B Plus Movies

Jet Li, in my humble opinion, has gotten a raw deal since he started doing American cinema. The man is far more than a martial artist, but a complex actor capable of bringing a number of subtle, tender moments to characters who might otherwise might just be brutal brawlers. The scripts he’s been handed in the States have all missed that dimension in him, even though some have tried. His efforts as an actor in China display a much greater range and depth to his acting.

For example, there is Fist of Legend.

In this movie, Li stars as a student of a great martial arts master who has been killed while at a tournement. Li returns to his master’s school and tries to help the students put themselves back in order, but finds himself and the school set upon by irreverant and viscious students of a rival Japanese school. Soon, Li begins to suspect foul play and is forced to go on the run, the local government being in the pockets of the Japanese. Li must fight to find justice, to keep his master’s legacy and to avoid being put in a jail cell… or worse, the grave.

If this plot sounds familiar, it’s because it’s identical to Fist of Fury,  Bruce Lee’s epic, one of the greatest martial arts films of all time. This is a remake and homage, no a rip off like so many other movies that came out China screaming “You killed my master”! Fist of Legend in many ways is a more hopeful film than Fist of Fury and distinguishes itself from it’s predecessor enough that comparing them does no harm to either one.

Fist of Legend uses all of Jet Li’s considerable talents, from his graceful work as a martial artist to his subtle and reserved talents as a dramatic actor. The film takes time to explore both the world that Li’s character lives in as well as the character himself, leaving one with a sense of a world larger than just the spaces in which the film’s fight scenes take place.

And what fight scenes they are.

Where the film kind of risks losing the viewer is in it’s pacing. In it’s attempt to be thurough, Fist of Legend seems to drift here and there.  I never really felt like I was just waiting to get to the next round of fisticuffs, but I did occasionaly wonder when they were going to get on to the happier part of the film. Admittedly, knowing the plot from Fist of Fury, I may have just been one step ahead of where I needed to be, but still this movie felt to me like it had enough material in it to be broken into to movies, a drama and a martial arts epic.

Before you sit down to Unleashed or Romeo Must Die, check out Fist of Legend. Better yet, skip those movies and go straight to this one. Jet Li has made entertaining films in the US (some of which I’ll have to review here at some point) but  to get a proper measure of how talented the man really is, go look at where he began. I did and because of that, I give Fist of Legend a B+.

Some movies start off looking like they are going to be normal and then twist into something strange and wonderful, like Fight Club. Some movies start off weird and then become something more approachable, like Moulin Rouge. Still others start off weird and just keep going with it.

It is in the third category I place the 1998 cult film, Six-String Samurai.

The film starts in a setting that is one part alternate history and one part allegory: In the fifties, the Russians bombed the United States leaving it a desolate, barren landscape full of warring gangs and the desicated husk of the American Dream. To the west lies the Kingdom of Elvis, and as the movie begins Elvis has left the building died. Hopefuls from all over the country converge on Vegas to be crowned the next King of Rock and Roll.

Enter Buddy, as in Holly (horned rimed glasses and all), who is said to be able to “kill over a hundred men and play a mean six string at the same time”. With katana and Les Paul in hand, he heads towards Vegas to make his bid, but along the way meets a orphaned kid who Buddy reluctantly takes into his protection. As he walks on towards his destiny, Buddy will face suburban zombies, rock star wannabes, the Red Army and even Death himself.

Once you’ve accepted that this isn’t the history they taught you in school, Six-String Samurai is fun movie.  While I’m calling it Sci-Fi, it has elements of a martial arts film, a western, post-apocalyptic action and modern fantasy. The movie’s sword fights and bluesy guitar riffs are edged with comedy and thickly coated with symbols of an America that never really existed save on glossy magazine pages and black and white TV screens. The film uses rock and roll as a metaphor, representing what is best and fine in the culture of the US as well as what fuels the dreams of those who start off humble but hope to make something grand of themselves by the end of the story.

