Autumn Classics: The Crow
What do you get when you cross Batman, the Joker, goth and grunge?
As the night air grows chill and the bare branches of trees seem to beckon to you, many movie lovers seek the familiar pleasures of spooky, macabre and melancholy films. Ken Lowe is revisiting some of these Autumn Classics that are reaching major milestones this year. Get up to speed with last week’s look at Batman and see all past entries here.
The ’90s shook up action movies, comic books, music. Marvel Comics was going bankrupt and facing down open rebellion by creators who decided to jump ship rather than sign away their original characters. The ’roided out, bare-chested, machinegun-in-each-hand ’80s action star was so played out that Arnold Schwarzenegger was sending it up himself in 1993’s Last Action Hero. Punk was evolving into industrial-metal and grunge. Hot Topic was expanding to a local mall near you.
Somehow, The Crow exists right in the middle of all of those trends. Its every sensibility is a ’90s trend in every conceivable way: Gothic punk, grunge, guns-akimbo action, black on black on black color palette, and a gritty hero. For that reason, it is dated, but for it’s un-self-conscious story of a disastrously sexy revenant rocker returning from the grave to avenge his own murder, it is timeless.
The story was based on James O’Barr’s comic, which had garnered a cult following. Hanging over the whole production—and possibly a morbid reason for the film’s success—is the death of star Brandon Lee, who was shot on set as a result of a series of mishaps arising from poor firearms supervision. It’s an unsettling feeling to have as the film begins with Lee’s character murdered, the fiancée he was to marry brutalized and fatally wounded. Left to pick up the pieces are their young surrogate daughter, skateboarder girl Sarah (Rochelle Davis) and easygoing local cop, Albrecht (Ernie Hudson). Devil’s Night, October 30, was a real-life cause of mayhem in Detroit, so much so that the very next year after The Crow came out, local authorities organized a citizen’s counter-arson effort called “Angels’ Night.”
Fast forward a year, and Draven bursts out of his grave with the aid of a strange corvid familiar, finding that any trauma to his body instantly heals itself and that he can see out of the eyes of the crow. Fortunately for him, all of the violent assholes who killed him have been hanging out in plain sight, waving their guns around and in one case, dating Sarah’s mother, so none are particularly hard to find. Draven wastes all of them with extreme prejudice and maximum poetic justice, painting crow symbols in blood and gasoline as he goes.
It helps that the movie believed in the Die Hard method of writing bad guys, which is to say, with personality: The cast’s big bad is prolific character actor Michael Wincott, and he’s backed up by Tony Todd and David Patrick Kelly, an actor with a decades-long track record of hyping up audiences for the beautiful moment when the hero kills the hell out of him. Draven dispenses with them all through a combination of Batman’s flair for the dramatic and the Joker’s fashion sense.
The Crow’s episodic structure and stylized sequences of heightened emotion seemed familiar to me somehow, and it only clicked when I learned that director Alex Proyas, like Highlander director Russell Mulcahy, got his start in music videos. The Crow’s individual sequences all have the exact feel of dark and twisted music videos that exist at the nexus of grunge, industrial and goth.
