Tuesday, July 30, 2019

The Crow: Wicked Prayer [2005]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

It's been a while. In the last few weeks Kay has been on a road trip around the American west (occasionally seeing bad movie landmarks like Guerrero Street in San Francisco where there's supposedly a hospital and the salt flats in Utah where Gerry killed Gerry), Sarah has been working every Monday night, and Grandma has been unable to attend. Therefore Bad Movie Night has been mostly Adam and Keith sitting around talking and occasionally watching good movies. But we're back and still trying to test Adam's theory about amusement being derived from the fifth installment of a series. "Twilight" 5 was fairly successful so we figured we'd try "The Crow: Wicked Prayer." We're all fans of the original "Crow" movie, which is neither good nor bad but highly enjoyable, but it was clearly a great premise and aesthetic for a future bad sequel. This movie also has the strangest cast since "Johnny Mnemonic" starring Edward Furlong, Tara Reid, David Boreanaz, Danny Trejo, and Dennis Hopper.

The plot is truthfully kind of confusing, and we didn't have Sarah to help us. Everyone wants some sort of revenge. There's a larger conflict between a Native reservation (of the Raven Aztec tribe, which is the fakest name) that wants to build a casino on their lands and mine workers who are having their mine shut down. But this is kind of just a backdrop for the story of Edward Furlong's character who is going to propose to his girlfriend, a tribe member, which is controversial for the tribe because he was sent to jail for inadvertantly killing a tribe member who had attacked his girlfriend. Regardless, they are both killed by this tiny Satan worshipping group named after the four horseman of the apocalypse (plus Tara Reid) as part of a ritual meant to bring about the devil in the body of the guy who calls himself Death. Per "Crow" tradition, Edward is brought back to life to get revenge on the Satan group who are going around getting revenge on other people they hate. It's kind of a mess but ultimately he gets his revenge and seems to meet up with his girilfriend in the afterlife.

This movie was pretty solid. Aside from the incoherent plot, it was very high on the overacting that becomes comedic rating. David Boreanaz gets incredibly silly after becoming the devil, Tara Reid is always comically out of place, and Danny Trejo never puts down a Bible throughout the film, but the real standout is, expectedly, Dennis Hopper who plays a pimp and the clergy who officiates the wedding between Boreanaz and Reid's characters. The movie is kind of worth watching just for that.

Spoon Rating: 5