Unlike the film, Eric and Shelly are stranded on the side of the road after celebrating their engagement and happen across T-Bird and his cronies who basically taunt Eric. Knowing his fate he makes Shelly lock herself up in their car, and he is shot in the head twice in spite of humiliating himself and begging the guys to leave them alone. About to die he is forced to watch as Shelly is torn from the car and gang raped by each of them very slowly. She then has her face stomped in after she screams, and is also shot in the head. To make things all the more disgusting, Tin Tin proceeds to continue raping Shelly even with half of her head missing. To add pure insult to injury the surgeons who take Eric in make jokes at his expense while trying to bring him back to life on the surgery table. Shelly has long been dead and Eric survives only to live a brief moment as a vegetable forced to endure jokes and mocks from surgeons unwilling to sympathize with his pain. Speaking as someone who knows what it’s like to have loved deeply and lost greatly, “The Crow” manages to speak to someone like me.
Victims. Aren't We All? Part Two
I cried when Brandon Lee died. I can still remember being a young kid still reeling from watching “The Crow” a week before and suddenly watching a news report about the death of Lee. Is that a bit over the top? I don’t know, I can’t say. I don’t think it was an irrational response, to be honest. In that age I was impressionable and very passionate about movies and I was becoming a huge fan of Lee. I’d seen “Rapid Fire” and “Showdown” a million times and he’d convinced me he was worth following in “The Crow.” I mean what’s so wrong with mourning someone you admired? People cried when Lennon died. People cried when JFK died. People cried when John Wayne died. Hell people cried when Bruce Lee died. So I don’t honestly think my reaction to Lee’s death was unreasonable. Because this man had every single aspect that showed he was capable of becoming a humongous star. And whether he became the neo-Bruce Lee or just faded in to obscurity, it didn’t matter. “The Crow” encapsulates everything that was amazing about Brandon, and if he moved on to doing nothing but cheap action movies, “The Crow” would have stood as his ultimate.
Victims. Aren't We All? Part One
“Someday all things will be fair and there will be wonderful surprises.”
If my house was burning around me and I had to pick one movie from my collection to keep, I’d pick “The Crow.” Even over “12 Angry Men.” Yes, I think about these sort of things, because in the last month I’ve done a lot that has revolved around “The Crow” and Brandon Lee. I am finishing up a large fan fiction about “The Crow,” I saw “Rapid Fire” for the first time in a year on HBO, and one day out of the blue I had the strange urge to watch “The Crow” again, and for some reason it was kind of emotional for me. I can’t explain it, really. Movies make me emotional but that’s during the dramas and whatnot. Normally movies based on comic books only manage to elicit excitement from me and that’s about as far as it goes, but with “The Crow” it’s a movie I’ve seen a thousand times and for some reason this viewing on the morning of a Sunday, I found myself quite engrossed in it.
Pixels (2010)
I don’t know, there’s something great about apocalypse movies. Maybe it’s the stripping down of society, the chaos, or maybe just the destruction but I love apocalypse movies. Even more I love movies that show the end of the world with as much creativity as possible. Take “Pixels” a short film that works as a fan service for gamers and for people who will at first scoff at the notion of 8 bit characters taking over the world and suddenly gaze in surprise at the creepy notion of it all. Patrick Jean’s film is much more of an ode to the classic gamer and a visual experiment than a movie with a narrative.
Day of the Dead: Desertion
If Stefan Hutchinson and Robert Kirkman ever teamed up it would be such an unbridled wave of creativity, I don’t think my heart could take it. Current favorite writer Stefan Hutchinson continues his spree of paying homage to horror classics with “Day of the Dead: Desertion.” Meant as part-prequel/introduction to Romero’s “Day of the Dead,” this one shot is an attachment for the upcoming Blu-Ray special edition of “Day of the Dead,” and it is pure quality from page one.
Daylight (1996)
1996’s “Daylight” is pretty much just a nineties version of “The Poseidon Adventure.” There’s an eccentric old couple, a resistant tough guy constantly battling with our hero, a cynical woman who bonds with the hero, an epic disaster that is impossible to rebound from, a moment where our characters have to swim under water to make it to a safe zone hoping to escape inevitable drowning, in the climax we see authorities opening a hatch for our victims to escape through, and like Hackman’s hero, Stallone even screams at god as he fights to live in the climax.
The Final (2010)
Well it seems “After Dark” finally pulled it off. They’ve finally brought aboard a movie in to their film festival that may be their most controversial to date. Watching “The Final” made me cringe and feel utterly disgusted all the way through because it’s such a volatile revenge fantasy that’s all too realistic to be taken as just a simple horror film. If you were old enough to experience the horror that was “Columbine” (I still have the newspaper) and the resulting aftermath, you’ll know that we’ve reached a point in our society where the bullied simply can’t take it anymore. Regardless of the circumstances or the lives they may destroy, sometimes people find little to no options in fixing their bullying problems other than resorting to brute violence. Do I condone it? No way. Is it a reasonable solution? No. But when you’re tormented day in and day out without anyone to properly help you, what little choice do you have?