The Crow

365 Films

Entry #32

The Crow (1994)

Directed by Alex Proyas

It’s impossible to talk about The Crow without mentioning the untimely and senseless death of its lead actor, Brandon Lee.  Everything about the film from the day of its premiere is tinted by that tragedy.  In a cruel twist of fate-perhaps one too morbid to point so forgive me-Lee’s death casts a pall over the film that doesn’t overwhelm, but strengthens the images.  The film is about a vengeful ghost and, in a way, that’s exactly what we are watching.  Obviously, I shouldn’t have to point out that I would take a shitty film over a dead young actor any day of the week, but just in case anybody missed that, this is me making it absolutely clear.  I don’t remember what drew me to The Crow some nineteen years ago.  As evidenced by entry #10, Batman Returns, I seemed to have an early predilection for a touch of the goth.  And if you happened to read entry #14 Death Becomes Her, I clearly had a morbid fascination/mortal fear of the end of life.  For the latter, The Crow serves a kind of lullaby, offering a vision of the afterlife that promises a spiritual peace for all of eternity.  Granted, that peace requires killing the entire population of Motor City bad guys in exponentially gruesome and hideous ways, but I was ten and I liked watching shit blow up.  Not that there weren’t moments in the film that didn’t absolutely terrify me.  The opening sequence details the savage rape and murder of a young woman and her husband.  The fact that it appears to happen at random was definitely a terrifying new concept for me.  Other images pop to mind such as eye-ball gouging, sword in the throat stabbings, and impalement on top of a church steeple that perhaps I was a wee bit too young for.  Then again, another vivid memory I have is of a fellow theater attendee visibly standing up and walking out of the movie right before the big shoot out in Top Dollar’s lair.  Rather than even dare to entertain the notion that the movie had the potential to rub certain people the wrong way, I merely thought to myself: “what an idiot, he just missed the awesome high-octane gun battle.”  As another gateway film into the realm of grown-up cinema, The Crow straddles the line between two seemingly paradoxical approaches to filmmaking.  On the one hand, the film exists as a howl of anguished grief for a lost love and the acceptance of a bitter understanding that comes from the knowledge that there is absolutely nothing you can do to get that person back.  On the other, the film has an almost playful and child-like sense of the adult world.  Good guys are clearly identified as such and bad guys as well and both sides of the morality coin get their just desserts at the end.  The recent talk of re-booting The Crow for the next generation strikes me as at once both completely absurd and absolutely perfect.  I hope I don’t receive any hate mail for this but The Crow could be perceived as the early ancestor to the current incarnation of the YA-Doomed Romance-Teen-Sci-Fi Horror genre that’s been sweeping the nation all nigh on ten years.  Don’t get me wrong; a Twilight version of The Crow is the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas.  I merely cite this as an example of the endurance of a film that seemed cursed from its initial conception.  Like the tagline says: “real love is forever.”