The Re-Visit: The Crow
THE RE-VISIT: THE CROW
By Steve Wood
Every now and then, a movie comes along that has an almost immediate cult following, The Crow was one of them. I wasn’t one of those people, probably because I was too young when this came out. I’ll admit, I haven’t seen this all the way through, and the last time I’ve seen more than 30 minutes of it was years and years ago, so I figured I’d finally give in and see what all the hype was about…
…I didn’t get it, I understood going into this that this was a serious movie, but it came off almost cheesy at times, possibly due to the substandard special effects, or obvious use of miniatures, or maybe because Brandon Lee was a horrible actor. Yea, he died during filming, so what, am I supposed to treasure this movie because of that?
So, what exactly was Eric Draven supposed to be, a zombie? All I know is that he was brought back to life, at least some form of life, by a crow that landed on his tombstone. My only problem with this is NOTHING IS EXPLAINED. It’s alright to let the imagination run wild during a movie, but The Crow was based in reality, so having someone like Eric Draven being able to reanimate and heal himself as if he was Wolverine was kind of strange.
While watching, I immediately thought of Spawn, the parallels with these two characters are so very obvious, at least in the movie versions of each character:
-Murdered by bad guys.
-Brought back to life to avenge their death.
-Has someone pointing them in the right direction. (The crow for Eric and Clown for Spawn)
-Befriends a child.
There were a lot of variances between Spawn and The Crow also, don’t get me wrong. But the similarities are strong enough to at least warrant mention.
I don’t see how The Crow spawned (pun intended) a bunch of sequels, I’ve never been, nor will I ever be interested in watching them. While I can see how this movie has a huge following, I just didn’t understand. One thing I will give this movie is that I don’t recall anything else like it in the early 90’s, I’m somewhat tempted to check out the comics, but I really doubt I’ll follow through with that urge.