B Plus Movies

With the budget of the average movie made in Hollywood today, any one person would be set for life. Between CGI and the salary of name brand actors, the numbers connected to any one production are astronomical, unthinkable twenty years ago. It’s practically a necessity.

Unless you’re Robert Rodriguez and manage to create and enormously successful franchise on $7000 because you made the unexpected hit El Mariachi.

Mariachi, as a musical style, involves a couple of guitar players, a few violins, a small acoustic bass and some really stylish outfits. It’s practitioners are street corner performers and buskers, iconic to the world’s perception of Mexico. The main character in El Mariachi is such a guitar player.

When we meet the Mariachi, he’s passing through a town trying to make a few dollars and get further down the path to stardom. The complication comes in the form of a hitman who keeps his guns in a guitar case. The mobster that the hitman wants dead mistakes the mariachi for his target, convinced in no small part by the fact the mariachi ends up with the weapon loaded guitar case. Gunfire and a love story follow soon after.

Anyone who sees this movie’s sequels (Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico) will notice a distinct lack of Antonio Banderas. This is because the cast is full of the director’s friends. Originally produced for the Mexican direct to video market, this movie was made on a threadbare shoestring. It was only later that Rodriguez could afford the A-Listers.

The performances aren’t Oscar worthy, but they’re raw and very well done for the sort of film. There’s a lot of heart in this movie, not just a little drama and even some comedy. The plot occasionally feels like a lethal sitcom, but more often feels like a tragedy in addition to an action film. With this movie, less really was more.

The budget does show in some places, though. El Mariachi doesn’t feel polished or refined. It’s also a subtitled film, not so much a problem but something that American audiences usually like some warning about. 

Of course El Mariachi ranks B+ in my system, being a seminal part of the stripped down, edgy trend of bare bones, gutsy movies in the 90’s like Pulp Fiction. This movie proves that money doesn’t build films, but ideas and that every once in a while, the unknown director or the no name production company pulls something amazing out of thin air. And that’s a reminder that idea starved Hollywood could use before it gives us another bad remake of some 80’s TV series, don’t you think?

When I was a teenager, often my mom would ask me when I was going to stop watching cartoons. With Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Thundar the Barbarian on the TV in the background, I’d say “never”. As I became an adult, I was exposed to Japanese Animation (Anime) and I found mature themes incorporated into the medium that grew along with me, allowing me to still enjoy animation while not having to only experience it as a tool for telling juvenile tales.

One of the first full length Anime works I saw, one that set high expectations for any other Anime I might watch. It was called Ninja Scroll.

Ninja Scroll is a period piece, starting with a ninja for hire named Jubei. He roams the earth, basically spending time being an unparalleled badass more concerned with fulfilling obligations than personal gain. He crosses paths with a ninja girl named Kagero who is on a mission to find out the truth behind plague that has killed a village. The two of them soon discover there’s much more to the death of the village than simple illness.

Jubei meets up with a government agent who presses him into service by poisoning him. The trio continues the investigation and soon find themselves facing a group of supernaturally powerful warriors, one of whom has a history with Jubei. The more they find out the more danger they find themselves in and the price of knowing what is really going on just might be their lives.

Ninja Scroll is remarkably accessible for western audiences as compared to some other Anime which practically expects you to have a native understanding of Japanese folklore and social idoms. Ninja Scroll runs like a pretty standard action movie and displays just how much violence and drama you can pack into a cartoon.

In addition to being beautifully told, it’s also beautifully presented. The approachable nature doesn’t get betrayed by the fantastic elements (including a villain who can turn his skin to stone and another that is capable of electrocuting people with the just a length of wire and his force of will). On the other hand, the fact that it is a cartoon doesn’t dull the edge of the very bloody violence nor the near rape scene nor the sex scenes nor any of the other elements to this rich piece of animation.

Anime has influenced western cinema for years now, like The Matrix or even has been adopted whole cloth, like The Dark Knight prequel, Batman: Gotham Knight. If you wish to delve into this art form but don’t want to have to already understand the significance of giant drops of sweat and spontaneous nosebleeds, then Ninja Scroll is a excellent, if brutal, starting place.

And for that reason I give Ninja Scroll a B+. And not because I fear the Shadow Warriors coming after me for rating it lower. Definitely not.

