cops like to keep a paper trail of their corruption just hanging around in file cabinets. Then he goes to his dead girlfriend's grave, whose angel headstone cries blood while he recalls some very silly flashbacks of their happy relationship and a scarred forearm killing her or something (apparently he only saw the guy's arm somehow), and then Kirsten Dunst shows up and becomes the first of the people he encounters that somehow doesn't recognize him even though everyone was very familiar with the guy, he doesn't really look any different, and he was the subject of an apparently very famous news story just one day before.
The story that follows is the first of this series that involves a mystery. He's got to uncover the web of cops and criminals and criminal-cops who were responsible for killing his girlfriend and setting him up, and lucky for him he found a piece of paper that very conveniently has a list of everyone involved that he has to kill one by one to get to the bottom of things.
The movie carries the tradition of the series by taking place on overly stylized sets standing in for a city, professional locations looking like dilapidated water damaged warehouses and abandoned churches, moody, dark, and shadowy cinematography, and a decent score punctuated with whatever songs the producers thought the kids would like to score underground orgy dance parties. Like a lot of the Dimension movies of the time this one looks pretty good but more or less went straight to video. The typical studio meddling was apparently in full force and even though it got things tonally and visually right for the most part, it's just typical for a crummy straight to video sequel... although this one was supposed to get a theatrical release, it was played in only one theater in Spokane, Washington in order to fulfill a contractual obligation, and then was shuffled off to a home release.
But this movie takes the series in some different and entertaining directions, and even if they're all clichés, they're kinda new clichés for these movies. The mystery plot, the police corruption, etc. pair nicely with the lame underground crime thing they'd done before. There's a decent entertainment value to this no matter how lame it is. And by my count there were only two big Crow graffiti moments... and there's only one really bad 2000s era CGI moment that I remember, when the Crow puts a gun in his mouth and shoots through the back of his head and then the camera travels through his tissue repairing itself... yikes.
And the cast is pretty decent. I got a kick out of seeing young Walton Goggins and knowing who he was this time, Eric Mabius is serviceable (he auditioned for the lead in the first movie...and I've seen him mostly in Hallmark movies since), Dale Midkiff has a good bad-guy cop face, Kirsten Dunst is clearly way too good for this movie and would get her real big break soon, and then finally we meet the real big bad guy; the police captain as played by Fred Ward. He's a great presence for a movie like this and is able to pull off a level of gravity in such a cliché role that eventually reveals itself to be pretty silly:
Wouldn't you know it, that the dead girl's/Kirsten Dunst's ultra rich father and Fred Ward's chief of police character were in on the whole murder and corruption plot from the beginning, and Fred Ward is the guy with the scar! What a reveal! The scar comes from him injecting himself with blood or something or other from a dead Crow to try to find out how to live forever or something. I don't really remember and it doesn't matter.
The ending commences when Alex Corvis loses his Crow powers for some reason and some shoddy photoshop work is employed to somehow place a false memory in his head and convince him that HE actually was the real killer all along. This obviously makes no sense whatsoever, and yet it somehow works. Then Kirsten Dunst's mouth is sewn shut for some reason, we find out about Fred Ward's intent to commune with the devil or steal souls or be immortal, or whatever the hell it is and the Crow itself jogs Alex's memory with a necklace and he wakes from his second death just in time to recover his powers and kill the bad guys... just like in the first one but without the budget to pay for this to go down in heavy rain.
Then, in a genuinely satisfying ending that I didn't really foresee, Fred Ward is somehow brought to the prison and he wakes up having been strapped into the electric chair by The Hallmark Crow and Mary Jane Watson. The scene is not great, and makes no sense at all (where's the staff?), but it's actually kind of a good and fun idea and a satisfying resolution.
This movie is obviously not very good, but there are good elements. The actors do their best with obviously weak material, and so what if the fog machine operator was working triple overtime? I like the look of this era of low-to-middle budget genre movie. They were still shooting this kind of thing on film and putting care into the lighting and set design so that they'd have something nice to look at while they were meddling with the script and undercutting the director mid-production. And so what if the lower budget means that these overly textured sets are populated only by the people directly involved in any given scene and there's never a regular civilian in sight (you could say the same for the original)? They look good at times and I like these locations even though it never looks like anyone actually lives here.
If nothing else there's a distinction of style that comes with these movies that's inspired by the first movie, or at the very least inspired the same things that inspired that one. Altogether it's below average for a real movie, but I enjoyed my time with this one more than the previous entry.
... and then ...
...we come to
The Crow: Wicked Prayer, from 2005. This one is something else entirely. It's both by far the worst of the sequels in every qualitative way, and also the most fun by a long shot. It's so extraordinarily stupid and inept from every angle you can imagine that it becomes entertaining in the way the best of the worst movies are, and in this case there are some very recognizable faces that show up to embarrass themselves by being in this absurdity, which makes it all the more fun.
Perhaps some may not be as amused by this kind of thing, but I found it hilarious and ultimately really quite enjoyable for all the wrong reasons.
The production started off with good intentions, I'm sure. After a few other concepts never came to fruition the idea here was to base the story off of one of the many other stories written under The Crow title. Evidently there are like a half dozen novels by different writers telling Crow stories, and Ed Pressman (who controlled and somehow still controls the movie rights to the title) finally thought they could use one of those stories as the basis for the next movie... What a concept... And there's a book by Norman Partridge, who's like an actual author, called The Crow: Wicked Prayer. Now, I haven't read this book, but from what I gather from looking at reviews online; the book is actually kinda good but the movie essentially changed everything about the story. I know, I can hardly believe it myself.
The most basic idea behind the story is actually a good one. Because you see the lore of the Crow actually has its basis in Native American mythology and there are tribes that worship crows as symbols and believe them to be a guide to help us cross into the afterlife. Now, that's not true at all, but you believed it for second, and if it FEELS like it makes sense. And usually that's enough for a movie... usually...
The thing is that this movie never has any clue what to do with this idea, doesn't have the distinct look and tone of even the lamer previous sequel, it doesn't know what kind of tone to go for, and it's poorly made all around with some really cheap and crummy production values. It oscillates among trying to be fun and crazy, serious and dramatic, and goofy and dumb on purpose, but it never does any of them well.
The movie starts with protesters (again?) at a ... steel mill? Oil refinery? Who the hell remembers? It doesn't matter. The movie takes place in the desert amongst blue collar workers in a blue collar town. The opening text informs us that the workers are at a breaking point to try and save their jobs and the tribe is trying to close the business to build a casino. The protest is going on when a group of guys drives up in a car and all of a sudden there are smash cuts and whip pans and ramped up editing and freeze frames that stop on each of these four characters as they seem to be indiscriminately firing shot guns at people. The freeze frames give them names and stats. They're each named after the horsemen of the apocalypse; War, Pestilence, etc. and they have stats listed like "Murders: 3, Diagnosis: Terminal, Apologies Offered: None, Mission: Revenge." It's unbelievably stupid, but it sets the expectations that this is gonna be in the tone of a fun, zany crime/action movie like one of the many 90s and 2000s Tarantino wannabe guys like Guy Ritchie or something. Now, make fun of Guy Ritchie all you want, it's fun and he deserves it, but at least that guy knew what he was making. This movie has this weird somber guitar thing playing over this sequence and the actors, like MMA fighter Tito Ortiz and Tank from The Matrix and the mean kid from Karate Kid II, appear to be taking this very seriously. It's all pitched completely wrong from the beginning, but you might be under the impression that this still sets the tone for a fun crime movie... like this same director's own fun, desert set, low budget, post apocalyptic crime action fantasy Six String Samurai, the first time he was attempting to be Robert Rodriguez... but this one doesn't have the courage to be that enjoyable.
These guys go on to shoot at a bunch of people for no real discernible reason and we see Tara Reid, ha yeah Tara Reid, pointing a sniper rifle at a bunch of prisoners and guards. She fires and causes an explosion, and we realize they've been creating havoc to free a prisoner who easily overpowers the guards. This is the big bad guy of the movie, David Boreanaz as Death, that's his name, or nickname.. or title or whatever, and his mission is to 'Raise Hell... Literally' as the freeze frame title card tells us... we find out later that his name is Lucy Krash and that Tara Reid's character is named Lola Bryne.. the couple of 'Crash and Burn' .. get it? That's clever...right...?
I've never really watched Buffy or Angel or whatever geriatric action series he does on CBS now, so I'm not very familiar with his acting, but David Boreanaz is cast a charmingly over the top Satanic cult leader with a wild personality, and I can't imagine any actor embodying this character less than this incredibly bland, generic TV actor. He tries soooooooo hard, but he just can NOT manage to play over-the-top in a way that works even a little bit. He desperately wants to be Nicolas Cage here, but he can't even rise to that low level. But that's not the worst casting choice..
The next character we see is Edward Furlong. Yeah, the kid from Terminator 2, 15 years later when he was deep into his horrible drug addiction era (he's clean now). He was very cool in the 90s, but as an adult in this movie it's impossible to take him seriously... especially with this haircut.
He plays Jimmy Cuervo, the man with the worst Crow-adjacent name of the entire series. He's a drunk loser who lives in a trashed trailer and everyone in town hates him... except for Emanuelle Chriqui (Sloan from Entourage) who's obviously way too good looking for him, and who is playing a girl from the local indigenous tribe because anyone with slightly tinted skin can play Native, apparently. She tells a group of random people in a field about the legend of the Crow for no reason that never appears on screen, and she loves him for no reason that ever appears on screen either. They plan on leaving town tomorrow to get married because they have to wait until his parol is over. Before that happens David Boreanaz and his friends kill them both. Why? As a sacrifice maybe? I don't know, but we see in flashback that they used to be friends, but the guys turned against him because they're on the side of the workers and he's a traitor because he loves and Indian girl. This little gang hangs these two lovers by nooses, and then 'Death' cuts 'Cuervo's' heart out of his chest as if he's in Mortal Kombat, and a '666' scar materializes on his chest.
Of course Jimmy Cuervo comes back to life, takes a sharpie to his face (literally a sharpie), finds some goth clothes, and looks completely ridiculous. It's kind of amazing how bad it looks because in theory it's pretty much the same thing as all the others, but he looks like a teenage girl coming out of Hot Topic. I know that's a hacky description, and it's not a comment on his masculinity or whatever, but that's just very literally what he looks like. The black lipstick and teased hair-do is one thing, but they put the guy in a choker. Yeah, that's right. A black choker. '90s Goth girl' had to be what they were going for.
From then on it's just insane nonsense. David Boreanaz's character wears a ludicrous mesh shirt and chastises his crew for being mopey after killing the innocent couple and not enjoying the meal he made for them of Deviled ham, Deviled eggs, and Devil's food cake... because he only eats satanic food... yeah...
Edward Furlong tries to be intimidating and wise like the previous Crows, but it's laughable. He tries to kill himself but discovers his powers, chats up an old lady who asks if he's an angel or a devil and he says 'maybe both' (how profound) and then he kills a bad guy with a bug zapper.
A local priest played by Danny Trejo talks to local tribal leaders about the threat of local Satanists at 'Rick E. Raven's' pizzeria, while a dance party with a banner that reads 'Rave 'N Fest' is happening on the other side of town. When he gets to the party and finds Tito Ortiz and friends terrorizing the peaceful Indian celebrators' party with a baseball bat after declaring this 'Montezuma's revenge' (see it's a pun because he's Mexican) Jimmy realizes he can't attack the big villain and his fiancée because of some magic spell or something. Then his Crow buddy gets shot, and therefore he can get shot, and he has to stagger out of the VFW hall that was standing for a dance club after Tara Reid's magic incantations make a curtain fall down.
Tara Reid has a crisis of conscience when one of the henchmen shoots at a kid, but then immediately gets over it, meanwhile Edward Furlong has maybe his worst acting moment of his entire career when the cop who accosted him earlier threatens him and he replies, "Do it! I want to die, I WANT to die! Do it! PLEEEEEAAASE!" He's trying so hard to be dramatic and it borders on Tommy Wiseau territory.
The bad guys come to a... church, or bar or club or something? Some big building. But this is where the insanity really begins.
You see it's the absurd, random cast that's most notable about this movie. Daymond John, who most will recognize from from reality show Shark Tank, even makes an appearance. Yeah, that's right, that guy. He's in this as a hearse driver because it is, to date the only movie produced by FuBu Productions. Nuts.
Then when they get to the evil lair Macy Gray shows up for no reason. Remember her? But nothing prepares us for the actor who comes later.. no not Danny Trejo, who we've already seen and of course is in this... But Dennis Hopper. Yup. Dennis Hopper in possibly the most embarrassing role in his entire storied career. He plays an evil.. priest? I really don't know. But he's named El Niño and he speaks in dated ebonics. He calls all the men 'homeboy' or 'homie' and all of the women 'shorty.' It's fucking crazy. Some of his dialogue is really hard to believe. My guess is that those lines were not in the script and he just saw how shoddy this production was and decided to make a joke of the whole thing. When he turns up the whole tone shifts a little bit, and it feels like these scenes were filmed towards the end of the shoot when everyone realized this was a joke and decided to treat it as such. But most of the scenes don't match that tone, and much of the cast never got that memo.
The plan is to turn David Boreanaz into the literal devil, apparently. By marrying Tara Reid this will somehow transform him into Satan.
How? Why? What? Huh? These questions are never answered.
Instead we just get some alarming dialogue from Dennis Hopper as he officiates this wedding while Jimmy and some sort of Apache resistance led by noted non-native-American Danny Trejo, attack the grounds and the other henchmen fight them off.
- "Satan: What's up Homes. This is Mac Daddy El Niño calling you up man."
- "To have and to hold your Mortal bad-assitude."
- "He'll be your homie, now and forever more."
These are direct quotes, actually said aloud by Dennis Hopper while officiating a satanic wedding in this movie.
And the wedding culminates with, "I now pronounce you the Devil and his Shorty. Now kiss the bride motherfucker!"
Then David Boreanaz looks severely constipated for a moment and falls down. Apparently that means he's become the devil. When he comes to, there's some weird druggy editing and the windows explode as one of the henchmen blows himself up and leaves a burning Crow design on the ground, and I kid you not even Edward Furlong rolls his eyes.
Boreanaz now has devil powers which means he gives an even worse performance than he was before and can play ominous piano while Furlong is strung up like a crucifix. Tara Reid informs us that if they don't have sex before sunrise the spell is broken for no particular reason, and then Dennis Hopper says:
"Is it really you? Original gangsta? Well, wicked ass props to you Mr. O.G. and thanks for representin' all the homeboys. Hhahahah!"
Wow.
At least Dennis Hopper knew what this was and made fun of it along the way. He's both clearly embarrassed and also enjoying himself.
Then Tara Reid has a flashback and kills Dennis Hopper. And they drive off. It would have made sense for the climax of the movie to take place at this location, but they decide to relocate it for no good reason. Some bad editing and flashbacks intercut with the tribal members taking Furlong down from his crucifix and then Danny Trejo is seen doing some ridiculous attempt at a ceremonial dance or something is supposed to signify to us that he got his powers, and presumably his groove back.
So then Tara Reid has some change of heart and doesn't wanna be evil for some reason while David Boreanaz and Edward Furlong have an extremely unengaging climactic fight with their superpowers making them briefly fly on wires and and use whooshing sound effects while Boreanaz is begging the audience to find him charming and magnetic on screen but nobody abides.
Believe it or not the worst line of dialogue is still to come. It's not even when Boreanaz as Satan calls The Crow unimportant and refers to him as a 'fart in my gas pump'. No it's when Furlong's Crow gets the upper hand in this fight and says "Quoth the Raven 'nevermore' mother fucker! HAHahahHahAHa!" Somehow, amongst everything else that's happened thus far, this becomes the low point.
Meanwhile, the sun comes up all of a sudden so he's lost his powers and Boreanaz gets impaled on some rocks, but the prosthetics are so bad that they just move around on his chest as he's breathing and talking. They clearly either ran out of money or any aspirations of this being a real movie by this point... probably both.
As Boreanaz is bleeding out Furlong reads some poem or something and cuts his throat. Tara Reid is arrested but also apparently has repented now? Whatever.. Furlong then drives a hearse to a field where he sits on a swing under a tree and his ghost girlfriend shows up to bring him to the afterlife.
A cheesey, jangling guitar love song plays over the credits. The end.
So I guess I have to apologize for how long and stupid that recap was, but as I was recalling how incredibly ridiculous this movie was I started looking up summaries so that I wouldn't miss too much, then trailers, then video reviews, then clips, then I ultimately just watched the whole thing again, and I couldn't help but describe pretty much everything about it because pretty much everything about it is wildly terrible.
And I'm quite sure that I still missed plenty of details and moments that would be considered absurdly terrible by many viewers, but...
The so called 'TLDR' summation is that this is the first entry in the Crow series that is so bad that it might actually be good. It starts with an ok setting and premise, but is made very cheaply and poorly and the desert setting and Native American/Indian/Indegenous backdrop never amounts to anything interesting, and the ineptitude of the script and filmmaking paired with a random cast of assorted C and D listers results in a bizarrely terrible but therefore entertaining experience.
This movie ended up playing in like one theater for a week in Seattle, again just to fulfill a contract, and was dumped on what I think would have been DVD by that point. That's clearly where it belonged, if it deserved to be seen at all, but I feel like it would be fun to watch now in a theater with people who knew what to expect.
....anyway....
In my original timeline of viewing these things, I then watched the entirety of
The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, which was a TV series on the Sci-Fi channel. It was made after the first sequel, I believe, and aired in 1998 and 1999.
