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JD [ 0.0 ]
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All the ratings just blow me away. I totally DISAGREE! This was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Most of the movie was so dark you couldn't even tell what was going on. And to think you'd watch this after a bad day? Not me. It can keep it's cult film status for all I care. That doesn't change the fact about how terrible this really is.
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DarkCell [ 10.0 ]
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Another Great movie. The last two were good but not as good as the original. Great special effects. Brandon Le was great in what was his final movie. He will be imortalized in the hall of fame of my movie archives for years to come.
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chapter11 [ 3.0 ]
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Right, I'm not sure about this film's cult reputation beyond the obvious. It's just not very good - it plays like one of Tim Burton's Batman movies, with a supernatural gimmick and a revenge-by-numbers plot, and the acting is pretty uniformly atrocious. Worst part is I'm probably gonna watch the damn sequels now.
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Jeff_Wilder [ 9.5 ]
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Everyone has that particular film. One that they loved during a particular time in their life and then go back to it later on, to discover that while they still like it quite a bit, it isn't as impressive as they first thought.
In the case of your humble reviewer, The Crow definitely falls into that category. I loved the film when I first saw it in high school and promptly purchased it when it arrived on home video. The film was a regular staple of my cinematic viewing habits throughout those high school years and was actually listed as my favorite movie in my entry in the senior directory of my 12th grade yearbook.
However, time has a way of taking its toll on certain things. Watching The Crow now at the age of 25, I'm not as enamored of it. In fact, I see how that were it not for a few certain elements, The Crow would be all but indistinguishable from Darkman and a few other exploitation films of that type.
The first thing that comes to mind is of course Brandon Lee. The son of screen legend Bruce Lee, Brandon was set to follow in his dad's footsteps into Hollywood. Prior to The Crow, Lee was best known for making low-budget chop socky movies that, while nothing spectacular, were far better than the dreck being offered up at the time by Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal. In the lead role in The Crow, Lee saw an opportunity to stretch out beyond the genre and he does so quite well. Indeed, The Crow does prove that Lee could have evolved into a fairly decent actor with time and the right material.
Sadly, it was not to be. On March 31 1993, just as filming was coming to a close on The Crow, Lee was killed when accidentally shot with a projectile from a prop gun. Not long after his death, the decision was made to complete the minimal amount of filming still left to be done and release the film as a tribute to Lee. Some people cried foul at this idea, claiming that this was a ghoul move by Hollywood as a means of raking in more bucks. While The Crow did bring in a high amount of capital, the decision to release the film as a tribute was the right one. It showed that Lee had more talent as an actor than hacks like the aforementioned Seagal and Van Damme and that he could have amounted to something if he'd lived.
The release of The Crow brought many moviegoers out to see it, in many cases more as an act of morbid curiosity than anything else.
The story is very simple. A young rock musician named Eric Draven (Lee) is engaged to marry to his girlfriend Shelly not long after the movie opens. However, their plans get altered when a group of villainous thugs working for crime king Top Dollar (Michael Wincott) invade their small apartment, raping Shelly. When Eric tries to protect her, he is mercilessly shot dead and the apartment is torched.
We then promptly fast forward to one year later and are told that when lovers are wrongly separated, sometimes the pain can be so intense that one soul cannot rest and so the person is brought back to make the wrong things right again. And we see that happen as Eric returns from the grave, hell bent on tracking down and exterminating Top Dollar and his vile cronies.
That's essentially the story in a nutshell. In his quest for vengeance, Eric is aided by a friendly cop named Albrecht (Ernie Hudson) and a young teenage girl named Sarah, whom he and Shelly looked after since her heroin-abusing mother neglected her terribly.
The way The Crow is filmed brings us right into the heart of the dark world that it is portraying. Many of the scenes take place either at night or in dark rooms or alleys with only a few minutes of daylight here and there providing some respite. The soundtrack is dominated by much heavy and industrial rock music by artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Pantera, The Cure and Stone Temple Pilots. This combination led one critic to call the movie "a bloodbath edited by MTV speed freaks".
One thing that I think made The Crow popular among many teenagers during that era was the fact that it was one of the first movies that actually seemed to understand Goth culture and take it seriously. There are several scenes at raves and clubs where the Goths congregate and cameos by alternative rock bands Medicine and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult.
While it was good to see a film that took the Goth culture seriously, today some of those aspects of the film have become dated. There are several references scattered throughout the film to various mid 1990s popular culture that were past their expiration date around the time The Crow reached video store shelves.
If the story itself isn't as original as it thinks it is and if certain parts of the film have become fated, The Crow is still a very good film. The performances by Lee, Hudson and Wincott (who is good at playing particularly oily villains) are all good and the way the story is told (from the perspective of the young girl Sarah) gives added emotional resonance to it. In addition, the bulk of the music is great and if you like it, you should definitely buy the films soundtrack. The way songs are used to underscore certain scenes (IE: The use of The Cure's "Burn" over the scene where Eric prepares to go out into the night to seek revenge) is quite effective.
While The Crow may no longer be at the top of my cinematic favorites list, it is still a graphic novel movie that is much better than the average graphic novel based movie.
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babyduck [ 7.0 ]
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I'm not sure if I got into the spirit of this film. Great film to see if you've had a bad day and you just want to see some guy go nuts and blast everyone away. Some kudos have to be given as this was Brandon Lee's last film.
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.4 |
| No. Ratings | : 38 | |
| No. Reviews | : 15 | |
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