I don’t normally review movies that were made on any sort of three digit budget or major ad campaign. But today, I feel I need to make an exception for a film that belongs in the B+ Catalog mostly for its subject matter, the stuff of geek discussions for decades. The source material, a ground breaking comic mini series that later was collected as a graphic novel, was called unfilmable and even by the most rabid fans was something that was thought to be best left to a cable serial and even then could only be expected to be presented in some watered down form.

I’m talking about Watchmen.

Describing the plot of Watchmen  is difficult because in its shortest explanation, it’s misleading and any description that does it justice is better given by just handing someone the book. Trying to meet these challenges in the middle, I’ll try to summarize thusly: The Watchmen are a group of superheroes, only second group of their kind in a world very much like our own, at least up until the 1940’s in which the first group of superheroes became active. The Watchmen are mostly retired, forced to hang up their masks by an act of congress outlawing costumed vigilanttes.  The members include:

• Nite Owl, a gadgeteer and idealist.
• Silk Spectre, a second generation crimefighter.
• The Comedian, who goes on to work black ops for the government.
• Rorschach, a nigh-psychopathic crusader who refused to retire.
• Dr. Manhattan, a former physicist given godlike powers who works for the government on scientific projects even as he slowly is losing touch with his humanity.

In the first few minutes of the story, the Comedian dies. Rorschach investigates and starts tracking down his former team mates to warn them someone might be targeting heroes. As the members of the team come to grips with both who they are and who they were, a plot unfolds that may be either the key to ending… or starting… world war III.

The world of Watchmen is a rich one and has a steep learning curve as we must accept in a glance that it’s the 80’s, Richard Nixon is still president and that America won in Vietnam. The director does an excellent job of summing this up in the opening credits, one of the best cinematic sequences of the film,  but still there’s a lot for the viewer to take in with only a short mentions and glances to convey it.

The story, too, has a steep learning curve. This story doesn’t hold back or pull punches, presenting to us an attempted rape, graphic consensual sex, gruesome violence, nudity both male and female, all of which is used to immerse you in a time and place of moral greys, devoid of easy choices.

Watchmen provides a counterpoint to the ugliness in its world with very human characters with very understandable motivations, from Nite Owl’s struggle to overcome the mediocrity in his life as a retired superhero to a former supervillian struggling with the fact he’s dieing of cancer. The people we meet are extreme personalities, but their outlook seems appropriate given the extremes of the world in which they live. If you watch this movie, you will not like all of the characters, but you will get where they are coming from.

Visually, the movie is amazing, lifting images straight off the page and setting them in motion. The gritty streets, spotless boardrooms and warm-but-dull apartments each move the story along as much as the dialog, the plot or the more spectacular effects. Watchmen is  as much an experience as a piece of cinema, something you must more surrender to than watch.

I was a fan of the book well before I saw the movie and while I was in the theater, this let me overlook some of the movie’s flaws. A couple of weeks later, I can see the holes in the work, from simple things like a character producing a gun that they had no reason to have to the moments in the dialog (mostly from Silk Spectre’s mom) that were not delivered as convincingly as they really could have been. There are moments whose signifigance goes unexplained, places where the pacing could be better and scenes where we get close ups when a short glimpse would have served just as well.

Watchmen is proving to be a commerical failure, which is sad because it’s a bold experiment and as edgy as movies get. It rivals Sin City and Pulp Fiction in it’s willingess to point you towards the unthinkable and not flinch. It rivals The Dark Knight in making the superhero acessable and real. It will be a movie that might be remembered for its brave choices if it is not overlooked for its spectacal.

For all its successes and all its failures, I give Watchmen a B.  I’m not sure I’m ready to go back into the theater and watch it again, but I will be waiting eagerly for the DVD release and the eventual, inevitable extended cut. This is not a movie for everyone but is more than just a movie for the comic book geeks like me. It’s B movie subject matter with an A list budget and a script that I won’t even try to rate, because I don’t feel up to juding the classics.

American film makers crib a lot of notes off of the works of other cultures. Reservoir Dogs, which starts with a bunch of criminals in a warehouse after a jewel heist gone wrong has a lot in common with the Chinese film City on Fire, which towards the end has bunch of criminals in a warehouse after a jewel heist gone wrong. Even the film giant that is Star Wars bears a remarkable semblance to the Japanese film The Hidden Fortress. And as you might not have heard of the Asian films I just mentioned, it goes without saying that the Asian inspiration for films in the states doesn’t always get the mention it deserves.So imagine when I found out that when I thought I was recording Nic Cage’s 2008 movie Bangkok Dangerous I was in fact recording a Thai film called Bangkok Dangerous.