This show is probably exactly what you think it would be if you imagine some of the other genre shows on the lesser cable stations at that time. I didn't really keep up with any of them, but I saw my share of single episodes of shows like Charmed or Xena or Stargate or whatever, and this feels a lot like those sorts of lower end shows...but even cheaper. I have to say, I enjoyed it. It was fun. It's didn't command my full attention but was a good companion for early morning workouts. But you really need to let a lot slide and can't really take it seriously.
Also, any talk about how they chose not to use the 'Eric Draven' name in the sequels to honor Brandon Lee, or that the new movie is disrespectful for naming the character Eric is kind of dismantled by the existence of this show. The first episode is a straight up remake of the movie, with Mark Dacascos playing Eric Draven. It's pretty much a low rent, beat-for-beat re-tread without an ending so that they can keep it going. Character names are the same, there's a girl playing the Sarah character, a milf type playing her junkie-who-has-a-change-of-heart mom, a handsome black dude playing the Ernie Hudson detective character, and Brandon Lee's one liner dialogue straight from the movie... just with cheaper sets, cheesier performances, and 90s TV music.
But Mark Dacascos is kind of great. This could have been embarrassing, but you really get the sense that had he been cast in one of the movies with a decent budget, or had this show been an HBO type thing or gotten the treatment even cheaper shows get today, that he really could have carried it to being something special. He's also, like Brandon Lee, a martial arts guy, half Asian, and evidently they knew each other and were friendly.
The series sort of continues the way TV used to function. The main character would get involved with a different crime story or some such issue each episode so they could bring in guest stars, and also spend some time with the main continuing issue of solving the mystery of how and why he's back from the dead so that they could carry a story arc throughout the season. They also had to try to deepen and explore the questions of the mythology, which sometimes is kinda cool and sometimes not.
This version of the Crow is not here just for his revenge mission only to return to the afterlife a day or two later. As opposed to the comics where the afterlife is represented with a train, in this case he occasionally sees Shelly on a rope bridge in the woods. He also isn't 'the crow' all the time. The makeup, and presumably his powers, only show up when something happens where he needs to fight someone. Like he'll get punched and turn away from camera, and when he looks back he has his made up Crow face. It's kinda silly.
What's also amusing is the day-to-day logistics and silly mundane things he has to deal with after coming back from the dead. He's an undead revenge entity, but he has to live in his old apartment (that looks just like a cheap TV version of the movie's set) and explain why he's back to everyone who knows he got murdered. He also has to figure out how to pay rent so he gets a job as a bouncer at the club where his band used to play, reunites with his band, and eventually plays in a 'battle of the bands.' He's even arrested and there's a whole 'The trial of Eric Draven' arc where he stands trial for the murder of Shelly Webster. Even though he's not actually alive, he goes to jail and stands trial. We don't care much about the personal lives of the other characters but that kinda thing pads out the 22 episodes as well.
While it's very cheap in the way these kinds of shows were at this time (you can see how much they reuse sets when so many scenes involve Eric bumping into someone in the same alley behind the bar), one of the nostalgic things about it that I found kinda charming was the music. These shows often tried to promote bands of the day by having them perform on the show which happened a lot here, and every episode ended with one of the actors narrating the names of the bands whose music was used in the episode... and they are SUCH late 90s bands. So many bands and songs that I remembered or forgot from the era, and some that I never knew but still feel so much like the late 90s. Whether or not I liked some of this music, it was just fun to remember it and be put back in that place momentarily by reminding me of band names like Days of the New, Bif Naked, The Crystal Method, and (fittingly) series favorite Rob Zombie (more on that later).
And if you'd asked me what late 90s/early 2000s style and fashion looked like I don't think I'd have been able to come up with an answer, but this took me back. Business men wear 3 button suits with bright red shirts and purple ties, which is an odd site, and there's a lot of spikey hair and cargo pants on the guys on the street, and a lot of lip gloss and elaborate hair configurations for the ladies.
The opening theme had a nostalgic element to it as well. If you'd asked me about the score from the movie I would have said it wasn't very memorable, but when I heard that simple, somber motif used as the beginning of the theme for the show it made it clear that that piece of music actually was kind of tonally perfect in the film. And I kinda like what they added to it here to make a TV theme tune. It's also just the kind of TV opening that doesn't really exist anymore; the music with a montage of clips from the show and brief explanation of the premise. That afterthought of a voice over from the original movie becomes part of the theme here to describe the concept to unfamiliar viewers, and so those words are repeated again and again as you watch it.
It's also fun to see the TV actors of the day. There are appearances by Anthony Michael Hall, John Hawkes, Corey Feldman (as Chris Draven, Eric's brother), and countless 'that guy' types who you recognize from small parts in movies of the time, and whatever else was shooting in Canada around then... Which of course means that I've seen a lot of these people in Hallmark movies.
It's a cheap show, but it's also quite ambitious. There are period piece segments where we see some version of Eric as a native American getting vengeance on an evil confederate soldier, an evil big money corporate guy who wants to unlock the secrets of eternal life via Crow-ism, a lady Crow seeking vengeance for the murder of her and her husband, an occult group with a devilish bad guy, and some other sorta big action sequences and stuff that would seem to usually be beyond the abilities of a show like this, but also narrative ideas from some of the other comics and books that the Crow movies never got to, or never got right.
Oh, and this show, is the only filmed adaptation of the source to do the Skull Cowboy. Sure, it's just some guy, and they don't attempt the makeup, but that's something...kinda.
It was renewed for a second season, but then Universal Television bought out the production company and cancelled all of the lower budget projects they had going, and so the second season, while already in production, was never filmed. The creator attempted to get a TV movie or miniseries off the ground to wrap things up, but neither materialized.
The series also had its own tragic on-set death when a stunt performer was hit with debris from an explosion, so maybe leaving it there was for the best. Still, I think Mark Dacascos could have been a real star if projects like these were a bit higher profile. He shines no matter how silly this is at times.
Before I saw the new movie I did some reading on some of the many attempts at making movies based on the Crow property over the years. As with a lot of IP, and especially those originating in the 90s, there are A LOT of
unmade The Crow projects that were in various stages of development.
It was a long road to get to even the first movie, and there were so many different versions of sequels that were supposed to be. Evidently the first one went through multiple actors before they got to Brandon Lee (Christian Slater, Johnny Depp, and River Phoenix were all considered), and at the first meeting that James O'Barr had with a producer in Hollywood he was told that they'd get
Michael Jackson to do it as a
musical.
After multiple producers made multiple attempts to change everything about it O'Barr helped develop the version that we got and was very happy with the resulting film. He has said conflicting things about his involvement with the sequel, so I'm not entirely sure if he just declined to contribute to it all, or if his first pitch was rejected so he removed himself from the other ones, but at some point he pitched a story of a female Crow. He had seen a story about a shooting in a church involving gang activity that happened to occur during a wedding, which killed the bride and groom in the crossfire. So he pitched and wrote a treatment for a story that would be called (I think)
The Crow: The Bride, which pretty much writes itself. She would be resurrected to take her revenge, wearing her tattered wedding dress as she sought her bloody vengeance.
This sure seems like kind of an obvious idea for a violent revenge fantasy, but the Weinsteins paid O'Barr for his detailed treatment and never moved forward with developing it as a script. There isn't a whole lot of information about why, but there are reports and hearsay that they didn't believe audiences would want to see a female led action movie, wouldn't care about a vengeful bride, and only wanted to see pretty much the same movie again. Of course, only a few years later a violent vengeful action hero called The Bride would become a massive cultural touchstone and a huge success for Miramax with Kill Bill. I guess it took an A-list writer to convince them it could work.
O'Barr started to rework the movie treatment into a comic script and created pages and pages of artwork, and said that this was going to be he next big epic crow book... decades ago. He's detailed this idea pretty extensively and said he was almost finished, but it's still never been seen.
It's also worth noting that David S. Goyer signed on to write the next movie that would become The Crow: City of Angels, but said that he set out with the explicit intent of NOT just making the same movie again, and that his first pitch, and the dealbreaker for him, was that he wanted to make it a female lead. They apparently signed him to the project under that understanding and then rejected the idea after he was already contractually obligated to deliver script. David Goyer also wanted to a
Gaslight Crow, like a Victorian era set version. Something similar was done with a Batman comic called Gotham by Gaslight the late 80s, which one would assume is where he got that idea. It seems like it could have been cool, but was probably too expensive to be realistic.
Some of the other The Crow comics and novels were pitched for adaptation at times, including the first The Crow book after the original which involved a murdered Indigenous warrior in the
Civil War era who returns to take revenge on the Confederate soldier who killed him. This was likely never a real consideration because it was too out there, featured a non-white lead, and would have been too expensive under a modest budget. I haven't read this comic, but as I understand it some of that material served as the basis for a subplot in the TV series.
After the lack of success of The Crow: City of Angels a young Rob Zombie, who had directed a lot of the music videos for his band but never written or directed a film, (and whose music was used in other Crow movies and the show) was brought on to write the next sequel to The Crow. Apparently he was given carte blanche because what turned in was an absurd and wild piece of work called
The Crow 2037: A New World of Gods and Monsters.
It's hard to know who is responsible for what in this thing. The few times when he or the producers have publicly spoken about this project it's very clear that it was not a pleasant experience. According to Zombie he spent 2 years putting it together and was getting wildly contradictory notes and orders on a daily basis. It got far along enough that they were scouting locations in eastern Europe, so the premise was obviously pretty well decided upon if nothing else, but as Zombie tells it producers would come and tell him to include whatever happened to be popular that week in the film, so when Private Parts was number 1 at the box office he was told to include Howard Stern, when Bon Jovi released an album they wanted him to write it for Jon Bongiovi to star, and when one of those post-Scream slasher movies was a hit they told him to write it for an all teen cast (which apparently is what the third movie was supposed to be). This all sounds very much like Harvey and Bob Weinstein, but from what I understand this was mostly Ed Pressman and his development executives.
So ... I actually read this script (quite a while ago), and it's hard to know how much it reflects what he actually wanted to do. There's no notation of what number draft this was, which is unusual. But it's very odd and out of place, and there's a rumor that Rob Zombie has not commented on that this was an entirely different script that Zombie reworked to fit the property, which is pretty believable when you read it. He says that he wanted to cast Scott Glenn as the lead character who would rise from the dead in the future, and then spend decades as an invulnerable bounty hunter entirely unaware of who he was or where he came from. So he'd live as a bounty-collecting killing machine, riding around on a horseback in a future punk, post apocalyptic wasteland of burned out city scapes amongst colorful bad guys, monstrous creatures, human sacrifices, oracles, zombie like creatures he calls 'ghouls' etc. There are absurd character names like the lead Basil, (obvious Basil Rathbone reference), his partner Fats, bad guy Damien, and then Fango Dango, Skags, etc. This is actually pretty much in line with the original movie (and comic) to some degree, except that there are no character with actual names in this one.
If there's much more of a plot I don't clearly recall it other than that the main bad guy gets a vision from an oracle who tells him of this kid who will grow up to destroy him, so he preemptively kills this boy, Basil, and his mother. Later the kid rises from the dead and lives his life as a wildly overpowered bounty hunter who rides around on a horse with a sword and kills fugitives along with his partner Fats. Nearly 30 years pass and during some crazy sequence Basil gets eaten by a giant monster, but the monster's innards transform into a magical tunnel where he walks down the corridor, has a vision of his previous life, learns that he needs to go on a revenge mission, merges with ghostly crow angel, and explodes out of this giant monster freaking everyone out and going after the very subtly named Damien and his henchmen and gang of witches that hang around him.
So much of this happens towards the end, and Basil also doesn't wear Crow makeup til the very end when blood streaks down his face in that pattern. This all obviously points toward the possibility that this was just some other script and it was baaaarely rewritten to be a Crow sequel. And 'A New World of Gods and Monsters' is a silly title, and an obvious reference to The Bride of Frankenstein, and the clip from that movie is written into this script. This script was not about what this could have been as a Crow movie. It was about the Rob Zombie-ness of it all. He said he wanted to do it like The Good The Bad and The Ugly, but it feels a lot more like he was trying to do Escape From New York or Mad Max or something. And I've never read another one of his scripts, but it reads EXACTLY how you'd expect a Rob Zombie script would. Characters have stupid and absurd names (as previously discussed), he writes in little cuts to old horror movies, he mentions certain moments being shot as scratchy old black and white cutaways, scenes are written as black and white silent movie scenes complete with title cards, he writes music cues, mentions color filters, uses silly language for screen directions, describes mundane side characters as disgusting freakish creatures etc. This did NOT feature his typical, annoying, swear-a-minute, white trash, redneck dialogue that he'd become so fond of later though. So that's nice.
Oh, and it ends with this rhyming voice over which plays over the character riding off in a foggy dark forest on his horse (when there was no voice over up until this point):
"There is only but death. Once inside the black deep.
The mysterious life is nothing now. The angels cry, the devils weep.
And my soul from that shadow, this I will never know.
From hallowed ground I was taken. For I am, The Crow."
This... sounds like a producers' note to me...The first moment in the script that reads like one.
Someone I was listening to described it as a script being written by someone who never learned how to write a script, which is very apt. The format and everything is correct, but it's a structure-less mess, he introduces new characters right up to the very end, it shows no regard for budget whatsoever, and he sets up story points and never pays them off or resolves much of anything. All of which is true of his first actual movie; House of 1000 Corpses, and that one certainly has its fans.
However insane and stupid it sounds, it was certainly something entirely different for this stale series, and Rob Zombie can hit on something entertaining at times. Reading this script it was clear they were never going to make it. At least not as written. If he was going to be allowed to make something like this, it would have to have been waaaaay cheaper and scaled down dramatically. The 3rd act has one crazy, huge, expensive action set-piece after another with demons rising from the dead and tons of effects and explosions and whatever the hell else was in there... But had some smaller version of this been made you get the sense that a lot of people would have hated it, but then years later it would have its cult fans and defenders.
And he was going to work on the score with Nine Inch Nails, which actually sounds awesome, especially in hindsight after seeing the excellent work that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have done with film scores.
Producer Jeff Most later confirmed that it was a story Zombie had already been working on and that they ultimately felt it was better left as an original work than a Crow story. Zombie bought the rights back, and Jeff Most said that he and Pressman would love to make it with Zombie as an original film, and that they'd envisioned it as its own franchise that they'd like to make... but of course that has not happened, and given how Zombie talks about the experience of developing this thing, I doubt he'd wanna re-team with these producers. And I don't see anyone else giving him a mega-budget to do this. I haven't seen this confirmed, and I barely remember this movie, but I have a feeling some of these ideas were worked into Zombie's animated movie The Haunted World of El Super Beasto.
As a lot of these 'mid major' studios did at the time, they made a couple of attempts to rework other scripts that they already had access to into a Crow movie. One that apparently got kinda close was a reworked script by Commando, Die Hard, and Running Man screenwriter Steven E. DeSouza, which was an action script intended for John Woo that would be changed up a bit and called the
The Crow 3: Resurrection... what a thoughtful title. I haven't read this one, but from what I've heard it seems to be just what you'd expect; a big expensive action movie with a Crow character standing in for your typical Bruce Willis or Schwarzenegger type guy. There's an elaborate corporate conspiracy and big action set pieces, but the opening scene shows the couple being killed at their wedding, so maybe that connective tissue to James O'Barr is what made the producers think this one would work for this property, and of course producers were doing a lot of this at the time. DeSouza had done this before when after Die Hard was a hit producers gave him a novel they owned the rights to and told him to rework the story to turn it into Die Hard 2 (and though he wasn't involved an entirely different script became Die Hard 3), and Dimension made like 47 Hellraiser sequels by just adding the Pinhead character to scripts they already had... not to much success, but clearly they had no problem taking this approach. However, this script was titled Ballistic, and it was owned by Warner Bros. and they didn't want to sell it without a hefty price tag, and so it was not to be... even though they obviously could have just ripped it off and made it different enough to avoid litigation.
So instead of Zombie's idea, DeSouza's script (and apparently many other rejected treatments and pitches) they ended up making Crow: Salvation as the third movie, and nobody cared about it... including the studio... and yet they wanted to make more. So the typical process of listening to pitches commenced and the one which was most reported on and was close to actually happening was a project called
The Crow: Lazarus, which was a pitch by writer James Gibson who appears to be one of those guys in Hollywood that has worked on a million things but has almost no produced credits to his name. His only feature that gives him a writing credit on IMDb is the 50 Cent movie Never Die Alone, but I believe he's been a working screenwriter for decades now.
To hear him tell it, the basic notion came from a contact he had at the production company who said producers were interested in casting a rapper for the new movie... Which certainly tracks based on what Rob Zombie said producers kept telling him. This seems very much like what producers would want to do at that time, and it could have been tacky, but a lot of what I've heard about this sounds like it actually kind of inspired and like it may have resulted in something interesting. Of course, that's true of many unmade film ideas and the results may not have worked out, but something about this kinda makes sense.
This was the late 1990s, and one of the biggest names in hip hop was
DMX. Gibson said his suggestion to cast DMX was what got the ball rolling on putting this together. He said in a 2021 interview with Bloody Disgusting, "What sold it was, I brought in a copy of his second album, which had just come out and was like quadruple platinum. Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, where he’s standing naked in a bathtub covered in blood. I’m like, ‘This is the Crow, right? Look, this is your Crow.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, he’s our Crow.’ They didn’t even really know who he was. I’m like, ‘Call it up, we’ll set up a meeting with his management. This is the movie, the movie is him. He’s the biggest star right now.’ It just seemed like a no-brainer." Gibson liked him because he was fan of his music, but also because that album had sort of religious/spiritual angle to it, that album cover, and because he'd started acting in those really good late 90s Stephen Seagal movies.
DMX liked the idea and signed on to star, which then attracted
Eminem to join as the bad guy. This would have been before 8 Mile, so it would have been a big deal for it to be his film debut (but also it would have been before anybody knew if he could act). Eminem would be playing a record label boss... and maybe also rapper? The idea was to sort of base this around the idea of gang warfare in the hip hop world. The plot would be inspired by the rumors and mystery surrounding the Biggie and Tupac killings, and how despite the case never being solved there were all those rumors about how Sug Knight and Puff Daddy had been behind the murders and that one was in retaliation for the other, and the theory that these rappers themselves were sort of caught in the cross fire and the true villains were the gang involved business men behind them.
The main character would be a rapper named Lazarus (not subtle, but also not a translation of 'Crow', so there's that), played by DMX, who was the biggest star in the genre, but is stepping away to be with his pregnant wife. His record label is headed by a rapper and childhood friend named Stone, played by Eminem, who is not happy that his biggest star is quitting. After Lazarus' final show he and his wife are killed in a drive-by shooting by a rival rapper and gang member. He's resurrected by the Crow, and starts his quest for vengeance. Meanwhile, Stone (the white guy) is also killed and resurrected by an Albino Crow (the white bird) and comes back to seek his revenge but also just to do some evil shit and kill Lazarus. Also meanwhile, Ernie Hudson would return as the same character from the first movie and be the only one who recognizes what was happening here.
I haven't read this script (not sure if one is available) but there are certainly some interesting ideas involved, and if handled well it could have been cool way to take a new angle on the same basic idea. Evidently, DMX liked the idea and Eminem liked the idea of working with DMX. DMX made some comments about the other movies and how he didn't care for how stylized and artificial they seemed, so if he had his way they'd have made a more realistic film... inasmuch as the setting, as he described it, would have been a real place, with people on the streets and traffic and an actual lived-in world, as opposed to the expressionist sets and models that the previous films inhabited. He seemed to have actual ideas and some real sense of how he wanted it to feel, rather than just signing on for a paycheck.
They offered each of these guys millions of dollars, which makes sense. They were the two of the biggest stars in music at the time and could have been really big box office draws. Music video director Joseph Kahn was signed on to direct, and would make his film debut as well. It's hard to say how that would have worked out. We've seen many commercial and music video directors have success when they join with the right project... Of course this series started that way. But his actual debut was the motorcycle action movie Torque, which is exceptionally bad. He later did a movie called Detention which is very stylish but also dumb and silly. It has its fans though, and maybe if this script was good and he had resources behind him it might have worked out.
The producers were all set to go, Gibson and another writer wrote a new draft, and they had big stars on board... but Dimension studios and the Weinstein brothers already had the distribution deal, and had a right of first refusal. So because Bob Weinstein thought audiences wouldn't accept a movie about rappers they more or less refused to make it. Ed Pressman's company tried to keep it going by taking the Crow elements out of it with the same actors but that never worked either. So the project died.
Instead, the Weinstein's agreed to do the 4th movie as The Crow: Wicked Prayer. What a great choice.
After that movie was a complete disaster that nobody saw a few years went by, and Pressman decided to try to get a straight ahead 'reboot' going. There were multiple scripts and projects that were pitched around that time, but the response of doing a remake was not popular amongst fans. The script they had at the time (around 2008), written by writer/director
Stephen Norrington (of the obviously beloved The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) was sort of an adaptation of the comic book, but also seemed to go to entirely unrelated places. This version of the project fell apart after some time and Pressman looked elsewhere.
At some point
Nick Cave was signed on to write a script... This is the one I really wanna to read, if not see... but I don't know if he ever actually completed a draft. If they went the route of Eric as dark rock start it's hard to imagine a better writer for that story.
After that, over the course of many years, many actors were attached.
Mark Whalberg was the first of the big names.. which is really hard to imagine. Later on
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo was attached
to direct a new version after the success of his turn directing 28 Weeks Later.
Bradley Cooper was then attached to star in that version, produced by Relativity media, however the Weinstein's claimed they still owned the distribution rights to the Crow and therefore should be in charge of development, which may or may not have had any merit, but regardless their legal action against Relativity stalled the development of that version of the project and Bradley cooper exited. You can find concept art of Bradley Cooper in the makeup, and while he's a good actor, something about it doesn't look right. But it shows how far along they were with this version that they'd started hiring concept artists to come up with such art work.
Later names were floated about like Channing Tatum, Ryan Gosling, and Mark Whalberg again for some reason, but it didn't seem like a real potential version of a new Crow project was gonna happen til later when Relativity and the Weinsteins agreed to move forward together with a new movie.
F. Javier Guittierez would be the director, and wanted to go back to adapting the original comic. To hear O'Barr describe it, he wanted to do a page for page adaptation of the book, shot in black and white (thought it's hard to imagine they'd allow that), and with all of the bizarre storytelling and quirks intact that was the intent at least, but of course those promises are never kept. They were interested in
Tom Hiddleston but after a brief attachment this version finally had a lead to genuinely be attached in
Luke Evans.
Once Luke Evans was on board James O'Barr was finally convinced that this could be a good idea. He said he was adamantly opposed to the idea and that no matter who was involved they'd never top Brandon Lee and Alex Proyas. But he said that Guttierez's commitment to just completely adapting the original comic directly convinced him, along with the idea of doing 'gritty' version in the tone of something like Taxi Driver, and he said Luke Evans was the ideal casting and looked just how he'd envisioned Eric in the comic. How much he actually meant this vs how much he was trying to sell this idea while it was being made is unclear, but he's generally not known for playing nice and doing PR.
But... the production schedule came and went and the studio kept spinning their wheels, so Guttierez went to Paramount and made a sequel to The Ring that nobody liked or even saw. Soon after Evans dropped out and everything fell apart once again.
But as much he was opposed to the whole thing before, it seems O'Barr was interested in this again, and later when Jack Huston from Boardwalk Empire and director
Corin Hardy who had just made The Hallow came aboard he said he was excited about it again. They'd commission a new script, after the previous one had multiple directors and actors come and go. But as seemed to happen over and over again, scheduling issues and delays with budget interfered with actors' availability and Jack Huston had to drop out.
As Corin Hardy was still involved, there apparently was a version pitched with Andrea Riseborough briefly involved as a the villain Top Dollar, which might have been cool in the 90s, but would have been the source of endless bitching in the 2010s and 2020s. But then Relativity media filed for bankruptcy and their whole slate of projects went into disarray.. But this was still a valuable property, so they held on to it for leverage... Which meant that when new executives were put in charge of the production company, they fired the director, then producer Ed Pressman sued that company for overstepping their authority... etc. etc.
After this convoluted mess resulted in yet another dead version of the film Pressman, Corin Hardy, and co. reconvened with a new production company and officially cast
Jason Momoa, after which Sony Pictures came aboard as the distributor. This one seems to be the closest to have ever actually gotten to production. They got as far as shooting test footage (which you can find with a quick google search) with Momoa in the makeup, and O'Barr was excited about how dedicated Jason Momoa was explaining how for this project titled
The Crow: Reborn (not a great title...), and how he was already losing weight for the role and really getting into the spirit. Hardy, O'Barr, and Momoa would see this same thing play out again, with a production start date coming and going, and Momoa eventually announcing publicly how disappointed he was to let down his friend James O'Barr, but how he was going to have to step away as this version of the project was just simply not coming together any time soon.
James O'Barr later gave up on it any movie adaptation entirely and no longer was involved. He would later say that he just couldn't take how many false starts there were and no matter how close they got they something always went wrong so he just wasn't interested anymore. He said all he does now is cash the check but that he just hopes they make something good if they ever make anything at all, but that it was out of his hands. He doesn't control the film rights, that's still original producer Ed Pressman, who was still, after AAAAALLLLL of that, persistent to get another version of The Crow into theaters.
Then.... eventually.... after pretty much every actor ever had been attached... After there had been a version with Alexander Skaarsgard pitched, and an earlier one with Jack Huston, their family members Bill and Danny, respectively, were finally cast. The director of many music videos (which Ed Pressman clearly has a boner for..) and Snow White and the Hunstman (that movie you forgot existed) was finally hired...
and we got...
The Crow from
2024.
I'm gonna have to both agree and disagree with our friend
Rey Kahuka here. Whereas I don't think this movie is as bad as some of the reviews and fan responses have been, I do think it's pretty weak considering its resources and background. With that said, in the context of this series it's clearly faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar from the worst thing that bares this title.
I spent a good bit of time in the lead up to the release of this movie making fun of the name of the lead actress in this movie; FKA Twigs... And with good cause. It's a stupid name. But one example of what I love about the Alamo Drafthouse is that instead of playing Toyota commercials before the screening of this movie, they played the trailer for the first movie, a little overview of the comic, and an FKA Twigs music video. I rolled my eyes at her a lot based on her name and her look in some promo images and interviews, but to my surprise I really enjoyed her video. It looked great on the big screen, the song had moody dark tone to it with cinematography to match, and had some subversive violent effects, which felt very appropriate for The Crow. That immediately turned me around on her and put me in a better headspace to enjoy her performance.
