YMMV / The Crow (1994)

• Adaptation Displacement: The film was a major Hollywood release, while the comic is niche even within the comics world. The film did help bring more exposure to the comic, however.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Devil's Night is a real thing in Detroit. Things have gotten better in the 21st century, thanks in large part to community groups that formed specifically to prevent the arsons, in an effort known as "Angel's Night". The tipping point, ironically enough, was how brutal the 1994 fires were.
  • T-Bird mentions Lake Erie once caught on fire "from all the crap floating around in it". This is not far from reality. In the 1960s two rivers which flow into Lake Erie, Rouge and Cuyahoga, were so polluted that they caught on fire several times.
• Awesome Music: Both Graeme Revell's score, which won awards and can be considered a gothic answer to Ennio Morricone's and Stelvio Cipriani's Spaghetti Western and Psychedelic Rock Giallo scores and Morricone's score to Danger: Diabolik, and the soundtrack, which featured notable bands as My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, The Cure, a Joy Division cover by Nine Inch Nails, among others. Mostly James O'Barr's favorite bands at the time he created the comic and whose songs were frequently referenced and used thematically in the comic.
• Complete Monster:
  • Top Dollar, a Detroit crime boss who established himself as the supreme ruler of all criminal activity in the city, is a chaotic arsonist who enjoys destruction and murder purely for its own sake. He organizes Devil's Night, in which buildings are burned down all throughout the city. He orders people terrorized out of their homes, and one such couple includes Eric Draven and his fiancée Shelley, who are both violently murdered by his goons, with Shelley also being raped. After Eric attacks Top Dollar's associate Gideon, Top Dollar shows Gideon the eyes of one of his previous victims before killing him. He eventually becomes tired of the profit reaped from the arson and other activities, and announces his plans at a criminal convention to burn down everything. After Eric attacks the convention, Top Dollar captures his young friend Sarah in order to lead him into a confrontation where he tries to throw Sarah off a roof before taunting Eric about his and Shelly's deaths.
  • Myca, half-sister and lover of Top Dollar, is her brother's equal in twisted depravity. Serving as Top Dollar's spiritual adviser to push him to further acts of anarchy and destruction, Myca likewise participates in the regular murder of innocents, including women the two take to their bed. With a penchant for eyes, Myca proceeds to carve the victims' eyes out to use in occult rituals and when kidnapping Eric Draven's friend Sarah, Myca expresses a wish to remove Sarah's eyes as well.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Eric's Jesus joke (actually lifted verbatim from the comic), not helped by the fact that he's saying it to Funboy while the latter is high on morphine and shooting at him to no effect as Eric moves in for the kill.
  Funboy: Jesus Christ!
  The Crow: Jesus Christ? Stop me if you heard this one. "Jesus Christ walks into a motel. *gunshot* Ow, he hands the inkeeper three nails and he asks-" *gunshot*
  Funboy: Don't you ever fucking die!!?
  The Crow: "Would you put me up for the night?!"
• Dancing Bear: Brandon Lee was killed in a freak accident during filming, and in the scenes that hadn't been filmed yet he had to be digitally inserted or replaced by a double. This generated a lot of interest in the film at the time.
• Evil Is Cool: Top Dollar is very well-regarded by fans due to his hilarious lines, awesome voice, memorable appearance, and general badassery as well as Michael Wincott's fantastic performance which has the right combination of charisma and menacing sadism. He even has an impressive sword collection to showcase his coolness.
• First Installment Wins: Though some of the later films have their defenders, it's pretty darn near universal that the first film is the best one, and none of the others really came close.
• Genius Bonus: Eric's makeup is meant to resemble the theatre mask for irony. After all, what's more ironic than getting killed by a murder victim (or as he puts it, "Victims. Aren't we all")?