Six-String Samurai was made on a shoestring budget but that in no way hurts the movie. What does hurt the movie is that the fights get a little repetitive and that the strangeness of things like a guitar duel with Death threaten to alienate the less dedicated viewer. This movie looks at it’s subject matter like a kid with a pinhole camera watching an eclipse, a perspective that makes it interesting but at the same time obscures the film’s impact.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a biology class documentary on bees and 10 being a David Lynch film, Six-String Samurai falls at about 8.2 for weirdness.  It’s not a film I’d recommend just for background noise, but more if you’re willing to let yourself get sucked in to a movie and also willing to hang with it when the allure wears thin for a scene or two. In my more usual ranking system, that means Six-String Samurai gets a B.

But I don’t expect this movie to care that it didn’t get my top honors. It’s just too cool for that.

Edgar Allen Poe is undoubtedly one of the best writers ever to come out of the United States. His tales are haunting and creepy, even read by the jaded eyes of 21st century readers. With a few words, Poe managed to evoke senses of loneliness, suspense, horror, revulsion and terror that have echoed throughout the years even unto this very day.

Though for now, I’d like to talk about a particular echo that occured in 1991, The Pit and the Pendulum.

A direct-to-video release, The Pit and The Pendulum was done by Full Moon Pictures, a studio dedicated to making low budget horror movies that didn’t look low budget. Other productions by them include the Trancers sequels, the Puppet Master series (the one about living dolls, not aliens), Dangerous Toys, Subspecies and more recently the tongue and cheek horror movies Evil Bong and Gingerdead Man.  The studio’s productions always were slick and disturbing, made with an eye towards a very particular, very twisted audience.

The story of The Pit and the Pendulum is very loosely based on Poe’s short story of the same name. It pads the setting a tad as, well, the original takes place entirely in one room. In this telling we meet a baker, Antonio and his wife, Maria who run afoul of the Inquisition in 1492. Maria is accused of witchcraft and much worse, comes to the attentions of the sadistic head of the Inquisition, Torquemada (played by Lance Henriksen, more on that in a moment). Antonio attempts to free his beloved wife and in the process becomes imprisoned himself. Torquemada decides to try a new torture toy out on the man, and that’s where the title pit and pendulum come into play.

The villain in this piece, Torquemada, was a part originally offered to Peter O’Toole, who turned it down. Lance Henriksen was at that time offered the role of Torquemada’s torturer (not the the guy who tortured for him, but applied torture to him). Henriksen turned down his role also, but said that if the lead nasty became available, he was ready to don robe and tonsure to do it. Eventually he got the part.

At a convention in 2008, Henriksen said that he got into the role by imagining how Torquemada experienced the world: walking barefoot along cold stone castle floors and being able to detect the presence of a woman by scent. He immersed himself in the character, bringing depth to what could have been a very one-dimensional character. It’s his passionate, fanatical performance that brings this movie alive. You have little choice but to hate Torquemada and root for Antonio and Maria’s reunion, complete with the triumph of compassion and justice over fear and blind adherence to bad rules.

While as I’ve described it here, this movie could have easily been a drama, rest assured that it’s a horror flick through and through. The tortured victims of Torquemada’s Inquisition are pictured in graphic, sometimes over the top detail. This movie has people being burned at the stake, flogged, crucified and choked to death. It even has an exploding witch.

Yeah, you read that right. An exploding witch.

While not the feel good hit of the year, The Pit and the Penulum are well worth a horror fans time, even seventeen years after it’s release. It’s a film that was taken seriously by those involved and that never spilled over into camp or absurdity, working with it’s gross and graphic elements to produce an engaging, shocking and chilling piece. It’s got a B+ from me and if Edgar Allen Poe were alive today, I’d say he’d probably approve.

Well, right after he asked “Where are my royalties?” and screamed “Get me out of this casket!”.

When one watches a movie with 2 in the title, one expects there will be some connection to a movie whose title includes an invisible 1. With B movies, it’s sometimes not the case. Like writers of the first millennium after Christ, any book that advertises as “based on a true story” or any soundtrack that says on it’s cover “inspired by”, the substance of a B Movie sequel may bear little to no resemblance to it’s supposed predecessor.

I thought about this a great deal as I found myself mesmerized in my seat by Back to Back: American Yakuza 2.

American Yakuza was a B action movie starring Viggo Mortensen (yes, as in Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings). A movie deserving it’s own review, it was at it’s heart a police action movie/thriller about loyalties and trust, set against a backdrop of gangsters, gunfire and crime. Back to Back: American Yakuza 2 has police, action, gangsters and plenty of gunfire. It even has one of the actors from the first movie, though not playing the same character, unless you wish to reduce his character to “Japanese gangster”. Watching American Yakuza is entirely unrequired for enjoying its sequel and in fact I might recommend watching this one first so that you’re not expecting a better movie.

