Stone the Crows

One thing you can say about The Crow is that is that it has delivered on expectations. They are remaking that crap 90's action film The Crow? Sounds like a bad idea. It's been in development hell for over a decade? It's definitely going to be bad. The Snow White and the Huntsman guy is directing it? His films are quite bad. The trailers out? It looks bad. Film is here? Yeh it's bad.

To call the film a remake is a actually a little unfair, it's really a new adaptation of the graphic novel source material (which sucks to begin with) and directer Rupert Sanders has tried to make the film something more than its 1994 counterpart, he just fails at a very fundamental level.

This is still the story of Eric, brought back from the dead to kill those who offed him and his girl but this time we lean more into the romance side of the tale, with his rampage motivated by the idea of saving his loves soul rather than just seeking vengeance. The problem is that there is a complete lack of any actual romance. We see Eric (Bill Skarsgard) first meet Shelly (FKA Twigs) in rehab and follow them over the few days they know each other before they are murdered. If you think that isn't long enough for true love to take root don't worry, she really loves him because he is "beautifully broken" and he really loves her because he once saw something bad happen to a horse. That's it for the great romance and they are soon killed because Shelly has an incriminating video of bad guy Danny Huston using occult whisperings to make people commit murder (apparently this causes the person soul to be sent to hell despite the fact they weren't in control of themself). Upon Erics death, some guy at a derelict train track decides that the whinny drug addict is the perfect guy to resurrect and send after Hutson.

Whatever you say about the 1994 film, it was dripping in gothic style and has a unique visual identity. This film dispenses with all that in favour of a grimy realism that is just boring to look at. The action is similarly uninspired with some of the blandest fight sequences of the year. Eric isn't supposed to be a master martial artist or anything but the fact he can't die is never used in any interesting way. It's a waste of Skarsgard, who showed in Boy Kills World earlier this year that he has proper action chops. He also has the perfect look for the role but is left floundering with a character that does nothing to endear them to the audience and the kind of dialogue an edgy thirteen year old would scribble in a notepad. It's odd that after so many years of trying to get a reboot off the ground the studio would settle on this nonentity as the version to press ahead with. Everything here is so uninspired it feels like they eventually ran out of patience and decided to just rip the band-aid off.

Aside from a couple of fun dismemberments there really is no entertainment value here unless you are the one in a hundred person the toxic teen romance angle actually connects with. The Crow isn't the most terribly made film you'll see, it's just a big empty vat of zero inspiration and that might be worse. Maybe next time, instead of a crow carrying the souls of the dead to the afterlife it should be a turkey.

4 parties in your apartment even though you know people are trying to kill you out of 10.

Comments

Star Scuffle

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is perhaps the purest distillation of a problem the franchise has had ever since the end of the original trilogy. The inability to expand the scope of its story. Commercially, it became a world devouring behemoth, but in terms of narrative it has never moved past (on the big screen anyway) those first films. George Lucas delivered a prequel trilogy that showed us how we got to his 1977 original. Disney's new trio of movies ended up amounting to little more than bringing the gang back and adding some new faces to the hamster wheel. They also gave us a couple of spin-off films dedicated to filling in unimportant details of the classic adventures. Eventually, a sprawling galaxy far, far away starts to look pretty small. Now their return to cinemas after a (much needed) seven year break is a lengthened episode of a TV show that exists because one of the characters in the original films looked pretty cool. With a laboured structure (there are three...

Rooms Got Back

Backrooms was never likely to struggle financially. The last couple of years have taught us that if you can turn Gen Z out, box office success tends to follow. Given the viral subject matter (more on that later) a younger audience were always likely to show up in more than enough numbers to turn a profit on a moderately budgeted horror film. The question facing studio A24 and 20 year old (yes that's right, 20 year old) director Kane Parsons was what to do with the free hit. Do you double down on the premise in order to satiate the TikTok crowd? Or do you layer on the themes and character in order to create an "elevated" horror more in keeping with the A24 brand? It seems they were never quite able to commit to one approach or the other and the final product falls unsatisfyingly in between. For those unaware of the Backrooms phenomenon, it began life as a creepypasta, modern folklore where people share an unsettling picture online and create stories around it. The idea wi...

Van Afterlife

Passenger director Andrè Øverdal has some impressive credits under his belt, including his Norwegian language breakout hit Trollhunter and chilling haunted corpse movie The Autopsy of Jane Doe. That explains why this mediocre horror has a couple of well crafted set-piece scares, but he is saddled with a bland script that is content to tick familiar genre boxes. Things start promisingly with the titular "Passenger" (a highway stalking demonic entity) dispatching a pair of nighttime travellers. We are then introduced to young couple Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio) who are about to abandon the city for a life on the road in their swanky van. Tyler is all in (to an obnoxious degree) but Maddie is hiding some reservations and things get spooky when they are marked by the walking metaphor for the dangers of travel. The first issue the movie runs into is the confusing nature of the entity itself. Why does it mess around with our leads for days when it kills everyone ...

