ust over 30 years ago, emerging action star Brandon Lee – son of Bruce Lee – was killed by a prop gun accident,on the set of this Gothamesque revenge fantasy thriller. It was a desperately sad event that generated more spurious talk of a family “curse” , rather than a conversation around movie location safety, which continues to be a problem to this day.
Now The Crow, which was released in 1994, a year after Brandon’s death, has been rereleased for its 30th anniversary. Brandon had largely finished filming and the movie was completed by finessing certain scenes in rewrites and using stunt doubles and digital superimposition of his face, which was camouflaged by the rainy, murky cityscapes and the eerie whiteface makeup.
Director Alex Proyas brings terrific energy and a swooping, sweeping camera to this grungy story of the living dead, drawing on Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop and James Cameron’s The Terminator, as well as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner with its incessant rain. Eric’s band apparently have a track on their album about the rain, plaintively insisting that it can’t last for ever; well, it certainly looks like it will. The Crow is a kind of lo-fi forerunner to the Wachowskis’ The Matrix.
The strange thing is that we don’t see much of Eric’s previous life in the flashback-fragments and he doesn’t look like a regular nice guy radicalised into vengeful violence by the horror of his and his girlfriend’s deaths. His badass death-metal makeup, accessories and general attitude almost make him seem similar to the four murderers from the very beginning. So the ordinary business of motivation is of far less importance than the general atmosphere of cartoony retribution and doom.