Feb 06 2009
B+ Movie Review: The Crow: City of Angels
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.