The Bourne IT

The set up for The Amateur is a well worn one, a man loses his wife in a terrorist attack and goes on a mission of revenge. The twist is, that while Rami Malek does play a man with a particular set of skills, they aren't the ones you would expect. Charlie Heller is a socially awkward CIA cryptographer with precisely zero fighting ability and no experience using firearms. He is though, a technological genious who invented half the agencies cyber security and can track and predict patterns like a computer. When his blatantly shady boss, played with smug glee by Holt Mccallany, refuses to act on Charlie's info about the killers he blackmails him for some training and the green light to pursue the perpetrators himself. The two main questions are, can the mild mannered tech guy thrive in the field and is this twist on the formulae enough to carry a fairly by the numbers espionage thriller? The answer to both is, pretty much, yes. Malek is tailor made for roles like this and it'...

Thunderbolts and Lightning, Mental Health is Frightening*

Thunderbolts* takes a bunch of relatively minor MCU characters and scoops them up into a "Suicide Squad" type adventure where they face off against insurmountable odds. Given most of the characters have appeared in TV shows, there is a distinct whiff of Disney+ about proceedings but it is also one of the most solid films Marvel has put out in years. The execs must have known they had something decent on their hands as they waited until a whole weekend after release to spoil the end twist with marketing, as appose to doing it in the trailers. The titular Thunderbolts are : New Black Widow, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), failed Captain America replacement John Walker (Wyatt Russell), former Winter Soldier turned congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Russian super soldier and Yelena's adoptive father Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ant Man 2 alumni Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and maybe mysterious newcomer Bob (Lewis Pullman). If you follow MCU events you will recognise ...

Listening to the Sounds in Silence

The tagline for breakout indie horror hit Undertone is, "The Scariest Movie You'll Ever Hear". This declaration sets out the film's stall as a uniquely audio based horror, and that is exactly what it delivers. The result is something that will chill some people to the bone and leave others falling asleep in their seats. Originally made for a meagre $500,000, the film takes place entirely in one location (director Ian Tuason's childhood home) and centres on podcaster Ivy, played with impressive range by Nina Kiri. Ivy is caring for her dying mother (the only other person who appears onscreen) so has to wait until the early hours of the morning to record her paranormal podcast with friend Justin (the voice of Adam DiMarco). She plays the role of sceptic to Justin's believer but her rationality is tested when her cohost begins playing some eerie audio files he received from an anonymous listener. Although Undertone isn't a found footage film, it very much t...

I Got Bombs But I'm Not a Bomber

Oppenheimer posed a tricky question for perennial hit maker Christopher Nolan. How do you make a three hour biopic of a scientist compelling enough to bring in big money? Turns out the answer is to not make a biopic at all. While J. Robert Oppenheimer is indeed the focus of the film it eschews any traditional biopic format, instead serving up what is essentially a heist or even sports movie wrapped up in a courtroom drama. This allows the director to indulge his favourite hobby of playing with time, as the story jumps between two different panel hearings while also covering Oppenheimer's early career and of course the work of the Manhattan Project. This approach works incredibly well with the three hour runtime flying by. In fact, if you go to see this in the cinema you might want to skip the large cola as there really isn't any time when little enough is happening to sneak in a toilet brake. Technically the film is outstanding. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, follo...

Talking 'Bout My Girl

In addition to already being the name of a dozen or so movies, Obsession is a horrendously dull film title. It conjures up images of dated romantic thrillers or bargain basement serial killer flicks. This is a long-winded way of saying this darkly humorous relationship nightmare deserves a better name, as it's anything but stale. Barron "Bear" Bailey (Michael Johnston), Nikki (Inde Navarrette), Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless) are longtime friends and work colleagues. Bear has long harboured feelings for Nikki and is determined to confess his love, despite warnings from Ian to bide his time and the fact Sarah might be the one who is actually interested in a romantic relationship. After chickening out of an ideal opportunity to tell Nikki how he feels he uses a cheap novelty collectible called a "One Wish Willow" to wish his crush was hopelessly in love with him. Turns out the tacky toy is legit and ties him into a "The Substance" styl...

Lungbuster

With Iron Lung, YouTuber Markiplier, real name Mark Fischbach, becomes the latest content creator to dip his toe into the world of feature film production. His effort is not as accomplished as the work of the Philippou Brothers (creators of Talk to Me and Bring Her Back) but it's a lot more striking and original than last year's Shelby Oaks (directed by YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann). The film is based on a relatively niche video game of the same name, which was made by solo developer David Szymanski (who helped with the film's screenplay) and is set inside a submarine exploring an ocean of blood. We follow exactly the same premise here as our protagonist, a convict named Simon, spends the entire runtime welded into a decrepit submersible on a distant moon trying to earn his freedom. What his superiors are specifically looking for is unclear but he is told the blood ocean holds resources vital to the survival of mankind, who has been pushed to the brink of extinctio...

He-Management

A second Masters of the Universe movie (after the 1987 Dolph Lundgren vehicle) has been on the docket for a long time, with directors from John Woo to Jon M. Chu attached and rights bouncing around various studios. The success of Barbie (another Mattel property) is likely the reason this iteration of the project has finally made it to screens. While a look at what constitutes modern masculinity means it does share a little in common with its pink dappled cousin, it mostly just contents itself with being the most sincerely dumb summer blockbuster you can imagine. Nicholas Galitzine plays Adam, the Prince of Eternia, sent to Earth as a child to escape the skull-faced villain Skeletor (Jared Leto) who has conquered our hero's homeland. Fast forward fifteen years, and Adam is now a friendly Human Resources worker freaking out potential dates by telling them he is the long lost prince to a land of magic and wonder. Finally finding the "Sword of Power" he dropped on hi...

Dan Says its Alright

Search This Blog