A little internet research and found out that Cage’s film was a remake of the Thai movie I’d found on cable. I was happy either way, as the 2008 movie got mediocre reviews but this one I had no warnings about to influence my opinon. So what did I find?

Bangkok Dangerous features a deaf and mute hitman named Kong. He lives a simple life, drinking beer and eating food from street vendors and supporting his best friend Joe, a semi-retired hitman who has to let jobs pass because he took a bullet through the hand. Joe’s ex-girlfriend Aom is their go between, meeting Kong and Joe at a seedy strip club to hand them their assignments.

The movie takes a lot of efforts to explain to us who these people are, what their life is like and how a deaf kid got into the business of killing people for money. The blood spatters and moral grays are juxtaposed against a believable innocence in Kong’s personality, most apparent as we see him fall in love with someone completely outside his usual world. This part of the movie moves a bit slow, but does a good job of making us care about the characters without letting us forget that they are criminals and thugs.

But this is the sort of story that doesn’t move along until something goes wrong.

Aom gets a lot of unwelcome attention from a brutal member of the gang. Joe kills the wrong person. And eventually, Kong has to turn his guns on those who employed him.

I’ve seen more dialogue in some restaurant menus than in this film, but that didn’t hurt it. The director told the story through images and subtleties, taking the full advantage of the visuals to tell us a visual story. Facial expressions and lighting take the place of plot exposition, helping us identify with a main character that lives without sound.

The images we’re shown help accentuate the fact that this is in no way a happy film, sometimes generating disgust and horror with a glimpse in ways other movies do with broad panoramas. One character is the victim of a rape, which we’re shown at first in flashes, a technique that communicates the chaos of the moment so that when later we see it plainly it almost seems redundant.

More morality tale than popcorn flick, Bangkok Dangerous is not an easy movie to watch, but once you commit to it, it brings you into the streets of Bangkok fully and surrounds you with the world the director wants to show you. Sometimes a little slow, sometimes going too far with interesting camera angles, it’s not a perfect film but something that a fan of Asian, Noir or even just gritty cinema can enjoy. For its flaws, it rises only to a B rating in my scale, but a B I give without reservation to a movie I never expected. 

Movie trivia is a strange comfort for the film buff, not because it lets us know more about the story but because we connect more with business of movie making. Knowing that Viggo Mortensen wasn’t the first pick to play Aragorn (it was Stuart Townsend) doesn’t make the movie better in the telling but it does speak to the actor’s ability and connect us more to the efforts that went into making the Lord of the Rings trilogy so amazing. False trivia, conversely, disconnects from that experience and reminds us that we are but consumers of a product.

For instance, I’ve been mistaken for years that the abandoned script for the propoesed sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, reviewed Wednesday, was cannibalized to make the script for the movie I’m reviewing today, Big Trouble in Little China.

Big Trouble in Little China brings us into the life of Jack Burton, played by Kurt Russel, a loud mouthed truck driver who has friends in Chinatown including Wang Chi (played by Asian character actor Dennis Dun) who is on his way to meet his bride, a Chinese woman with green eyes. Unfortunately, Wang’s would be bride gets kidnapped at the airport by members of a Chinese gang. Jack and Wang (I feel dirty typing that) head down to Chinatown to find her and end up in the middle of a war between rival gangs. This might all be well and good except the battle is joined by three mythical Chinese warriors, the Three Storms in the service of their master, Lo Pan who is a wheelchair bound invalid during business hours but spends more of his time as immortal evil sorcerer (played by another master character actor, James Hong).

Then it gets weird.

We meet Egg Shen (played by Victor Wong), a historian and peasant magician who drives a Tour bus and is the guy who knows what’s going on. Also joining the fight is Gracie Long (played by the still hot Kim Cattrall), a woman looking into the disappearance of Asian girls into prostution rings. Together with the help of one of the gangs of Chinatown, this group must take on Lo Pan, his warriors and demons to keep the sorceror from becoming immortal.

Big Trouble in Little China plays on sterotypes, the unexpected mixed with the expected.  Where a drama would break those stereotypes with insight and displays of humanity, director John Carpenter decided to break those sterotypes with explosions, lightning and the flash of swords. But the thing that makes this movie memorable is Jack Burton, the ugly American.

