Review of The Crow: City of Angels (1996) by Tristan G — 26 Nov 2007

Believe it or not, I like this film just as much as the original. It's a little different than the first. It takes place in LA instead of Detroit, the first film had a rock star and his girlfriend being raped and murdered, but this time it's an immigrant and his son.

Also, the content is worse. Sure, the first film had it's share of violence and gore, and truth be told, this film is less of a violent film in terms of what happens. But it certainly feels much more violent.

Not only that, but there's a lot of graphic drug use and sexual content including a club full of fetish fiends, hermaphrodites, and sadomasochism. But aside from all that, this film has a more personal feel to it.

Since the victim this time around was an innocent child, the guy is MUCH angrier. In fact, he is really psychopathic. Brandon Lee in the first film had a kind of gleeful fun in killing the thugs, but this guy is torturous.

The first film was also a very dark washed out looking kind of film whereas this one is full of dirt, slime, grease, broken glass, and sick colors of gold and green, with dust filters and lighting. This film has a much more art house kind of feel to it with the William Shakesphere kind of love story subplot with the little girl character from the first one now grown up.

The film also contains Glam Rock legend, Iggy Pop as one of the bad guys. He is so funny in this film that he almost steals the film from the real star, Vincent Perez. Perez plays the character of the crow with a lot of emotion and intensity.

It works perfect with what the film tries to provoke. He looks more like a cross dresser in this film, which is quite a stylish touch, but he looks freakin' awesome in the crow makeup. The soundtrack has less of a rock metal feel and more of a punk/glam rock kind of feel.

I thought it worked just as well. The ending is sad, but still works fine with the rest of the film. I really enjoyed this. This was like a new cool take on the first film done right. It has more of an emphasis on sadness and depression and other such emotions and less of an emphasis on doing good for people.

This was cool, I loved it.