TheCrow

The Crow (1994)

Deep down inside me lives a 14-year-old Goth girl. This is the part of me that enjoys albums by The Cure and Type O Negative, computer games like Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, and film series like The Crow or…dare I say it…Twilight, to a certain extent. And while I’m not driven to write bad poetry about the purple lake of despair, I do indulge from time to time in the realm of weird melodrama with an overtly violent twist.

Brandon Lee’s final film in a career of such forgettable ‘hits’ like Laser Mission, Showdown in Little Tokyo, and Rapid Fire is un-arguably his best. I don’t often say a movie changed my life, however, if any movie did, it was The Crow. It makes me long for a world where an accident on the set didn’t cause Lee his life, just to see what else he might have done based on the strength of his amazing performance in this.

The story begins on Devil’s Night at a crime scene, where a man has been thrown out of his window while his girlfriend was beaten and raped by a gang of thugs because they were opposing tenant eviction in the neighborhood. We first meet Ernie Hudson as Albrecht in this scene, in a wonderful performance done by an actor who doesn’t seem to be in nearly as much as he should. We also meet a streetwise kid named Sarah, who for lack of a better description has been adopted by the couple in the apartment. The girl’s name is Shelly Webster, the man is Eric Draven (Lee).

A year passes. The thugs who committed the murders are still free and running wild on the streets of Detroit, Sarah has managed to keep in contact with Albrecht, who’s been demoted to beat cop, and Eric is resurrected from his grave by the a crow to set the wrong things right.

Calling it a revenge story tells us what we really need to know about the rest of the film from this point. Eric is going to find and kill the bad guys. But the real meat of the story comes from Eric’s hunt for the killers. When he’s first brought back, he doesn’t know why. Through powerful flashbacks induced by touch he puts the pieces together, and quickly knows what he’s supposed to do. Each kill he makes is its own set piece, and each one is bigger and more elaborate than the last; my personal favorite being the John Woo style shootout sequence in Top Dollar’s (played by the ever-gravel voiced Michael Wincott) club.

There are so many themes at work in the film as well, each one winding beautifully with one another to form a rich, complex narrative. Love, friendship, death, balance, sadness, they’re the structure of what make this film so powerful and brilliant. And due to the accident on set it this movie shouldn’t have been anywhere near as good as it is. Brandon Lee was shot on the set with a live bullet and died shortly thereafter. Contrary to urban legend, the scene was not in the massive shootout, nor was the fatal bullet footage left in the final film. The incident occurred while shooting the flashback sequence in Eric and Shelly’s apartment. One of the firearms used in the scene had been accidentally loaded with a live round and the actor who played Funboy was the unfortunate soul who had that particular gun. A criminal investigation did occur, but it was officially ruled an accident. No charges against anyone were filed. Unsolved Mysteries did a segment on this, and clever Youtube searching might yield positive results.

According to who has spoken about it in the past, Lee was up to half way or two-thirds finished with principal photography when the accident occurred. Rather than scrap the movie, the filmmakers decided to soldier on and film around the problem areas in a dual effort to not have to shut down a multi-million dollar film, and as a tribute to Lee, who had an incredible amount of faith in the project, as the interviews on the second disc of the special edition DVD will attest.

This meant that the scenes with Sarah and Eric had to be shot with a double for Lee. Pay close attention and you’ll never see Eric’s face when he’s in the gutted apartment with the young girl. The rooftop running sequences were computer animated, as well as the reflection in the mirror right before Eric paints his face. An entire character had to be removed because of this as well.

The Skeleton Cowboy was an important character in the original graphic novel, and he was supposed to make several appearances throughout the film to guide Eric. Lee had only shot half the footage needed with character when he died, so the Skeleton Cowboy remains only on the deleted scenes montage of the special edition DVD.

This is one of my favorite films of all time, and I can’t even remember the number of times I watched it. If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend it more, even though there is an air of sadness that goes along with it.

4 out of 4

reviewed by Seth Moore