There are a lot of things to like about the fourth outing for the Crow franchise. First and foremost is the setting. I liked the idea of setting a Crow story someplace other than an urban city, and what we wind up in flavor is a sort of Crow Western, sort of. I was hooked into this new interpetation of the James O’ Barr character, which inspired the novel Wicked Prayer by Norman Partridge- but when “Prayer” blinks, boy, it blinks.

The story takes some time to introduce who’s who, but the opening of the film even has the spagetti western flavor, with Luc Crash and his Four Horsemen are introduced with title cards (i.e. “Famine..Occupation…Former Grill Cook…Luc Crash…Death…Goal: To Raise Hell -LITERALLY!”) and his boys (and gal) bust him off the chain gang. These folks have formed a haphazard satanic cult, which includes a handy how-to book, and kill off those they feel betrayed them somehow. But they kill off the Jimmy Cuevro The Crow to Be and gouge out his dead girlfriend’s eyes so Tara Reid’s character Lola Byrne ( “Crash n’ Burn”! Get it?) can ‘see’ (this confused me- she was a great shot!). They have a real heart to heart talk with JImmy, and bury him in the nearby junkyard.

Big mistake. A bird comes by, taps on the dirty discarded fridge which supposedly was once used for torture on one of Crash’s crew. Still, as the rule goes, when a soul cannot cross over until he makes the wrong things right… You know what happens next. While some of the industrial alternative tunes are missed (they could have snuck one on a car radio if they really wanted to) in a way, I’m sort of glad. Still, I guess even a tune from Macy Gray would have sufficed, but no. More on her in a moment.

Director Lance Mungia does a wonderful job within the first two acts of the film, setting up the story, and getting two surprisingly good performances from Edward Furlong, who is the New Crow Jimmy Cuervo, and former Angel David Boreanaz as Luc Crash/Death. Sadly, the film falls apart quickly in the last half hour, where Luc Crash supposedly gets possessed by Satan- don’t think the kind of devil in, say, Fallen or the Prophecy films, think more along the lines of…Little Nicky.

Still, despite some promise, this film loses it’s luster and appeal in the third act.

Look, I think Dennis Hopper is one of the best actors around. Hard to believe he won an oscar for Hoosiers in the late eighties. Hard to believe he was in many good films. But when Hopper is in a bad film, he’s his flamboyant sketch of his Easy Rider days, and it’s not fun anymore. It’s a matter of picking up a quick paycheck. When Hopper’s El Nino and his bodyguard mistress played by Gray show up in the film, whatever steam Wicked Prayer had quickly evaporates. Then there’s Boreanaz’s “devil as a used car salesman” approach (Mungia’s description on on of his three-!- DVD commentaries) which, combined with Hopper and Gray, and an Indian healing dance around a wounded bird, which most likely contributed to a direct to DVD release.

That’s a shame, because that last twenty minutes don’t match the rest of the picture in tone. Even Tara Reid was tolerable- even if her character wasn’t fully dispatched as she should have been by film’s end. Her character turns out to be the most twisted of the bunch, and well, she’s okay, but nothing special. But I did like Edward Furlong in the Crow role, although his stunt double (a good four inches taller) does a good job too, I could not help note that The Crow’s violent kills are somewhat tame, and one is even off camera. That one, however, has Cuevro stopping War (Matrix’s Marcus Chong) before he blows up a tribal posse.

Furlong’s character is more conflicted than the previous Crows, as there is something of a backstory where he killed an alleged rapist and had the community turn against him; and after Cuevro and his girlfriend Lily (Emmanuelle Chriqui) , the Four Horsemen are not enjoying the couple’s demise. I’m not going to compare him to other actors playing the past Crows, although his occasional spaced out look is closer to Vincent Perez’s Ashe Crow from the second film.

There seems to be some editing issues, as in some scenes, Cuevro’s Crow just shows up, and another where we didn’t see him apply white paint, but did see the death’s head markings being put on. My best guess on this is the sad approach some filmmakers and studio execs take nowadays: if it goes right to video, no one is going to care, therefore, why should we, the filmmakers? It’s a better effort that the previous Crow sequels, but that’s not saying much. The supernatural element was brung in, and instead of getting down and dirty with it, they go to camp.

Director: Lance Mungia
Starring : Edward Furlong, Tara Reid, David Boreanaz, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Danny Trejo and Dennis Hopper

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