Monday, August 08, 2005

The Crow: Wicked Prayer Review

If you know me, you probably now I'm a huge Crow fan. So here's my SPOILER FILLED review for the turd that is The Crow: Wicked Prayer.

The crow: Wicked Prayer Review:

I gotta admit, as I started watching this movie I though “hey people are exaggerating, this isn’t half bad.” The opening credits are pretty cool, and the whole look of the film is quite good, on par with any theatrically released film (unlike Salvation for example), and the score is amazing. However, from there things start to get a little…stupid. When the “captions” came on for the villains I thought that they’re going for the full on B-movie thing. I mean if you can’t escape it, might as well embrace it right? But it just goes in this whole other lazy direction. Their whole opening assault is so badly edited it’s hard to understand; and their cars with their names on them reminded me of Power Rangers vehicles (more on this latter).

It was really stupid how Lily (who is fucking beautiful I must say, if you gotta say one good thing about WP is that it has most beautiful girl in the franchise) recited the opening films lines word for word. I understand that they are establishing that the Crow is an Indian myth, but at least come up with an original monologue. (And speaking of Indian…are they Indian or Mexican or half Indian half Mexican; half Aztec half Guatemalan…what the hell are they?).

The murder scene was decent, and would’ve been a lot better if Reed hadn’t been cast, but hey what can you do? I thought the 666’s were kinda cliché and I hated the whole thing that since she has Lily’s eyes, Lola now sometimes gets cold feet over what Luc is doing (actually let me just say that Tara Reed sucked ass and be done with her in this review). I gotta say thought, unlike Tara, David Boreanaz was pretty good, even after he became Satan (he might’ve been a little too over the top for a Crow film, but I found him hilarious as an over the top (no pun intended) villain, and he would be great as a bad guy some campy gangster movie). Him and Yuji Okumoto (as Pestilence) I found to be really cool crazy villains, and you could really tell they were having fun filming this shitty little movie (unlike what can be said for the other bad guys, that Ultimate Fighting guy can’t act for shit).

While all in all Eddie gave a solid performance, the guy looks ridiculous as The Crow. I mean he paints his face with a Sharpie, a fucking Sharpie!! That costume makes him look more like a trick-or-treater than an undead avenger. Like has been said before, he would’ve looked a lot better had he kept on the suit he was wearing when he died, because now he looks more Velvet Goldmine than The Crow. (When Pestilence tells Jimmy that he was going to ask him to marry him I almost peed myself laughing).

And speaking of Eddie…did the guy even train for the fights in this film; hell did anyone do fight training? Remember, at there core, Crow films are action flicks. And this has to be the worst fighting/action scenes I have ever seen in a film. The wirework looked flat out ridiculous, and you can’t tell what’s happening at all with the bad editing. I really don’t know why with such an obviously low budget, they just had to include ridiculous (and I assume costly) wirework when simple hand to hand combat would’ve been cheaper, and much better.

Now I gotta say, while I mostly complained about the film so far, it does have some good moments. The scenes in the weeding chapel (both with Luc and Jimmy) were pretty cool. The scene in Ravenfest was really, really cool, specially the dialogue between Luc and Jimmy. And the exploration of other Crow themes and mythos (the “you’ve made me a monster” line, the shots of both Jimmy and Lola hanging in the tree trying to hold hands while the crow pecks away, the last shot of them reunited) were really cool.

Alas, after they get to the wedding chapel the movie becomes a complete and total mess. While I didn’t find Dennis Hopper to be as bad as everyone said he was, here he didn’t work at all and really served no purpose other than make everything really stupid. After he comes onscreen the film becomes total garbage. I mean are the Indians trying to kill Jimmy, or Tank (with his stupid ass Power Ranger’s armor), or both. Why do Jimmy and Tank team up; weren’t they trying to kill each other 30 seconds ago? How did Danny Trejo’s bitch-tit dance heal the crow? Why are Jimmy and Luc fighting like they’re Goku and Vegeta? Hell why the fuck was this thing even green lighted? (And remember all this ranting and I didn’t even mention the fact that they used stock footage from the other films for the bird). It’s as if after the church scene they just didn’t care anymore, and were rushing to finish filming the film to go out drinking before last call.

Is this the worst of the Crow films? Yeah, and by a long shot. And sadly, it even more disappointing because they are some genuinely good things in this film, yet they far outweighed by the bad ones. It’s seems to me like the director cared, but after a while the film just slipped out from under him. Really disappointing. While I might end up buying this in the future for collector’s sakes, but if I do it’ll be second hand from eBay. I don’t want Pressman, Most, et al to think that I actually support the way they’re rapping James O’Barr’s story and Brandon Lee’s memory just to make a buck. This film franchise really really needs to die, and not come back.

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