If I had to pick out only one difference between James O’Barr’s gently vicious comic book, The Crow and the sequels that came in the wake of its superlative cinematic adaptation, it’s this – while Eric Draven rose after the violation of his death, the movie franchise is still yet to resurrect no matter how much degrading trauma Dimension Films continued to put it through.
After studio interference made 1996’s City Of Angels practically unwatchable and noticable budget cuts rendered 2000’s Salvation equally emotionally nurtured, the powers that be took one more shot at the whole vigilante/goth thing five years later The Crow: Wicked Prayer. However, while the previous follow ups proved to be variations of the orginal theme, Wicked Prayer took inspiration from Norman Partridge’s novel of the same name, which essentially makes the movie a spin off of a spin off. Unsurprisingly, the film contined to poison the series with the efficiency of a nuclear meltdown, but what is surprising is that this fourth installment may even be worse that the second – something I thought was utterly impossible.
Trailer dwelling nobody, Jimmy Cuervo, lives in abject filth while being actively shunned by the minuscule population of Lake Ravasu on the Raven Aztec Reservation. The reason for this is he has recently been paroled for the murder of a rapist, but even though his name is less than mud and there’s people who’s lived in insane asylums in the 1920’s that have better quality of life than him, he still has managed to catch the eye of Lily, the daughter of the local pastor and sister to a local cop. Needless to say, both despise him, but both Jimmy and Lily still plan to leave town and start a new life even though the fortunes of the area are soon due to improve with the closing of the local mining operation and the opening of a new casino.
However, their plans soon spectacularly turn to ka-ka with the arrival of escaped convict Luc “Death” Crash and his main squeeze Lola Byrne who, with their satanic gang made up of thugs named (sic) Pestilence, War and Famine, string up Jimmy and Lola for nefarious purposes.
Removing Lily’s eyes in order to gift Lola with precognitive powers and removing Jimmy’s heart in order to get the ball rolling on becoming the antichrist, Luc’s gang of lunatics head on their merry way, but unknown to them is that payback is on the wing.
Randomly picked to avenge his murder by the crow, Jimmy promptly resuurects like a video game character, dresses like he’s about to attend a Nine Inch Nails concert in the 90s and embarks on a poorly shot and edited mission of vengence in order to gain justice for his lost love and metaphorically boot the devil square in the nards.
My hatred for the first attempt to sequelize The Crow is legendary as watching City Of Angels was like listening to someone else’s abject misery over a bad phone line while pouring piss into your own eyes, so imagine my surprise/horror when it turned out that Wicked Prayer may have squeaked past it by the width of a pube hair for actually being worse. Say what you will about City Of Angels (and I did), at least parts of the movie and some of the casting made sense on paper, Wicked Prayer, on the other hand, flies right off the rails in virtually every aspect of its production, leaving you with the cinematic equivalent of the after effect of snorting poppers.
The fact that the film was directed by Lance Mungia who gave us the zero-budget, mega-kooky Six String Samurai just goes to proves that hurling an imaginative indie filmmaker at an established franchise isn’t a sure fire way to revolutionize it. To give him – and the source novel – its due, switching focus from monolithic, urban grunge to a dusty, gothic, non-western is somewhat inspired as a brutal, avenging angel returning from the dead sounds like something right out of High Plains Drifter. However, the enticing potential is soon squandered by hideous plotting, worse editing and a cast so distractingly random, you wonder if they were picked by either throwing darts at a selection of headshots while blindfolded or the pulling of names out of a hat who were desperate for the work.
Hence we get Edward Furlong (for some reason) donning the face paint of the Crow this time and while the actor once nailed the squeaky defiance of a young John Connor, he is so woefully miscast here as a supernatural superhero, his first appearance in full goth getup is more likely to chokes of stifled laughter rather than the gasps of awe once reserved for Brandon Lee. Furlong jumps through the usual emotional hoops (grief, rage, blah blah blah) but he turns in a performance that feels more fitting for a high school play than an established franchise – but at least he’s trying to be professional. Elsewhere, we find the rest of the cast shamelessly mugging and wildly overacting in order to presumably kill time before the production called wrap, but even the sight of David Boreanaz playing the devil as a redneck dickhole (think Angelus from Buffy whacked out on ket) and roaring out bizarre insults like “Killers don’t go to heaven, dawg. They go down – like my fuckin’ bitch!” isn’t anywhere near as fun as you would hope. In fact, after hearing him actually describes someone at one point as being “a fart in my pump”, you’d think that the devil would have snappier banter – but then, when your girlfriend is the personality vacuum that Tara Reid portrays as his fiancee and you surround yourself with cartoon thugs named after the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, maybe you’re too preoccupied to realise you might need to change your material.
And yet it gets even weirder when Dennis Hopper shows up as a pimp coat wearing, jive talking cult leader who greets the Devil with an excited “Wicked as props to you, mister OG and thanks for representing all the home boys!” without a shred of irony and the fact that there’s also an inexplicable appearance from Macy Gray, who puts in an even more baffling, out of place cameo than the one she had in Spider-Man, makes you convinced that someone may have mixed some peyote into your last snack.
As the movie drags itself from boring, clumsy setpiece to boring, clumsy setpiece to a climax where are hero’s mission mission turns out to be that he literally has to cock bock Satan, Jimmy Cuervo’s desire to die soon begins to mirror our own as you wonder how the franchise went from “Mother is the name of God in the mouths of all children.” to “Quote the raven: nevermore motherfucker!” In merely four films.
In recent years, a much needed reboot has been endlessly writhing in development hell to the complete lack of my surprise. Why? Because surely there’s no coming back from this…
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