And Bill Skaarsgard would seem like an ideal actor to play The Crow... right? He's slender and handsome, but also looks creepy and like there's something dangerous about him. And he's famously very comfortable with wearing white makeup with streaks over his eyes.
So it was sad to see how that both actors kind of disappointed me in similar ways to how the movie would go on to nearly live down to it's disappointing expectations.
What tied all of the previous unmade incarnations together (post sequels) seems to be that they wanted to go back to adapt the original comic and the characters of Eric and Shelly, but this one, like so many of the other previous attempts, doesn't really have any interest in the story of the comic. It just takes the basic premise like any of the subpar sequels did. With that in mind, why bother? Why use the names and the title as if it's a remake or new adaptation?
Instead of the original movie starting with the aftermath of murder and then showing us flashbacks of the relationships, or the book starting with the Crow already in the process of going after the gang members, this movie opens with Eric as child for no good reason, seeing a white horse that we're told via voice over that he loved lying bloodied dying, wrapped in barbed wire. This is inspired by the second scene in the book, but isn't presented in the same way and transposes it to his childhood for no reason, and also shows us useless information about this character that never comes up again, like the fact that he apparently grew up on a farm. Also, he's surrounded by crows already in this scene, signaling that the director doesn't have a grasp on the symbolism. Also, there's a flashback to this opening movie like 5 mins later, and this opening is immediately followed by a ripoff of the opening credits from Fincher's The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, with Bill's face coming out of blood and black sludge with weird pattern and generic dark music. This is the first time that it feels like maybe they hacked this thing up in post production because the sequence of these things feels all wrong.
Then we move to the modern day and meet Shelly. She appears to be a prostitute...maybe? Or maybe she's just friends with prostitutes? Either way, she's a drug user, she's involved with organized crime in some way, and she's in possession of a maguffin in the form of a video that will apparently take down the big bad guy if it ever gets out, or so her friend Zadie tells her over the phone.
So Shelly runs off and as she's being chased by a crime guy who wants to kill her, bumps into some cops spilling some drugs out of her bag, gets arrested, and is sent to a... maximum security, co-ed rehab center?...where everyone wears pink jumpsuits? This place makes no sense, and if this movie had taken place in the sort of comic book world of the original movie maybe some of this could make sense within a caricature/comic book logic, but this movie takes place in a more realistic setting, that's also completely non descript. This could be anywhere, and therefore is kind of nowhere. Instead of Detroit, or future LA, this is 'The City.' It was shot in Prague, one of the most distinct and beautiful cities in the world, but manages to make it an entirely bland city scape of just character-less glass buildings, populated by a very international cast of bad guys and tattoo artists with no explanation of any of it. Although, I'll give it credit for showing us a real place instead of a series of models, backdrops, and elaborately dressed sets. That's new for this series.
Anyway, in this prison/co-ed rehab she meets Eric, who we first see being bullied by pretty much the entire general population of the other junkies. I guess we are supposed to see him as such an outsider that even in this place he's an outsider? I don't know.
The real signaling that he's an outsider is that he looks like a fucking asshole. He has a hideous mullet and is covered in the douchiest tattoos imaginable. I saw someone refer to him as 'Ghost Malone' and can't get this out of my head, but most people will be instantly reminded of Jared Leto's unanimously hated portrayal of the Joker. Remember how Leto had a tattoo on his face that said 'Damaged?' Well Bill Skarsgard has awful face tattoos also, including one on his rippling abs that says 'Good Boy' but 'Good' is crossed out. Yeah... you see because he's such a cool, dangerous anti-hero... that he's just ...'boy.'
So... Shelly is immediately drawn to him, I guess because Eric has sketches and poetry notebooks (lazy movie short hand for a sensitive, artistic soul) and they start this long, LOOOONG, LOOOOOOOOOOONG drawn out development of their relationship, that still never feels earned even though it takes fucking forever before we get to what we all came for. The bad guys are after her, and so Eric helps her break out of rehab-prison, and escapes with her. And it is very VERY easy to escape. Just crawl through a vent, climb a fence and take off in the woods.
In a very amusing moment that I'm sure nobody else noticed or cared about a security guy says they're looking for prisoner 0-0-5, which just shows you how little thought went into this thing. How is Shelly, who just arrived at a facility that's clearly been operating for decades and houses hundreds of inmates that we see, prisoner number 005?
So, then Eric and Shelley run off to a super pricey penthouse apartment that Shelley has access to for some reason and they have a 90s sex scene that looks oddly similar to that opening scene in The Room.
Why would they go back to the city when neither of them seemingly has any reason to go there and it's where all of the danger is? Don't worry about it. They clearly didn't, so why would you?
Meanwhile Danny Huston is the main bad guy.. and he's a CEO or something? He's rich and he also likes fancy classical music, and has a young lady piano protege that he brings around with him. This is never really relevant, but sort of is briefly for like 2 seconds. Danny Huston is brought to a room where Zadie from earlier is sitting there insisting that she doesn't know where the video is, Danny Huston whispers some silly sounding grumbling nonsense into her ear, her eyes get all weird, and then she kills herself with a knife.
Billy and Twigs then have these discussions about why they're in love, rendered in really eye-rollingly poor dialogue like, 'You were just so beautifully broken,' 'You feel like my person,' 'If stopped loving you that would mean I was dead,' 'If I'm hard to love, just try to love me harder' and 'Do you think angsty teens will build shrines to us?' Fat chance, Shelly.
It's really middle school notebook stuff.
She's an actual musician, but you'd never guess from the terrible scene where they play piano music to his lame notebook poetry scribblings, and she whisper sings over it. It doesn't sound like anything, but they tell us that it sounds amazing. I guess I'll defer to her since she's a popular recording artist, but the scene is supposed to show us how difficult it is for her to play music, because of her past with the bad guy. But she doesn't tell Eric that. He's supposed to be madly in love with her but doesn't know anything about her past.
They also are just supremely unlikable and poorly realized characterized. It's one thing for your lead characters to be addicts, you can make that work and it can deepen their backstories or their pain or whatever, but these two don't want to get better. These supposedly romantic scenes between the two of them falling in love just, show them just slipping back into addiction but with no consequences. They immediately start drinking, doing drugs, and having sex, and hanging out with other degenerates at the like and at a club while they're suppsed to be fugitives.... And we are supposed to think that's cool? I guess?
FKA Twigs plays this character as a sort of fragile, innocent, waif but that's not what the script has told us about her thus far. She's supposed to be a criminal and an addict who's intimately involved with some of the worst people in the world; a guy who is not only a ruthless crime boss, but also has an evil demonic power that can corrupt any person. But she just has her gentle little lisp and speaks in quiet, ditzy, innocent, naive, childish tones and lame quotes that a 13 year old would think were clichés that I guess we are supposed to find charming and endearing. And Eric doesn't have any personality as far as I can tell, and no previous life other than we know he liked a horse once and did drugs and got tattoos.
And as much as I may be an out of touch old millennial, this movie really feels like a committee got together and workshopped what they thought Gen Z would find cool (and for what it's worth everyone, including the target audience seems to have rejected it). This movie thinks tattoos are the absolute pinnacle of culture. When Eric and Shelley run off to have their romance, they all of sudden have some friends they hang around with, and they all seem to be tattoo artists. Eric and Shelley get tattoos together, including the 'tragedy mask' that inspired the Crow makeup in the original comic and movie, and they seem to just spend all their time getting tattoos, hanging out near tattoo equipment, and inspecting their tattoos. In another inspired bit of dialogue he sees that tragedy mask tattoo that says 'Laugh Now, Cry Later' and he replies 'for me it's more like 'Cry now, Cry later.' How deep. The movie thinks this is profound enough to bring it back later and make it a pivotal emotional moment when he finishes this tattoo post mortem.
While they're getting drunk and high at dance club some random guy that I guess is supposed to be her friend tell Shelly that Zadie, her friend who tells her in the beginning about the video, has been killed. And she's stunned and terrified. We in the audience all assumed she knew that already. If she hadn't then she showed a shocking lack of concern about her friend's safety before this... Oh and by the way she never told Eric about any of this, and they just continued to hang out and go drink by a lake and go to clubs and do party drugs... But now she finally decides they should flee this no name city that they have no real ties to and is the place where they are obviously in never ending danger... but then guys burst into the tattoo shop apartment to kill them.. fucking finally.
FUCKING FINALLY! None of us are actually invested in this relationship, and all we were doing was waiting for them to die... and it took over an hour to get there. And finally... finally, this movie gets going.
When this happens Eric is transported to an ethereal train station, or crossing of train tracks, or something. It doesn't make much sense, but it does actually look cool, which is true for the movie general. What this one has that keeps it in-line with the first movie, and those first two sequels, is that it's got an effective look. For all its faults I think the cinematography is pretty strong, evocative, and atmospheric. This purgatory train track place is the best example of that, and even though it takes forever to get there, we end up spending a lot of time there. It's shrouded in fog, and looks like it goes nowhere but goes on forever at the same time. Great. And these scenes include some really nice underwater photography that doesn't do a great job at symbolically representing the rules of what's going... the many, many rules... but give off that ethereal look and feel rather well... frankly the movie should have opened here.
