Jamie
We spotted The Crow from a million miles away and I declared “If this does not qualify for BMT then we may as well close shop because it won’t be a world we want to BMT in.” Thank heavens The Crow delivered, otherwise you (and by you, I mean the bots at Internet Archive) wouldn’t be reading this right now. It was a Madame Web level disaster waiting to happen to the point where we didn’t even care to do it Live. We had already waited a while for the film to come out… what’s a few more months? In preparation, I of course watched the original film and at first I was like “what in the world?” but then I started to vibe with it. I also really appreciated a couple moments where in creating the dour rainy world of The Crow they employed some miniature work.
To recap, Eric is a drug addict in rehab. He’s just real brooding and dark but is handsome. You wouldn’t understand. Shelly is also dark and brooding but is a beautiful girl also with drug problems. You wouldn’t understand. No one understands. That is until Shelly gets a video from her friend Zadie that is like… wow. Soon the henchmen of the eeeevil Vincent Roeg are after her for that video. Before they can snag her, though, she is snagged for possession and sent to rehab. Eric and Shelly mean and it’s like… wow. But in a different way than the video. You wouldn’t understand. But they understand… each other. When trouble comes for Shelly, Eric is there to help her escape and soon they are in looooooovveee. They are just a couple of young people having fun while sticking their middle finger up at the world. Wooooo. But then they get murdered. Sad. Eric ends up in purgatory where he is offered a deal: kill Roeg, who actually works for the devil, and he can be with Shelly. He immediately agrees. He becomes… The Crow. He goes around killing people because he’s invincible, slowly working his way up the chain towards Roeg. But then he finds the video. It shows Roeg forcing Shelly to kill a woman. He’s shocked (shocked!). He’s not so sure he loves Shelly. Without the power of love he is able to be killed and only by promising to exchange his soul for Shelly’s is he given a second chance. This time he don’t miss. He slays everyone with super dark and cool moves. Roeg attempts to steal his powers in a climactic battle, but Eric is able to trick him and kill him and save Shelly. Ultimately he sacrifices himself for Shelly… for love. THE END
I have to give this movie a lot of credit. They could have just remade the original film. Swap out the music, but otherwise just keep it more or less the same. Or they could have made it even more like the original source. But they did neither. They basically went their own way with the idea of The Crow. So I can see why they might be excited about it. But this really isn’t it. It’s quite bad. The characters are unlikeable pretty much from top to bottom. The additional supernatural element of the bad guy is kind of dumb (but you also need it because how else is Danny Huston going to be your bad guy?). And worst of all… it kind of comes off lame. I got a deep waft of lameness off this guy. But they tried.
Hot Take Clam Bake! I think Eric probably should have killed Roeg for his own life in the end. He barely knew Shelly. She killed someone! What else has she done? He doesn’t know… because he barely knows her. And as we all know, you can’t love Shelly the way she deserves until you love yourself. And if you love yourself then isn’t that the real true love (awww). And if that’s the true love then maybe that’s what gave him his dope Crow powers. Thus… keep it for yourself, bro. Treat yourself. Hot Take Temperature: Sweet guitar licks.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me looking extremely confused and distressed watching this film* Let’s go!
The Good? I’ll say this, I guess I can understand why someone would look at this and think to themselves, this is unique, this is creative, this is interesting, this is what film should be. Taking chances means not all of the chances are going to work out right? I can see why someone would say that.
The Bad? Literally everything about this movie. It is a slap in the face. It is a slap in the face to fans of The Crow, and it is a slap in the face to someone like me who merely appreciates the idea of Squalor Porn films like The Crow. This takes that concept, and then flushed it down the toilet. As I told Jamie: “Imagine The Crow, but now the movie is filled with the worst people you’ve ever met.” The entire first half of this film is, arguably, mentally ill young adults hanging around and being self-destructive and we are supposed to understand this as the pinnacle of love somehow? The back half of the film gets closer to what The Crow seems to actually be about (a rad goth guy who through the power of love becomes an invincible revenge demon?), but by that point I so distrusted the makers of this film it was all for naught. This is the worst film of 2024. Bar none, it is the film I would say encapsulates the 2024 class of bad movies.
The BMT? I think so. Out of all of the films of 2024 if we were to re-watch one I think it would ultimately be this one because it is just so weird. IT also helps that The Crow as a series has several quite notable potential friends floating around, so once we do those as flotsam in the future we’ll also have a few other weird ones to draw from as bad movie Crow-adjacent cinema.
Batch image processing! Now this is what I call flawless AI classification. Right? … Right? WRONG. Well, it is better. The exact same experiment from last time but using batch image processing:
So now when Revenge of the Nerds 2 (position 1 in experiment #1) is right next to Jaws 3D (always position 0) it still gets it. The thing that is a bit mind bending is the shifting. For whatever reason it just cannot seem to get the index straight. I’ll spare you the other graphs but things I’ve tried: (1) Giving it the number of elements and the range of possible indices (helps with errors for sure, it will no longer go off the end of the array, but it didn’t fix the shifting). (2) Inverting it, i.e. putting Revenge of the Nerds 2 first and moving Jaws 3D (no change). (3) Adding more posters, positing that it was the end of the array that was causing issues (just makes the end more fuzzy).
The main complaint I would have here is that there is really very little recourse in getting it to give consistent indexing back, and without consistent indexing batch processing is incredibly difficult. I’m sure there is some giant query that will help, but this is already a tiny bit discouraging since it isn’t that it is just missing out on films occasionally. Rather it is identifying the poster correctly and then just returning an off-by-one index with no indication of when the error is occurring (Experiment #10).
I literally am at a loss to think of any superlatives this fits into in the end. Not even a twist or even really a MacGuffin. The film is an amorphous blob operating as IP-driven non-IP. It is wild. This film is BMT, it is a weird view into what 2024 means as a film year.
Learn all about corvids I would guess in the Quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 