The Crow

“It can’t rain all the time.” The comic book film, as told by the sound of grunge and the annals of horror. It’s kind of baffling to imagine anything else in the genre matching the raw heartbreak of The Crow. Remains as timeless as ever, three decades on. Dripping with a dirty, wet, trashy atmosphere that remains one of the most vividly realized of the 1990s. Impossible to escape the storm cloud of grief that hangs over all of it with Brandon Lee and yet it makes the film’s proceedings all the more poignant and powerful. The tears burn the corner of my eyes each and every time those final credits roll. Hard to think of another revenge thriller that I’ve seen that really just burns with this potent sense of agony, that plays out from scene to scene like tracks of a concept album, telling this harrowing tale. The Crow is the most simple of concepts: evil people who do evil things being brought to justice by an unstoppable force, and it’s brought to life by the turmoil of the decade. It all looks and sounds so gorgeous on the big screen (seriously could be the single greatest soundtrack ever assembled) and the remaster at our screening was just stunning in all of its nasty, metallic glory. Served also as a brutal reminder of how far blockbusters have fallen because the preview for the forthcoming remake played ahead of this and it looked like absolute slop when played just before this seedy little indie action flick from thirty years ago. One of the foremost examples of how certain classics just need to remain untouched, like the sanctity of a grave. The Crow forever remains a classic to me, one of the most important films of my life. A gorgeous, moving exercise in dancing on the dark side.