1990s Gothic Superheroes: The Crow
The year is 1981, Berlin is the divided capital of a divided country. For decades this has been the place World War III would start once the Cold War turns hot. At any given moment gunfire from the East will snap out into the night air as someone makes a life-or-death dash across the border to escape the socialist workers’ paradise of East Germany. The Berlin Brigade is a division-strength US Army garrison permanently stationed on the West side. As such it has members of all the armed services assigned to it. When World War III starts they will be completely cut off.
In Berlin that year, an eighteen-year-old Marine sketch artist named James O’Barr sits down to pour out his rage onto paper. He’d joined the Marine Corps to try and forget the utterly senseless death of his fiance who had been killed by a drunk driver in Detroit.
Joining the Marines hadn’t worked, neither would writing. If anything it made it worse for O’Barr. Every page of that comic seethes with the fury of a man howling raw hatred into his art.
In 1989 Caliber Comics (which managed the neat trick of succeeding when all the other comics publishers were collapsing) printed the black and white comic O’Barr had been working on for nearly a decade. The Crow. It did okay, but wasn’t that big of a hit. It certainly wasn’t a must-read like The Dark Knight or Watchmen but it did have a following among younger comic book fans.
Screenwriter John Shirley worked up a treatment and started shopping his script around. Eventually, it landed on Edward Pressman’s desk. Pressman has an excellent track record for being able to spot a property with potential. Wall Street, Conan the Barbarian, American Psycho, and a bunch of other titles you have actually heard of came to the screen because of him. Pressman’s real talent has always been an innate ability to sniff out the zeitgeist of any given period. And there was something dark about this new generation of moviegoers.
Angry and cynical, they had shrugged off the name “Baby Busters” for the letter “X”. Of course we were angry and cynical, how could we not be? The rules were being rewritten for us and every generation that would follow us. The guy we’d voted in to be our second serving of Ronald Reagan turned out to be nothing but a liberal who was ten years behind the rest of them. The first Boomer president was completely fulfilling our expectations as the most corrupt, hypocrite to hold that office in the 20th century and the press absolutely loved him for it. We had done what were supposed to and ran face first into a wall for our trouble. We either went to Jail, rehab or the military.
So yes, Dark Fantasy called to us in a way that it hadn’t for other generations. The Crow wasn’t the first dark hero but he was ours in a way the rest couldn’t be. Eric Draven and his girl were trying to make their way in the world and were brutally murdered for it, his girl got it the worst being raped before her wedding day and dying in a hospital 30 hours later. The outrage spoke to us.
Brandon Lee was a Gen-Xer himself. He’d lost his father at an age where a father’s death shatters a boy’s security. He would spend the rest of his life in Bruce Lee’s shadow and would emerge from it only in death.
The Lees were a theatrical family and Brandon naturally followed the clan tradition. Perhaps trying to find his father, he studied acting at Emerson and the Strasberg School. He trained in a variety of martial arts; Muay Thai, Wing Chung, Silat, and of course Jeet Kun Do. While he wouldn’t match his father’s ferocity as an on-screen martial artist, he was clearly a better actor. Sure he was trading on his name but he was also putting in the work and he had screen presence. Hollywood liked the young actor, he was going to get his shot at the big time.
John Shirley was, naturally, fired from the film he’d started the ball rolling on. He was replaced with splatterpunk writer David Schow. Pressman decided that the film would need as stylized a look as possible and went hunting for music video directors; Alex Proyus was selected to helm the film and Paramount got the distribution rights.
Brandon Lee campaigned hard for the role, won over James O’Barr, and was selected for the role. He threw himself into the part of Eric Draven, dropping 20 lbs and working with Jeff Imada to choreograph the action scenes. He would be doing most of his own stunts. Production began in Wilmington. North Carolina and was scheduled to take 54 days. It would be finished shooting earlier than that.
On March 31, 1993, Brandon Lee was filming one of his last scenes for The Crow. It was the one where Eric was murdered. The prop was a real revolver. A Smith and Wesson model 629 .44 magnum. During a shoot prior to this one, the armorer had made some dummy rounds for a closeup scene of the pistol, so it would appear to have rounds in the cylinder. The powder had been removed from the round but the primers had been left in place. Somewhere along the line the hammer had been dropped, ignited the primer and the bullet squibed the barrel.
For what would be Brandon’s final scene, this gun was loaded with banks. When Micheal Maltese pulled the trigger there was enough of a charge in the blank to clear the barrel. Brandon Lee was struck in the abdomen with a low velocity, high caliber .44 projectile. He lost consciousness as soon as he hit the ground and never woke up again. His pulse had stopped before he was even on the ambulance. After six hours of emergency surgery at New Hanover Medical Center, Brandon Lee was pronounced dead at the age of 28.
There was an odd sense of surrealism to watching The Crow in the theaters back then. Gen-Xers had thought well of his father, so going to see The Crow was almost like going to the funeral of a family friend.
Given both the subject matter and the well-known fate of its lead actor The Crow was nearly uncomfortable to watch, you knew you were watching a dead man playing a dead man. It added something genuinely macabre to this very gothic film. It was highly stylized and well-paced, and the director managed to extract stark beauty from the scenes of dilapidation. You couldn’t help but feel sympathy for Eric as he was trying to reach out to the living knowing he was no longer one of them. The hawk-faced Michael Wincott was everyone’s favorite heavy in the 90s, his portrayal of the nearly demonic Top Dollar made him a believable final antagonist for the Crow.
It made $119 million against a budget of $20 million and in 1994 that was a pretty respectable profit. Perhaps a little too respectable. The truth be said, The Crow was a one-off for its audience. There was no more blood left in that stone but that didn’t stop Hollywood from squeezing. Its two sequels went straight to video and I never saw either of them. Neither did anyone else really. Both of them were the worst kind of sequels, shot-for-shot remakes of the first movie. The last one was sent straight to Blockbuster in 2000.
In case I didn’t make this clear, The Crow was very much a product of its time. It spoke to a young Generation X in its teens and twenties in a way that it could never speak to the Millennials let alone the Zoomers.
A remake was always going to be pointless and Hollywood was trying to make one for about 20 years.
Sadly, they finally succeeded. A shot-for-shot remake would have been so much better than the edgelord bullshit they dumped all over the audience. Shelly is now a crack whore instead of a social worker, she witnesses some mob thing and they come after her. Instead of telling the police about a murder she deliberately gets herself arrested for possession and gets sent to mandatory rehab where meets meth head Eric. The film spends waaaay too much time on this completely detestable drug addict couple. They spend what feels like an hour in a Nihilistic dull, boring, and tedious “love” story before Thank You Glob the Mob finds them and kills them. The audience cheered. Eric is resurrected not as the Crow but by some old asshole named Kronos who is big mad at the guy who killed them. This completely pointless journey into non-plot-related contrivance lasts for another 3 hours (that’s what it felt like), Eric screws up everything and is discarded byu Kronos for it. FINALLY in the last 20 minutes, he becomes the Crow and starts doing the required killing the bad guys thing.
As a reward, Shelley wakes up the moment she dies indicating the rest of the movie didn’t happen? Who knows? Who cares? Who gives a shit?!?
There was no way the Crow wasn’t going to bomb. This bomb deserves to be the career stain it will be for everyone involved.
This bomb will hopefully kill this franchise for another generation. At the end of the day, Brandon Lee’s The Crow was a movie that was always going to belong to the era that created it. The 1990s. When you watch it now, it simply isn’t the same, nor should it be.
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