Back to Back: American Yakuza 2 starts with a number of people going about their rather messed up lives with no knowledge their paths will soon collide. First we have a pair of Japanese gangsters (the Japanese mob is called the Yakuza, if you didn’t know) who are nonchalantly hanging out in an Italian restaurant. We have a cop who just got investigated by internal affairs. We have the cop’s daughter who is going through a bit of teenage rebellion and parent hating. And then there’s a couple of assorted other police officers, a couple of assorted Italian mobsters and a psycho (really, listed in the credits as “psycho”) with an AK-47 and a dislike for the boys in blue.

The psycho comes to the restaurant and prevents the assorted gangsters from getting lunch there. This apparently disrupts the plans of the Japanese gangsters one of who takes it into his own hands to resolve the situation. This leads to an arrest, an escape and the Yakuza taking the cop under investigation and his daughter hostage. Soon, they find out they have enemies in common and a path towards clearing this mess up becomes clear.

With the diverse elements and situations of the characters and the strange weaving together of their fates, this movie starts off very much like a bargain basement Quentin Tarantino movie. I kept trying to turn the channel, but the question of “what does all of this have to do with everything else” was enough to make me pay attention long enough for me to get to the place where the Yakuza and the disgraced cop have to work together. And it was at that moment that I had the horrible realization I was no longer watching a slick, gritty crime drama.

“My god,” I thought to myself. “I’m watching a buddy film!”

While this should have been enough to send it sliding down my ratings scale like a kid with a trash can lid on a snowy hill, the shooting began in earnest about that time and I continued to sit and watch.  And I’m kind of glad I did, for while this movie may not have been Oscar worthy, it did have some very redeeming qualities. For one, there is a liberal sprinkling of cameos and bit parts in this movie, most of which are by traditionally comedic actors. The aforementioned psycho is played by Bobcat Goldthwait. There’s also Tim Thomerson (the Trancers series and a yard long B-List pedigree),  Vincent Schiavelli (deceased character actor that you’ll know when you see), Stephen Furst (Flounder from Animal House) and Fred Willard (Wall-E, MadTV and about a 190 other movies and TV shows). Between shootouts, there are scenes that range from weird to funny to all to familiar family drama, causing the movie to constantly teeter on the bridge between the warm hot tubs of awesome and the deep, muddy pits of suckitude without ever really falling into either.

I’m not going to say your life is incomplete without seeing this movie, but it’s worth checking for on cable and while you may not want to hold anyone down and force them to watch it, if you’re an action movie fan or have any working knowledge of comedians in the late 80’s, you’ll have a good time with this one. The movie has some issues with cliches and direction here and there, but not enough to rob it of entertainment value completely.

Back to Back: American Yakuza 2 gets a C from me. It’s a decent time waster and cute little ride that won’t change your life, but might make you smile. If you watch this one, keep your eyes out for some of the best last words ever written on a strip club napkin, the best thing that could ever happen to Bobcat Goldthwait and another demonstration of why if you have kidnapped someone and have them in your car, you really should wear your seat belt.

Monday, I reviewed a movie called Gangs of the Dead and spoke of the deep level of suck to which it managed to delve. What sticks with me about that film was how close it came to being cool and how much it had to work with versus what it actually did with it. This made me think of other zombie movies and what they did, both wrong and right.

Take for instance an 80’s classic, Night of the Comet.

Night of the Comet starts with a couple of Valley Girls, the prototypical 80’s girl who spent inordinate amounts of time at the mall, sported leg warmers and spoke in one of the most contagious slang dialects of the twentieth century (I’m sure there’s evidence to back me up on that last one somewhere). One is a cheerleader, the other works at a movie theater and at the opening of our film, they have no more concerns that shopping, having sex with their boyfriends and topping the high score on an arcade game (if you have to ask me what an arcade game is, I’ll have to slap you.)

As the opening exposition is kind enough to tell us, there’s a comet on the way and Earth is going to pass through it’s tail. This is cause for the masses to party in public and for a few more cautious souls to hide in bunkers. Turns out, of course, that the latter took the wiser path. The comet’s mojo turns people in to zombies, doomed to disintegrate but not before trying to maul the small remaining non-zombie population.

