The Crow (1994) – Alex Proyas (Friday’s Finest)

Last week we featured the biopic of martial arts legend Bruce Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and today we pay homage to his son Brandon Lee who appeared in his final film – The Crow. Dragon was less than two months away from opening when Brandon Lee died on the set of The Crow March 31, 1993. I haven’t revisited The Crow in many years, but I did watch it incessantly after it came out. I even owned the VHS Cassette.
The Crow is a dark, gothic supernatural superhero movie that is set in a lawless metropolitan city. It is based on the 1989 limited comic book series of the same name by James O’Barr. The viewing experience is all the more disturbing considering the fate of its protagonist Brandon Lee.

I found The Crow a beautifully-filmed, engrossing and touching thriller. I’d recommend it to anyone who has a fondness for weird gothic mythological stories. The script is superior to other films I’ve seen of this genre. As for Brandon Lee, this really was a superb performance. This film is a fitting memorial to a fantastic talent who undoubtedly would have become a major star.
So it’s said, the Crow of all birds is the one charged with the special mission of bringing souls to heaven once they’ve departed this mortal coil. But when one soul leaves behind some business that really needs finishing The Crow can bring you back. Such is the premise of the film. The Crow is where Brandon Lee is brought back to the mortal coil on a vengeance quest.

IMDB Storyline:

A poetic guitarist Eric Draven is brought back to life by a crow a year after he and his fiancée are murdered. The crow guides him through the land of the living, and leads him to his killers: knife thrower Tin-tin, drugetic Funboy, car buff T-Bird, and the unsophisticated Skank. One by one, Eric gives these thugs a taste of their own medicine. However their leader Top-Dollar, a world-class crime lord who will dispatch his enemies with a Japanese sword and joke about it later, will soon learn the legend of the crow and the secret to the vigilante’s invincibility.

Production on The Crow was struck by tragedy when Lee was fatally wounded by a prop gun during filming. As Lee had finished most of his scenes before his death, the film was completed through script rewrites, a stunt double, and digital effects. The film is dedicated to Lee and his fiancée, Eliza Hutton. Eliza Hutton supported Alex Proyas’ decision to complete the movie. It’s a terrible loss when youy consider how much Brandon Lee was bursting with talent, good looks and cat like reflexes like his father who also was tragically taken away all too soon. The film received positive reviews from critics. It was a sleeper hit at the box office and grossed $94 million on a $23 million budget and gained a strong cult following. The success of the film led to a media franchise. 

Interesting Trivia from IMDB:

• Although he was not at fault for the death of Brandon Lee, Michael Massee stopped acting for a year because he was so traumatized by the incident. (His next film was a small role in Se7en (1995).) Up until his death in 2016, he had never watched the film.
• Alex Proyas said that Brandon Lee was unhappy with the way his face paint looked when the makeup department applied it to him before shooting. Lee and Proyas then agreed that it would look best if Lee applied his own makeup every night before going to bed so that when he woke up his face paint would naturally look more worn out.
•  James O’Barr didn’t like casting Brandon Lee as the main lead for his comic-book adaptation. But he was thrilled when he first met Brandon on the set with the makeup and Crow outfit. He was amazed by Brandon’s take on the character when he spoke the exact lines from the comics.
• With his profits from the film, James O’Barr bought his mother a car, and a surround system for himself, then donated the rest. “I was really good friends with Brandon, so it just felt like blood money to me,” he said at a comics convention in 2009. 
• Brandon Lee lost 40 lbs for the role.
• (at around 47 mins) The latter part of the scene in Albrecht’s apartment was ad-libbed by Brandon Lee and Ernie Hudson. The line about Shelley (“Believe me, nothing is trivial“) was not in the script.
• Even though the movie, based on the comic, is called ‘The Crow’, none of the birds used in the film were actually crows. All of them were in fact ravens, which are much larger than crows and have a longer, more impressive beak.
• River Phoenix and Christian Slater turned down the role of Eric Draven.

References:
1. The Crow (1994 film) – Wikipedia
2. The Crow (1994) – IMDB

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand