Crow [VHS]

(Brandon Lee, as most visitors to this page will already know, died tragically as this film was being produced. That's a terrible loss and it adds an even darker edge to an already dark film.)

Alex Proyas, who would later give us the haunting noir-SF _Dark City_, here turns his directorial hand to bringing _The Crow_ to (heh heh) life. The film recalls all the best elements of Tim Burton's first _Batman_ film and, I think, outdoes its predecessor by quite a bit.

You probably already know the plot here. Rock musician Eric Draven (d'Raven; get it?) and his fiancee Shelly Webster are brutally murdered on Devil's Night (the night before Halloween). Exactly one year later, Draven returns temporarily to life in order to exact revenge on the thugs who murdered them. Which he does, very stylishly.

Dressed in Goth black and with his face painted white, he comes across as something like a vampire, something like a one-man combination of Batman and the Joker, and something like the old comic book hero the Spectre (remember? murdered policeman Jim Corrigan returned from the dead?). The whole thing is calculated, in the old Batman phrase, to strike terror into the hearts of evildoers, and so is Draven's remarkable healing ability: since his wounds close over just about as fast as they're formed, he's all but unstoppable.

Anyway, the overarching theme is that love is eternal, but along the way we get to see a lot of dark and gratifying violence as the bad guys get what's coming to them.

The cast and the script are magnificent. Of course the late Brandon Lee steals the show. But everybody else is good too, including the bird.

The cinematography is brilliant. Everything is muted into almost pure black and white, with occasional touches of red. The cityscape is wonderfully realized, fitting somewhere between Burton's Gotham and Proyas's own Dark City. And it always seems to be raining. On top of all that, the entire thing is lifted high into the (night) sky by Graeme Revell's otherworldly score.

If you like noir fantasy, don't miss this one. The genre doesn't get any better.