For the most part, Jack has no idea what’s going on even as he’s trying to overcome the dangers of his situation. In Asian cinema, the viewer is often handed bucketloads of concepts and cleverly named artifacts (Six Demon Bag!) and just expected to accept that these esoteric references are vitally important to the situation. I have no idea if Asian veiwers are any less confused than American ones, but if you’re born in the states and don’t have a degree in Asian Studies, then you probably just look up at the screen and just like Jack Burton go “okay, I can deal with this… whatever this is”.

Because of that aspect of confusion in the midst of action, we connect with Jack and take this fantastic and over the top world at face value, so no matter how strange or twisted the next scene is, the suspension of disbelief stays firmly in place and the time that might be spent with long and complicated plot exposition for the Anglos in the crowd is instead spent shooting things and in general kicking butt.

Big Trouble in Little China is sort of an ubiquitous find in department store $5 bins. I’ve seen in packaged on the same disc with movies that have nothing in common with it except gunfire. I’m not sure if this is a testament to its logevity or a mark against it’s public opinion, but either way it’s easy to find.

If you buy only one obscure, cheap 80’s movie this year, make it this one.  Big Trouble in Little China is fun, confusing, cool and bizarre. It’s a B+ film all the way and perhaps one of the best weird Asian flim with an American main chracter and that wasn’t made in Asia.

Watch it and see if you don’t end up quoting it for a week. I dare you.

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.

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.

Sometimes, the ingredients don’t predict the soup that they make. You can take cheddar cheese, peanut butter, broccoli, flounder, cherries, and chicken broth and no matter how much you like them individually, the result of their mixture is probably not anything you’d like to consume. Sometimes, even taking a tried and true recipe (like say, lasanga) and tossing in an extra ingredient for variety (like say, squid ink) does nothing to improve it and everything to bring it down.

Sadly, the same can be said for some movies and specifically about The Crow: Wicked Prayer.

I gushed over The Crow on Monday and talked about it’s base premise, repeated in each of it’s sequels: A man is wronged and his loved ones dealt with by cruel men. The grave cannot hold his sorrow, so it spits him back forth with a black bird to guide him. His mission is simple: set the balances straight and gain revenge, but those who upset the balances in the first place have no problem making that a hard task.

The fact that three attempts have been made to recapture the raw power and pathos of the first is a testament to how well this formula works.  The Crow: Wicked Prayer promised, from it’s earliest rumors, to be faithful to this vision without simply re-doing the first one.  I had high hopes for this movie.

The cast includes Edward Furlong (of Terminator 2 and Detroit Rock City), Tara Reid (of American Pie and gossip magazines), David Boreanaz (of Angel and Bones) and even a cameo by Dennis Hopper (of…. do I have to tell you who Dennis Hopper is?). Furlong plays Jimmy Cuervo, an ex con trying to walk the straight and narrow. Boreanaz plays a Satanist who wants to sire the AntiChrist with the help of Reid and his three companions who have styled themselves after the four horseman of the apocalyse. To do this, the group tracks down Jimmy and takes his heart and his would-be fiance’s eyes.

Now the stage is set and we can begin the path of revenge. Unfortunately, this is where it all takes a bad turn.

The Crow: Wicked Prayer took passionate, dedicated actors,  well written dialogue and an engaging plot and somehow still missed the mark. Furlong’s character, post-mortem, is supposed to come across as out of sync and darkly alluring, but instead he just looks off balance and drugged. Boreanez does well as a villian up until he gets the power of Satan and his acting becomes a parody of past performances. Dennis Hopper didn’t just phone in his performance, he called collect to do it. The script developed plot holes that it doesn’t even bother to try to justify. They fall back on cliches, reinforcing that if you’re part of an ethnic minority group you must know all of your culture’s arcane rituals.

I don’t know if the movie got rushed at some point, if the editors were off their meds or if the director just wasn’t watching the playbacks but this movie squandered it’s potential. What could have been a solid reboot and an answer to the prayers of J. O’Barr’s fans was  reduced to a suggestion of what it could have been.

So not only seeing what it could have been on it’s own but knowing the standard The Crow: Wicked Prayer had to live up to, I can give it no better than a D in my scale. If you’re a fan of the series already, then check it out. If not, know that there are better movies based upon J. O’Barr’s The Crow. Unfortunately, unless the proposed reboot turns out to suck, there aren’t any that are worse.

Well, except for the movie Phoenix Rising. But that one was a porno.