The girls manage to escape this fate by spending the night behind steel walls (the projection booth for one, the backseat of a car for the other). They meet up with a trucker who also survived and then go to fetch weapons from the National Guard Armory, which they know how to use because their dad is in the military.

The guns turn out to be necessary for more than mulching zombies as a group of scientists now want to capture the girls and figure out how to make a cure for the zombie disease out of their blood. Between zombies and rogue scientists, the girls and the audience are in for a bit of a ride.

The thing that made this stand out from other zombie movies, for me at least, was that it was more a period piece than a horror movie. It used the 80’s kitsch to connect with the audience and highlight some of the sillier aspects of the Valley Girl chic. This is true for about the first third of the movie, but that’s enough to set the tone.

Where the movie slacks off is in the last two thirds, in which it becomes more of a standard sci fi piece. If they’d kept the focus of the first part of the movie, it might have stepped beyond B movie territory and gone straight into genius. It didn’t, though and instead remained cute and entertaining.

While not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination,  Night of the Comet is a very watchable, enjoyable movie. It has almost no gore factor though which makes it more of an action film than horror, even if it does provide some deeply creepy scenes in the process (the guys in the mall and the game of “scary noises” stand out).

As of 2009, the 80’s are back in full force as evidenced by the teenage girls I’ve seen bopping about the mall in ripped jeans, tiger striped spandex pants and side ponytails. If anyone needed reference material for the look, this is one of the films I’d consider required viewing. Night of the Comet get’s a B from me, and a deserved one at that. Totally. I mean like gag me with a spoon.

Some of my best movie experiences have come from being up at 3am, flipping channels and just happening to land on the first few minutes of a movie not deemed worthy of a prime time spot. Abandoning all hope of a reasonable amount of sleep, I surrender myself to serenidpity and curiosity and let myself sink into the mind of a b movie director. Often, this has resulted in me looking at my friends the next day, my eyes red and held open by force of will, explaning how they simply had to track down the story that was worth sacrificing rest.

On the other hand, some experiences don’t result in the same enthusasim. With that in mind, I’d like to talk about 2006’s Gangs of the Dead.

Gangs of the Dead (known as Last Rites before its DVD Release) falls somewhere between Dawn of the Dead and Resivoir Dogs in its storyline: Two groups of LA gang members show up at the same time to buy drugs from the same guy. This deal also happens to be a sting operation, with law enforcement listening in and preparing to make some arrests. Alas, nothing is to go as planned.

You see, the movie opens with a group of homeless people listening to a street preacher. Bible in hand, the street preacher talks about a metor shower the world is to witness that night (calling it God’s feces) and prays for a miricle to show his people that all the wrongs in the world are going to be set right. The miricle comes in the form of a preview of the metor shower which streaks through the sky, lands on the homeless people and turns them into infectious, cannibalistic zombies.

So when the word is given to make the bust, the cops are confronted with rotting hordes of the undead and have to join their would-be perpetrators in an effort not to get eaten. Tensions rise as racial barriers, gang barriers and plain old stupidity begin to lower the life expectancy of everyone involved. Along the way, we are introduced to the literally named Dick Weatherman (who is both a weatherman and a complete… well you get the idea) and a few of the gang bangers family. We also are invited to wonder (for the three seconds it takes us to figure it out) who narc is that brought the cops to the apocalypse in the first place.

Gangs of the Dead has the seeds of an interesting film, hinting that it might be able to tie in a message about the self destructive nature of gang life and bigotry. It also hints at being suspenseful. The sad fact is that it fails to do any of this.

The pacing of the movie drags after about the first twenty minutes. The characters are inexcusibly dumb, forgetting where people are and what resources they have such that their deaths seem inevitable. The script makes an attempt to get us interested in one or two of the characters only to, in the end, kill them all off and focus on the snitch (you’ll know) and one of the side characters who is introduced as a street tough teen but becomes more and more infantile as the story goes on.

