The Crow: Wicked Prayer

I’m a sucker for Edward Furlong. I remember the boy from Terminator 2 fondly, so of course I had to rent the fourth installment of The Crow series. I took a real chance, because the third installment, The Crow: Salvation was downright awful, despite Kirsten Dunst. (Yes, you read that right. Talk about contractual obligation.) This installment was definitely direct-to-video worthy, but it was not nearly as bad as the third.

Jimmy Cuervo (Furlong) is an ex-con who loves Lilly (Emmanuelle Chiquri), an Indian shaman who is leading her people to shut down the toxic mine in their community and open a casino. Luc Crash (David Boreanz) is the bad guy, the leader of the local satanic cult, whose followers are called Famine, Pestilence, and War. His girl is an ex-hooker called Lola Byrne (Tara Reid) who wants to be more than just white trash. Luc wants to become the Anti-Christ, and of course to do this, Lilly and Jimmy have to die. This of course leads Jimmy to come back as The Crow, to set the wrong things right, etc., etc.

If the first Crow was a kung fu Goth action movie, the second was a Goth music video, and the third was just plain painful, the fourth is a western. I saw potential in it, but the actors were either poor or left with very little to do. The dialog was laughable. The action is negligible and where it was present, the wires and slow motion were obvious attempts at masking the fact that none of the actors could really do any of the fight scenes. Even the costumes were Hot Topic bought, and if you are any little bit of a smidgeon of Indian, you won’t like the shaman’s outfits. She looks good in them, no doubt, but they are shamefully not even close to authentic.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this unless you like the actors or just feel like you need to see The Crow series to completion. Otherwise, just pass it on by. If you watch it, you will just wish for what it could have been.

Rating: 2 ½ Purrs