Oct 022012
 

This is a review of a “Fan Edit.”  Details of the original film, including twists and the ending,  may be revealed.

For anyone outside of the goth subculture, The Crow is primarily known for the death of Brandon Lee. The son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee was shot and killed in a stunt gone wrong. It’s hard to guess how the movie would have been remembered had Lee lived, or even what the movie would have been like. Better, I’d guess.

The story follows the simple revenge exploitation standard (I Spit on Your Grave). A girl is raped and killed and her boyfriend, Eric Draven, is tossed out a window. A year later, Draven returns from the dead for vengeance. He hunts down and kills the attackers in a predictable fashion. Spicing up the action (and supplying enough additional plot to make the movie feature length) is the incestuous, Machiavellian pair of Top Dollar and Myca, crime lords who seek a way of steeling Draven’s invulnerability.

As is, The Crow isn’t satisfying.  (Read my full review of The Crow.)  What works is its stunning visual style, dizzying cinematography, mythic subplot, bizarre characters (well, a few anyway: Top Dollar and Myca command every scene they are in), and the savage violence.

More important when considering fan edits is what doesn’t work, most notably, the demystification of the avenging ghost through repeated scenes of chit-chatting.  Yes, this ultimate goth spirit spends half his time sitting around shooting the breeze.  He has a nice talk to a policeman over beers.  He chats to the scrappy girl multiple times.  The production loses its grandeur when the icon of death is reminiscing with a twelve-year-old. And to go with that, the film would have benefited from both the girl and the policeman being eliminated or greatly reduced.  The plot is overly simplistic, but there’s not a lot you can do about that.

So, The Crow is ripe for fan editing.  It’s a tricky film to work with as the removal of Shelley, the young girl, and the policeman would leave a few holes.  But this is also a movie where replacing dialog with dark wave music would not be out of place.  There are possibilities.


The Crow: The O’Barr Edit
Editor: Suicidal Wombat Productions.  Runtime: 53 min (-48 min).  2007.

The stated intension of the fan editor (I’ll assume an individual until told otherwise) is to make the film as much like the comic book as possible.  I can’t say how well he succeeded.  It’s been nearly ten years since I read the comic.  But that doesn’t matter since I have no interest in his intension.  You can attempt to make a movie more like its source material.  You can also attempt to make a movie more like a watermelon.  Both options make about equal sense.  Two of the greatest movies, Blade Runner and Casablanca, are notorious for abandoning their sources.  My concern is only if a film is good, and in the case of a fan edit, if it is better than the original.  Unfortunately, it isn’t, in both cases.

Suicidal Wombat Productions’ cuts are severe, turning the feature into a short film.  The majority of Shelley’s screen time is gone and the policeman now is nothing more than the officer who happens to work the local area. This is a vast improvement and puts the film on the right track. Their subplots are not missed.  I would have liked to see even more trimming of Shelly as she’s still around to talk with Draven in the street as well as have breakfast with her mom (because there’s nothing better in a gritty revenge flick then a girl and her mom frying eggs).

The cuts also keep us with Draven, seeing the world as he does.  Most filmmakers make the mistake of leaving the protagonist when it is almost always more exciting to keep a single viewpoint.  This is particularly important in thrillers.  But the fan editor didn’t give us enough of Draven.  If we are sticking with him, then it is vital to start with him, but his resurrection has been removed.  It was an emotional jolt, and without it, the picture feels like it fades in on a story already in progress.

As I watch fan edits, time after time I end up saying, “Why didn’t he cut more.”  The biggest mistake is almost always being too delicate.  Not this time.  In general, Suicidal Wombat Productions chops too much.  This is most evident with the main villains, Top Dollar and Myca, who no longer have any great plans, nor are they adversaries to Draven.  Top Dollar is just some guy who has far too many lines for his limited purpose, and Myca is a girl who stands around a lot (yes fans, Bai Ling’s shower scene is gone—now that’s cruel).  This causes three huge problems that kill this version.  First, they were the most interesting and entertaining characters in the film.  Without them, no one shines. Second, without their subplot, the story is too simple even for 53 minutes (45 minutes excluding the credits).  It wasn’t all that clever before, but now we’re left with a painfully linear story: dead guy comes back and kills four guys; the end.  That’s the plot for a twelve minute short.  Finally, while Top Dollar and Myca are cut, they aren’t cut enough.  Keeping in mind I don’t think they should be cut at all, if their story is gone, they shouldn’t be hanging around all the time.  Undoubtedly, if the fan editor had been the original filmmaker, these two characters wouldn’t have been written into the story.  But they were written in, and appear in too many scenes to be excised after the fact.  If a viewer who hadn’t seen the original sat down to view this edit, he’d spend half his time scratching his head and asking why those two irrelevant characters kept popping up.

The Crow The O’Barr Edit is a black & white film because the comic lacked color.  Since the feature had a de-saturated pallet, it doesn’t make much difference, but what little it does is negative.  It is a movie where blood should be red.  What would have worked better is a Sin City treatment, where most of the world is shades of gray, but a few important things stand out with vibrant, primary colors.

The Crow is a movie in need of help, but it doesn’t get it here.  If you like the comic, you’re in luck because it is still available.  If you want to see a good Crow movie, like me, you’ll have to wait and hope.