The best I can say is that the movie could have made more mistakes than it did. There is humor mixed included that doesn’t turn it all into a farce. The initial set up of the film sets a creepy and tense tone, even if that’s latter killed by the movie dragging on. The gore is used to good effect, though it is concentrated in two or three scenes and at one point it’s obvious that the entrails one zombie is chewing on are ramen noodles. And I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge actors Noel G. (who played in Bruce Almighty) and Reggie Bannister (veteran of the Phantasm series) who did very respectable jobs.

But in the end, this movie took the seeds of brilliance in it’s concept and fertelized them with salt. You get the feel that more could have been done with this movie but that somewhere, someone either didn’t have the clarity of vision to see it through or that they ran out of money and just used everything they shot to make the film.

The invention of the DVR has removed the need to stay up and watch one of those chance cinematic gems I started talking about. And I’m glad, because if I’d actually stayed up to see this one to the end, I’d have wanted to sue the studio for my lost z’s. A set of poor choices dotted with occasional gems of good horror, Gangs of the Dead, aka Last Rites gets a very round D from B+ Movies.

On the one hand, it’s the day before Valentine’s Day and I’d like to review a love story for it. It’s also Friday the 13th which pushes me towards reviewing a horror film. What’s a movie geek to do?

The answer is review both. If you have already read the title, then you know the movie that covers both genres is Bride of Re-Animator.

To understand this movie, though, I must say a few words about the Lovecraft inspired, classic 1985 horror film Re-Animator. The movie revolves around Herbert West, a brilliant doctor who constantly seems to teeter on the edge of genius, threatening to pitch himself headlong into villiany. West has developed a glowing green fluid which, injected into dead bodies, brings them back to life. The problem is that they don’t always come back as reasonable as they were alive.

Also we meet Dan Cain who discovers West’s side project and agrees to help him. Their efforts go terribly wrong, however, leading to a bloody and twisted chain of events that grow more horrible with each turn.

While I won’t go into the end of Re-Animator, the fact that both main characters manage to survive must be revealed or else it would be impossible to speak of the sequel. In Bride of the Re-Animator, we find Cain and West working in Peru, using a civil war as a way to collect new bodies and new body parts to continue their experiments. Eventually, the two return to the states, where West begins collecting pieces to attempt something new: A composite being, a woman made of various bits of other human beings including the heart of Cain’s slain girlfriend.

Cain sees this as a chance to be reunited with his true love. West sees it as a way to further his experiments. Of course, it’s gets complicated and bloody.

The heart and soul of these films is the performance of Jeffery Combs, the actor who brings Dr. Herbert West to life. He plays this character so well that you at times find yourself rooting for him, at others hating him and in some ways feeling sorry for him. He’s an obsessed man, single minded in taking his science and pushing it to its logical conclusion. Because of his blindness to everything not immediately important to his work and his willingness to do everything it requires to see his work to it’s fruition, you can’t help but want him to succeed, even when he does the horrible or the unethical to meet his goals. The horror that erupts around him seems to be not just an accident or even a consequence of his actions but a visible representation of the twisted vision ever present in the character’s mind.

The other actors do well. Re-Animator is a classic for a reason and even being a low budget horror film from the 80’s, it met with critical acclaim upon release and is still one that horror movie fanatics seek out today. Its first sequel was by no means a lesser film, preserving the creepy, gory feel of the first movie while telling its own distinct tale.

These movies are not for the faint of heart or easily offended, pushing the bounds of good taste in places and being outright gross in others. That warning aside, I can recommend these movies to those who appreciate the weird and disturbing and give both Re-Animator and Bride of Re-Animator the coveted B+.

Though, of a note, if you use either one of these as a Valentine’s Day date movie, I cannot be held responsible for the ass kicking likely to follow. You have been warned.

Cyberpunk is a genre of fiction, mostly revolving around the idea of society reacting to technologies coming at us so fast that we’re unable to comprehend their impact fully before we have to become proficient in their use. Generally, cyberpunk drew upon dystopian visions of the future along with the symbolism of replacing body parts, either with bionic or artificial organic parts, representing man’s descent into inhumanity when confronted with the pressures of living in the modern world. Cyberpunk was also declared dead by one it’s finest authors, Neal Stephenson.

I have to wonder what he thinks of Repo: The Genetic Opera.