In this place Eric meets this older guy with an accent, that means nothing to us, but works as an exposition machine. The many rules about what he has to do and why, and what will happen if he does or doesn't, are explained outright by this guy. Having read the book, it's just such an odd choice that this guy isn't the Skull Cowboy. He was clearly meant to be in some earlier draft of the many scripts that were written to get to this point, but it got mangled and changed along the way somehow. He clearly serves the same function, and the Skull Cowboy appeared to Eric on a moving train in the original book. It's so close that not just giving this guy a Skull face and Cowboy hat feels like such an odd decision. I mean, God damn, this movie is so in love with tattoos, why not have give the guy a Skull face tattoo?
Instead he's called Kronos, and he has a dog.. at first. The dog is never seen again. Another clue that this thing got chopped apart in the edit.
So, the movie gets much faster paced after this, so I'll try to be brief (ha, yeah right.. why start now?) Eric is told he can go back for his revenge, or whatever, shows back up at the scene of his murder and kills the guys who are there and takes some damage along the way. In a different sort of approach he doesn't wake up a year later or days later, but rather minutes after he is killed. And this version of the Crow heals, but not that easily. When his guts start spilling out if his washboard abs, he has to physically push them back in before they can heal up, when his bones break he has to snap them back together. This is kind of the first glimpse of the very brutally gory violence to come, and it's pretty cool to watch. It's also cool that he feels everything, and doesn't quite understand what's going on. He scared and in pain, at first, when the shit goes down, and thus shows emotion for the first time in the movie.
From here on the narrative doesn't matter too much. We are told some expository dialgoue, but we are just ramping up to the movies' actual action setpieces. Despite his powers Eric is still just some guy. He spends some time with his tattoo artist friend who's not nearly surprised enough that he's back from the dead, he says he needs guns, he arms up, his friend is killed, he goes after bad guys, at one point loses his love for Shelley so he kinda loses his powers, they explain some rules to us, he gets them back, etc.
And in there is one of many moments where they try to be profound, but the result makes little sense. Like when Eric goes back to find his friend and tell them he's gonna 'kill them all' the friend gives him a gun, but before he leaves his friend goes, 'Wait...' pauses dramatically... and says,'You're gonna need these.' What he hands him... are bullets. Well ... yeah. He needs bullets for a gun. Fucking obviously. But you said that like you were gonna give him some rousing speech, or some symbolic object that was gonna be important. But instead you just gave him the most obvious thing in the world and acted like you were imparting some great wisdom. Why is this moment included?
Similarly Danny Huston visits Shelly's mother at some point and we see that she's very rich and successful, and we are told that's because she somehow sold out her daughter's life or soul to become a success, both in non-specific ways. And she says of Eric and his revenge quest, 'It's not anger, it's love.' But... what? We were never convinced by them being in love, but how is it not anger If someone hurts the person you're in love with and you want revenge, is that not based in anger? Did they think about whether or not this made any sense before they wrote it down and asked a very accomplished and capable actress to say it? Also, how would she know that? As far as we've seen she's had no contact with her daughter in the period of time we've seen her. This is the first time we're even made aware of Shelly's mom at all. It's a terrible bit of dialogue for a variety of reasons.
Either way, we see Danny grumbles through his demln voice changer into her ear and she kills herself too. But moving on...
What's kind of interesting is that when he comes back from the dead he's still sort of a scared timid guy. He's out of his element and doesn't understand how things work, and still feels pain when he fights everyone and gets shot and beaten up and whatever else happens to him. Also, he's not a great fighter. Bill Skarsgard is just coming off of his elaborate action movie Boy Kills World, where he does all the intricate choreography that all action movies seem to have these days, but this character doesn't really have those abilities, and doesn't fully understand his powers. That doesn't make much sense when we see him easily dispatch everyone later on, but it's kind of a cool wrinkle... and it has a pseudo-explanation.
So, when he decides to actually go out and Crow it up, he takes some tattoo ink, because tattoos are cool man, and spreads it around under his eyes, inspired by the tragedy mask tattoo (so profound that he actually finished his 'cry now cry later' tattoo.. cool man) and grabs a sword to head out... and I couldn't help but wonder if waiting til essentially the end of the movie for him to put on the Crow makeup and garb, and use a sword, was taken from the Rob Zombie script. Much like the bad guy being the human emodiment of the devil feels like it's from Wicked Prayer, much like the bad guy being a businessy type into the occult felt like it was from the TV series, much like the purgatory guy felt like he was the Skull Cowboy from the comic, much like the tattoos feel like one of the later comics, etc. etc This script largely felt like a pastiche of Crow things that were and never were made but probably didn't really belong together.
Somewhere in between these plot points he goes after the bad guys in a pretty cool car chase sequence where he jumps into the windshield of a moving vehicle to try to get some of these nameless, generic henchmen. The Hench-lady in particular. And things start to become more entertaining here. The action scenes are fairly well directed and make sense with where he is in his quest. He's still not good at it but his anger (no it's love) carry him through. The bad guys get away and he gets thoroughly mangled and has to scrape his body back together. And the effects are good. The look of this movie works in general, and that includes the special effects, both the practical and the CGI.
At some point we're told Eric's love needs to remain pure to keep his powers, but then he sees the video we've been hearing about decides he doesn't love her anymore.. even though they've been together in this deep relationship for over a week!
And this fucking video... it's the least surprising thing of all time. It shows Danny Huston whispering something in Shelly's ear and then she walks over and kills another girl. This is meant to be a shocking revelation but we're not surprised as the audience, and I don't buy that Eric is as shocked as he's supposed to be, and I buy even less that this is the evidence that Danny Huston was so worried about getting out. This is what was gonna ruin? Him whispering into a girl's ear? From the perspective of anyone in the real world of this movie that would mean nothing, and even if it did implicate him he seems to have enough power over others that it wouldn't really matter.
But Eric is so broken up about this that he loses his powers because he just can't face that his criminal junkie girlfriend could have done something bad even though she cryptically eluded to it constantly and told him he'd never think of her the same way if she knew. It doesn't make sense. But his love for her waivers so he loses his powers and then has to make a deal to get them back. He will trade his soul for hers, to prove his love is true, and so when he is done he will go to hell or stay in purgatory, or whatever. So now some weird ritualistic moment occurs and his blood is replaced with black goo or something and now he's good to go. He's gonna really go kick some as now.
And so then we get to the best sequence in the movie, and probably the whole justification for its existence. You see Danny Huston is an evil bad guy who likes opera. As far as movies are concerned pretty much only powerful bad guys ever seem to like opera. That piano girl from earlier plays in this opera house, and Danny Huston hangs out here a lot, but now there's a performance and a crowd, and staff, and security, and loads of bad guys.
Which is good for Eric because somehow he knows everyone is there and waltzes into the opera house and just starts murdering everyone indiscriminately. For as serious as this movie was trying to be up until this point, this sequence is pure fun. It's like a video game. He has to mow down one goon after another to climb the ladder up the hierarchy of bad guys, culminating with the few we've actually seen before and who've had a few lines already. And it gets gross. By this point he has full control over how indestructible he is and he walks in, takes on a million bullets and then unloads on everyone with guns, swords, his hands, whatever. Heads explode, limbs are sliced off, eyes are gouged. As fun as this scene is, the violence is nasty and gruesome, but it's undeniably entertaining.
And of course they use whichever opera this was to score the mayhem, which so many movies do. The idea, I guess, is to ironically juxtapose beautiful, classy music against brutal violence, but of course most operas are 'operatic' because they're melodramatic stories and regularly include themes of intense love, murder, revenge, etc. Not so ironic, but it's supposed to be I think.
And as Rey noted in his review it ends with Bill Skarsgard taking the stage behind the performers and throwing severed heads into the crowd of people who may not deserve that treatment... although in the world of this movie it wouldn't be unreasonable to imagine that everyone with enough money to afford a ticket is also part of some evil devil conspiracy, although it doesn't seem Eric's investigated thoroughly. Either way, that's a fun moment.
After that goes down Eric follows Danny Huston back to his mansion. Eric confronts him by his symbolic bedroom mirrors and after giving him the cliché "How could she ever love you, look at what you've become speech," to a blood soaked, scary looking Eric, he's somehow able to get him with his evil dark contact lens whisper thing. When Danny Huston overtakes Eric with this special effect, Eric fights it off with an 'Eric and Shelly 4Eva!' love montage, and he grabs him and both crash through one of those symbolic mirrors, and they both end up in the the afterlife train station, where Eric very easily dispatches him. It's a very anticlimactic climax.
Even in purgatory apparently Eric has to punch and strangle Danny Huston to beat him, but then demon hands drag Danny down into an infinite puddle of water and he's gone. Like the other effects it actually looks pretty cool, but it's over rather quickly considering that this guy is suppsed to have the power of the devil or something.
Then Shelly floats up in her nice looking slow-mo underwater shots very strategically looking as if she's in an angelic wet t-shirt contest, and they're somehow, briefly reuinted.
But then we get to, probably, the biggest problem the movie has. The ending really, really sucks. In the original movie, Eric sees his beloved Shelly in a vision once his revenge mission is complete and she takes his hand, and we know as an audience that they're both going to return to rest with each in death. It's poignant and simple. In this movie, after the bad guy is dispatched Eric has to deal with the fact that he made a deal to stay dead in order to save her. So he sends Shelly's soul back to the real world to condemn himself to hell or stay in purgatory forever, I guess.
Then she wakes up, but not at the same point in the timeline. No, it's back towards the middle of the movie when they were killed like it's doing an It's a Wonderful Life kind of thing. Eric is lying dead next her, she's alive, and the paramedic who has resuscitated her is the purgatory guide, Cronos, who isn't a Skull.
So... what the fuck does this mean? Was the second half of the movie just a dying vision or overdose or something? Probably not because Eric has some final voice over speech. So he actually sent her back. So... Time travel? So did all the people Eric killed come back to life by turning back the clock? What about Danny Huston? He was pulled into the same purgatory train station that Eric was in, but then wouldn't going back in time and killing Eric for good undo that? If not, what does that look like? Did he just disappear? What about all of the other bad guys? What about Eric and Shelly's friends that were killed too? And if Shelly is back now does she have powers? If not, is she in danger? Will she remember her time in purgatory? Why is the paramedic the Non-Skull-Purg-Guide? Is he going to be her guide in the real world now or something? Was he just a real person all along? Is he really there?
What could this scene possibly be telling us?
It really makes no sense, and after all the time this movie spent explaining all the rules of this situation to us, it just leaves us with a new situation that you can't make any sense of at all. It smacks of a tacked on ending that was demanded by a producer or studio.
... And of course, that's what hapened. Bill Skaarsgard has already said publicly that he wasn't happy with this ending and prefers the original one from the script, that they did apparently shoot. This was a really REALLY poor attempt to leave it open ended with a clearly misguided idea that this could be a new franchise, but it's so unclear what the intent is or what a sequel would possibly be. Like a lot of this script it feels possibly well intentioned, but like they put almost no thought into whether or not it actually works. Oh and Shelly is revived in the daytime, but they were killed at night, which is further evidence that they just reshot an ending and didn't pay attention to whether or not it made sense or even had any continuity.
It sure seems like they had no idea what they were doing, but evidently this ending was supposed set up a potential sequel... how? Who knows... I guess maybe they thought he could come back or she could be the lead, or whatever. I don't know how it could have worked based on whatever happened at the end here, but it doesn't matter much. This one will likely not continue based on the box office and the critical and fan response.
The Crow 2024, is NOT very good. But it's also not VERY bad. And certainly by this series' standards it could be a lot worse. There are nice and novel things about this movie, the soundtrack is very uneven, but mostly pretty good and matches the mood (not always), the cinematography is quite good, the production values are probably higher than any other entry in the 'franchise, ' the cast is pretty top notch, and the action is pretty well done. None of those elements are at fault. It's the director for allowing this character design, and it's this mess of a script. On paper this elements sound good, and probably sounded really good in a meeting. 'This time let's really take our time to develop these characters and their relationship a lot more, and represent the aesthetic of the younger audience.' Sounds good. It's just that neither of those things are done well. The script just sucks and it seems no matter how much they tried in post production it wasn't salvageable. But Bill Skarsgard tries his best, and at time he really looks great. Despite the tattoos and haircut.
And had this been The Crow: Gen Z, or The Crow: Tattoo Douche Bag, or (knowing Hollywood studios) most likely it would be The Crow: Legacy (Hollywood just fucking loves that subtitle for a sequel... almost as much as they love any word that starts with 'R'), then that would be one thing, but just calling it The Crow sets certain expectations and invites immediate comparisons. This is a completely new adaptation (barely an adaptation, really), and that's fine, but keeping the character names also sets an expectation that there might be something recognizable about this from either the first movie, or the source material. The source material continued on in comics and novels, but as an anthology the way the movie sequels did. By making this movie basically just another mediocre sequel but using the title and names, it feels a little unseemly. They tried to some degree, and it's well made in certain aspects, but the characters are hollow and poorly written, this attempt at developing the love story does nothing to deepen the relationship that started apparently like a week before all of this, the characters are never likable or interesting or even consistent, it takes way too long to get where its going, the rules and the lore of what the Crow powers can and can't do are pretty unfamiliar and convoluted, the dialogue is silly in a movie that aims to be starkly seriously, and there are just far too many logical issues. I think the fact that this is new, it came after a very well documented development hell, and the sensitive nature of remaking a beloved cult movie with tragic backstory made me find a lot more to pick apart here than in some of the other sequels. All of that plus the extremely serious tone that it's going for and the fact that it had by far the greatest resources behind it of any project to bare the title, and that it had some much squandered potential considering the talent involved made me a little harsher on this movie than perhaps I had to be. All in all, it's mediocre and pretty much fits in with the low bar that the series has set, but in a new way.
And that takes us up to the present day. They finally made another Crow movie and it's a massive failure... financially and culturally, at least, which Alex Proyas (the director of the original film) has taken some ill-advised delight in, posting the miserable box office and even worse reviews online in celebration (doesn't he remember the little tantrum he threw when his own film God's of Egypt failed and was savaged by critics?). It's kind of remarkable, and speaks to the strength of the original book and the first movie that they keep trying. There has been exactly one successful Crow adaptation, and it was 30 years ago. Since then there have been almost too many attempts to count, a string of comic anthology sequels, a string of novel anthology sequels, 4 more movies, and a TV series. In the may hours I spent reading up and searching videos and whatnot I learned there are also a ton fan films. I didn't take this mini-obsession quite far enough to watch those, but I peeked at some clips and previews of these, and some don't look all that bad. It's clear that there's a devoted cult fanbase and that those fans are taken largely with the simplicity and clear operatic themes of the narrative, and maybe mostly with the aesthetic. The character aesthetic, including the pseudo goth/punk/post-punk subculture of the characters, and the aesthetic of the comic and the film. The look that was cultivated in that book and that was so well translated and expanded upon in that first movie. But it's still curious that they never got around to just making a 'more faithful' adaptation of the comic, or even some of the obvious iconography like the talking Crow, the skull cowboy, the original versions of Eric and Shelly and where they lived, etc. It's the obvious thing to do to appeal to fans. It would sound good in a press release and interviews, and it would still be doing something new for the series.
I have to imagine they'll try again at some point. If the past is any indication then Ed Pressman will still control the rights to the property, and he has always been very dedicated to getting some new project made based on what he sees as a valuable IP. I'm gonna guess that it won't be a sequel to the most recent one considering how little faith the studio had in it and how roundly it was rejected by fans, critics, and general audiences (although I wouldn't be too surprised if some cult following develops for it...if City of Angels can have a following, then why not this?). If and when it gets there I hope the road is a little less convoluted and doesn't result in patchwork scripts that clearly are written and re-written because of whatever financial or union rules make it more convenient, and they just make something coherent and more interesting. Maybe one day we will see the original book actually adapted more faithfully, maybe in animation. Maybe there will be an adaptation of one of the other novels or graphic novels. Maybe one day Rob Zombie will make his ludicrous script into a movie, whether or not it involves the crow. Maybe an anthology TV series would work where each episode is in 1 hour movie based on a different character being brought back by the Crow, or each season is a different story. There are many ways to approach the basic concept that could work, which is one of the reasons they keep trying I guess.
I'll spare anyone who could possibly still be reading, or ever started and just skipped to the end, from having to endure some lame line about how the series will 'never die' and will always be 'resurrected' or material that you love being 'eternal' or 'immortal' or whatever... But what I will say is that one of the most interesting studies in watching all of the various attempts in this series is just how much it illuminates the degree to which the details matter and the fine touch it takes to make material work. It's always basically the same story and the characters generally all function in the same way. The aesthetic is even always pretty much of the same sort. Given that, it's kind of amazing just how much variety of quality there is. It runs the full spectrum from very good to very bad and in a remarkable variety of ways. Why some actors look good in the garb or are able to sell the outlandish dialogue and concept is particular to each project. But as with many of the crappy series or sub-genres that I find myself delving into for no good reason, I had a good time going through these movies. Like I said, it's interesting to see the variable quality, but each of the entries is also a bit of a historical document. Each one was very much representative of its time in ways that were good, bad, and often funny, and it was quite enjoyable to see some of these famous actors giving some of their first and last performances, respectively. Even reading up on all of the many failed attempts at making Crow movies, and the various degrees of development and progress each one reached was a fun document on Hollywood history between the late 80s up until today that illustrated the waves of changes that the film industry went through in the time that this title has had any name recognition.
And again I enjoyed rambling and meandering on, and dumping out the otherwise useless information from my brain over the course of however the fuck long it took me to come back to this tab type this shit out when I clearly should have had better things to do.