The Crow (1994)

Some time in a hell-hole version of Detroit that makes today’s actual Detroit look downright genteel. Why even the one in Robocop looks charming and a bit quaint in comparison. It is what was once just the night before Halloween and has now come to be called “Devil’s Night” on account of the mass cases of arson committed by the crazed, the violent and the insane. It is also the night before the wedding of Shelly (Sofia Shinas) and her rock musician fiancée Eric Draven (Brandon Lee), and the last night of their respective lives, for the couple are brutally killed and – in Shelley’s case – raped. This is apparently what happens in Detroit when you’re fighting an eviction notice from the inventor of Devil’s Night, one Top Dollar (Michael Wincott).

Exactly one year later, Eric comes back from the dead accompanied by a crow psychopomp that looks a lot like a raven to me, driven to take vengeance on Shelley’s and his tormentors, sit on a rooftop and dramatically play guitar, and fix the life of a little girl named Sarah (Rochelle Davis) they were friends with. Fortunately, Eric is now more or less unkillable, being dead already and all that, and has also acquired a small variety of psychopomp-based superpowers.

Because everybody reading this will already know, I’m not going to get into the death of Brandon Lee during the filming of the movie.

Fortunately, Alex Proyas’s film does have more going for it than real-life tragedy. Or rather, it has if you can look at a film that is quite as much of its time and place as this one is and just go with it and accept it; or perhaps do as I do and find particular joy in exactly how much and how loudly The Crow screams 1994.

Of course, if you’re one of those people who just can’t cope with the film’s gothpunk/grunge/post-industrial aesthetic of burning (there’s a lot of burning in this one) dirty city streets, Hot Topic wear and Poe-quoting, or only find this sort of thing kind of silly, there will be no joy for you to be found here. Me, I’m not always quite as into all of these things as the film is, and tend to put down many a film going for this aesthetic as made by poseurs (though you can rip my The Cure mp3s out of my cold dead…hard drives, I suppose). In The Crow’s case, making an exception comes rather easily to me, though, for there’s nothing of the poser in the film at all. All the Poe-quoting, romantic desperation comes to the film quite naturally, and there’s a genuineness to the its romantic despair that turns much in it what should by all rights be silly and overwrought into something that feels as if it comes from the hearts of the filmmakers.

And it’s not as if the purveyors of this sort of aesthetic don’t have a sense of humour; at the very least, screenwriters (and quite well-known writer-writers, too) David J. Schow and John Shirley sure as hell have one, so the film also regularly demonstrates a sense of humour that counteracts any threat of the film falling into po-faced caricature that might have been left.

Proyas, coming, as is rather typical for a filmmaker of his generation, to his second feature film – after the pretty obscure Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds made half a decade earlier - via a successful stint as a music video director, brought with him the expected sense of visual slickness and polish, but at this point in his career (which alas already went downhill fast after his next cult hit, Dark City), the man also knew how to utilize his technical skill to create a film that is an aesthetic and thematic whole where the stylish visuals do indeed carry meaning, and are not used to distract from the human elements of his film but rather to enhance them. That he’s also wonderful at creating atmosphere and a sense of place, even if that place is decidedly unreal (or perhaps hyper-real) is pretty obvious too, so it’s no surprise that this made him a bit of rising star, if one that soon enough would only get to make soulless crap like I, Robot and Gods of Egypt.

Adding the cherry on top is a cast of character and weirdo actor stalwarts from Wincott to Ernie Hudson (as the only good cop in town), from Anna Thomson over David Patrick Kelly to Tony Todd and Bai Ling, all doing their respective things with great aplomb. And Brandon Lee? He’s pretty brilliant, obviously selling the physicality of his character easily but also believably portraying the revenant version of Eric as a guy who is broken, with parts of him missing, and others turned slightly grotesque.


So, The Crow turns out to be one of the films that impress you when you’re eighteen or nineteen and still hold up twenty-five years later without needing the warm glow of nostalgia or the special enthusiasm of youth to survive.