The world of Repo: The Genetic Opera is one in which organ failure is a common and ubiquitous problem, the same as bad vision or wisdom teeth might be today. Necessity being the mother of invention, a company is born which produces designer organs which first are a medical miracle but soon become a fashion statement. The problem is that organs are expensive and most have to buy them on credit. If you default on too many payments, they do more than wreck your credit rating: they send the Repo Man to come collect their property.

Enter Shilo (played by Alexa Vega of the Spy Kids trilogy), a young girl who has grown up to the age of 17 constantly hampered by a blood disease, inherited from her mother. She is guarded by her father day and night (played by Anthony Stewart Head of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer). As a parent and doctor, he provides as safe world as he can for Shilo, but cannot tell her that he has another occupation. He is a Repo Man, the one the company calls directly when important organs must be taken from important people.

Adding to this melodramatic tragedy in the making is the family who runs the organ making company, GeneCo. They are composed of the cruel family head, the rage filled eldest son, the face-stealing younger son and the scandalous, wannabe singer daughter (played by Paris Hilton… what a stretch). There’s also a grave robber who gets drugs out of the brains of corpses, an opera singer (played by Sarah Brightman) who has effectively sold herself to GeneCo and a whole parade of scarred, gun toting figures to fill out this violently surreal setting.

Did I mention it’s a musical?

With its Wagnerian scope, Shakespearean themes and George Romero-esque imagery,  Repo: The Genetic Opera was either going to be awful or awesome. I prepared myself for awful. Which may be why I got awesome.

From the first moments actors start taking the screen, I couldn’t look away. Sometimes, it was because I couldn’t believe what they were showing me. Sometimes it was because I couldn’t wait to see what was next. But scene after scene, the movie kept throwing visuals at me that stunned and amazed backed by music that flowed with the story and didn’t, as it does in so many musicals, seem tacked on.

The highlights for me were Blind Meg/Sarah Brightman, who played her role flawlessly as well as the Grave Robber, who serves as the story’s narrator in addition to being a playful yet morbid in-story purveyor of recycled drugs.

This is a movie bound to produce strong reactions, the sort of film that must have the right sort of gallows humor to enjoy or at least have a strong stomach to experience. There were some choices that the director made that might lose those not attracted by the imagery: the pace of the movie is a little off in the first third of the film, for instance. Part of the story is also told with flashbacks and drawings where one might expect a movie with “opera” in the title to tell these plot points in song. The movie is not flawless, sorry to say.

But I wasn’t hoping for flawless. I was hoping for B+.

Repo: The Genetic Opera may not revive cyberpunk as a genre, but it certainly does suggest that it lives on in the sick imaginations of at least two screenwriters. If the movie gains the cult status that it truly deserves, those imaginations have suggested the possibility of a prequel and a sequel. I hope this movie gets the attention required for those projects and that, like this one, they hit that perfect balance of bizarre and watchable that so many would-be cult films fail to achieve.

To make a long commentary one question and answer longer, is Repo: The Genetic Opera B+? You bet your mortgaged liver it is.

The death of a sequel is in its inability to bring anything new to the table. Sure, we want enough of whatever the original story was that we get the same feeling, the same magic and emotion brought on by that introductory tale, but we also want to see something else. Play it too close to the original and you risk boring the audience by taking them over well tread ground.

And fear of innovation is not anything I can pin on The Crow: Salvation.

The last movie to review in my four part retrospective of The Crow franchise, The Crow: Salvation had a lot going against it from the beginning. It would invariably be compared to The Crow and it would be hard to capture that depth of story again using the same plot. Also, critics were less than impressed with The Crow: City of Angels, so not only would be compared to a very well liked movie, but also a less than well liked movie.

Seemingly destined for failure, the movie failed to bring us back to where we started but it didn’t just stop and die either.

The Crow: Salvation begins with the classic formula that made us fall in love with the series. Take two lovers, add some tragedy and sprinkle with an unkillable thirst of for justice and once again, you get an undead vigilante in black and white makeup ready to pass out the butt kickings to all comers. In this case, we have Alex Corvis who was framed for the death of his lover and spots the killer (by way of a plot provided identifying mark) as one of the members of the gallery watching him be electrocuted. He comes back and along the way must not only find his killer but also look after his girlfriend’s sister, played by a pre-Spider-Man Kirsten Dunst.