  • The lyrics for "Burn" draw heavy inspiration from portions of the comic that weren't filmed.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The movie is about a guy who returned to life after being shot dead, starring a guy who was accidentally shot dead during filming. Not that this is funny, but Eric's occasional flippancy about being dead and people intending to kill him definitely qualify for this. One particularly jarring line, "Take your shot, Funboy - you got me dead bang" is spoken to the character whose actor pulled the trigger.
  • It's really hard to watch behind-the-scenes interviews of Brandon Lee in which he's talking so reflexively about his character coming back from the dead, complete with lines like how "we should live life to the fullest, because it could end at any moment".
  • A repeat of the accident would go on to happen in 2021, when Alec Baldwin accidentally killed a woman and wounded a man with a prop gun during filming of a Western he was producing called Rust.
  • This wasn't the only time someone was accidentally killed in an adaptation of The Crow. In 1998, an explosion gone wrong during filming of The Crow: Stairway to Heaven killed actor and stuntman Marc Akerstream.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Brandon Lee, holy shit. Most of his movies prior to this play him as a skilled martial artist, yet with a laid back comedic personality. The Crow, on the other hand, shows him Playing Against Type as the deeply hurt and revenge-driven Eric Draven and not only is it successful, it is scary, making Eric simultaneously very likable and sympathetic and terrifying and makes full use of his incredible magnetism and charisma. The fact that he died in the making of this movie makes his performance more haunting. Had he lived, it would almost certainly have been his Star-Making Role.
  • Michael Wincott has spent most of his career in supporting roles, B-movies, and voice-over work. His superb turn as Big Bad Top Dollar shows just what he's capable of with a meaty role.
• Narm Charm: Some of the special effects look pretty dated by today's standards. Yet, the story is so intriguing and the performances work so well that it's hard to care or even notice them.
• Once Original, Now Common: It might be a little hard for modern audiences to appreciate how gritty, stylish and adult the film was upon its release, especially for a film based on a comic.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The film is a Cult Classic, but outside of its dedicated fanbase the film is mostly known for the tragic death of Brandon Lee during the film's production. The lead tip of a real bullet had jammed in the gun that the crew had loaded with dummy blanks, and the crew didn't realise until after fellow actor Michael Massee, who played supporting antagonist Funboy in the film, fired the fatal shot. Massee was utterly horrified by the incident and kept under the radar for years afterward, but when he too passed away in 2016, every obituary mentioned that he had fired that fatal shot.
• Retroactive Recognition: Moreso a behind the scenes example. The stunt double that filled in for Brandon Lee after his death in many scenes (including the iconic scene where Eric suits up and puts on the make-up) is Chad Stahelski, who would later gain fame of his own as the main director of the John Wick franchise.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The compositing of Brandon Lee's face over his double after his death is not that noticeable, unless you are paying attention. But you gotta cut them slack under the circumstances - no one had ever done the effect before (and when Skank dies the same way, the effect of his actor falling doesn't look much different).
  • Michael Wincott's hair extensions to give him those long, flowing locks are, well, pretty obvious in more than a couple of scenes.
  • Eric's hand in the scene where Fun Boy shoots it is obviously a prosthetic when he holds it up to show the bullet hole. It's most obvious by the way it stays completely still when Eric is moving around slightly.
  • Some of the green screen is rather noticeable, such as when Skank is falling to his death, or some of the shots of the Crow flying over the city.
• Squick:
  • When Eric grabs Darla's wrist and magically causes the morphine in her veins to leak out.
  • The eyeballs. Egads, the eyeballs.
• Unintentional Period Piece: While based on a comic from 1989, the film is very much a product of The '90s, with the industrial-gothic soundtrack and visual style, the trenchcoats, the round-lensed glasses worn by Grange, the preponderance of shoulder-length hair, etc.
• The Woobie: Eric and Shelley. They were good people who simply had the bad luck to get on the wrong side of someone truly horrible and suffered a fate no one should ever go through. At the very least, the film allows them to reunite in the afterlife after Eric has avenged their deaths.