What this movie does right is that it doesn’t directly try to be the first movie, just with a different actor in the lead. It plays with the plot devices, requiring Alex to believe in the purity of his mission and his own innocence to keep going. This adds a vulnerability and introspective twist to the character that means there’s a chance that the unstoppable can be stopped. This in turns builds tension and at least for me, made me engage the story and really wonder how the character was going to finish his quest.

The less than perfect parts of this tale are in its framing, like a complete lack of understanding about how electrocutions take place. Also, the acting by the main villain (played by Fred Ward) left just a bit to be desired. Despite it’s curves, there are few framed shots where it’s pretty obvious they were trying to copy scenes from The Crow. Not enough to make me get bored, but enough that I said to myself “yep, I guess it’s time for him to get shot by a line of guys in a bar”.

The Crow: Salvation was neither the best movie I’ve ever seen nor even the best comic book movie but it was the best of the three sequels, I felt. While this is faint praise, in the B+ rating system, this means that I give it a B. There will never be another movie, I fear, that will completely capture the magic of the first movie but if they keep making sequels, future filmmakers wishing to take up this tale would do well to look at the third installment and see exactly how much you can push the formula and still make a movie worthy of the pre colon title The Crow.

Cult classics are hard to manufacture because they require something genuine. It usually takes a movie with no money behind it but passion to catch an audience, a fringe that resonates with the message as if they’ve been there all along, just waiting for someone to help them say what was in them from the start. Like a chance encounter that leads to a sweaty night in the back seat of your Celica or a fine meal whose only recipe was “take everything left in the refrigerator and throw it in a pot”, you can’t so much plan a cult classic as let it happen.

When you try, you get The Crow: City of Angels.

The Crow: City of Angels starts many years after the original, in which Sarah, the young girl championed by The Crow’s Eric Draven, finds and aids Ashe Corvin, who is the newest victim of a crime so heinous he must seek vengence before he can return to the grave, in this case the murder of his self and his son. The villian is Judah, a sadomasochist who leads a band of colorful villians and keeps company with a modern day witch.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a pretty straight forward rehash of the first movie. This is sad, because the director originally said that he’d wanted to distance the sequel from it’s predecessor. Despite whatever effort he made towards that desire, the only really evident difference between the two was green lighting instead of gray lighting.

As with the original movie bearing the title The Crow, this flick is not something I would normally review. I saw it in a normal theater and it had a budget to speak of, unlike the straight to video pieces that would follow it. I’d originally intended to tack this review onto one of the others. The reason I can’t is that there is one thing this movie has that those others don’t: A rare, impossible to find alternate version.

Alternate versions and director’s cuts are the filet mingon of the movie geek’s DVD collection menu. Having tracked down a copy of a movie with five minutes of never-before-seen footage is the difference between saying you’ve seen the movie everyone else saw and saying to saw what the creators really hoped to show. It’s the whole reason that deleted scenes and outtakes are included in DVD releases these days, to give the ravenous the few extra crumbs that make it worthwhile to bring home the whole cinematic cake.

According to IMDB, Wikipedia and probably some old movie buff telling stories in the back of a seedy bar, the original cut of The Crow: City of Angels was a very different movie before the editors got a hold of it. It took the cookie cutter villians and gave them depth, so that when they get killed we actually care. It ran a romance sub-plot that the theatrical version hints at but never follows through on. It even had a radically different ending and one of the best closing lines I could imagine for such a gothic and downbeat movie.

That cut would have been awesome. At least I think so. I’ve never seen it.

It apparently showed up on German pay per view once and now only exists as a cobbled together piece that you have to track down through torrents and downloads (which we know you don’t do, because that’s illegal). If the studio who did this, Mirimax, has this copy available, they haven’t apparently realized there are people salivating for its release.

But no, they only released a safe and gutted version. What would have been a hard hitting, moving two hours of cinema instead was bad rendition of the first movie with more colorful death scenes but no heart. Despite some passionate performances (most of the scenes with Iggy Pop, who plays chief henchman Curve, are pure genius) The Crow: City of Angels is a hot dog when we were looking for a steak dinner.

As such, I can rate this one no better than a C and it gets that only for being pretty and having Mia Kirshner in it. I just wish that whoever made the editorial choices for this movie had realized that if we’d wanted to see The Crow again, we would have just pulled it off the shelf and rewatched it.