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THE CROW: WICKED PRAYER
Rating: 
USA. 2005.
Director – Lance Mungia, Screenplay – Sean Hood, Jeff Most & Lance Mungia, Inspired by the Novel by Norman Partridge, Producers – Jeff Most & Edward R. Pressman, Photography – Kurt Brabbee, Music – Jamie Christopherson, Music Supervisor – Jeff Most, Digital Effects – Look Effects (Supervisors – Mark Driscoll & Henrik Fett), Special Effects Supervisor – Giuliano Fiumani, Production Design – Fred M. Andrews. Production Company – Dimension Films/Edward R. Pressman/Jeff Most Productions/Fubu Films/Wicked Prayer Productions Inc.
Cast:
Edward Furlong (Jimmy Cuervo), David Boreanaz (Luc Crash), Tara Reid (Lola Byrne), Dennis Hopper (El Niño), Emmanuelle Chriqui (Lilly), Dave L. Ortiz (Tanner), Marcus Chong (War), Tito Ortiz (Famine), Yuji Okumoto (Pestilence), Danny Trejo (Harold), Rosemberg Salgado (The Priest), Macy Gray (Cara Mia), Rena Owen (Mary)
Plot: In the town of Lake Ravasu on the Raven Aztec reservation, the white miners are at bitter loggerheads with the Indian council who want to shut the mines down and build a casino. Jimmy Cuervo, a white kid who lives in a derelict trailer on the edge of the town, is in love with the Indian sheriff’s daughter Lilly. Jimmy’s old friend Luc Crash is busted off a prison chain gang by his girlfriend Lola Byrne and rejoins his Satanic cult associates. Led by Luc, they go on a trial of murder across the reservation, Luc seeking vengeance for the murder of his miner father by Indians. They burst into the general store where Lilly works and hang both Lilly and Jimmy – Lola tearing out and eating Lilly’s eyes, while Luc cuts out Jimmy’s heart. But the crow spirit brings Jimmy back from the dead. He sets out on a trail of vengeance, slaughtering Luc’s gang one by one and trying to stop Luc before he completes the marriage ceremony that will make him into an avatar of Satan.
The Crow (1994), starring an ill-fated Brandon Lee and adapted from the graphic novel by James O’Barr, was a cult hit. The Crow inspired three sequels, The Crow: City of Angels (1996), The Crow: Salvation (2000), with the third of these being Wicked Prayer. There was also a short-lived tv series The Crow: Stairway to Heaven (1998) and a series of original novels. In each film, the distinctive black-and-white clown makeup was adopted by a different actor.
While the original Crow film was celebrated, none of the sequels have gotten very good notice. This is particularly so in the case of Wicked Prayer, which enters into the realm of the spectacularly bad. The director chosen this time around is Lance Mungia, an unknown whose previous venture onto cinema screens was the gonzo post-holocaust film Six-String Samurai (1998). Wicked Prayer was inspired by one of the Crow spin-off novels, Wicked Prayer (2000) by Norman Partridge. I have not been able to find a copy of the Wicked Prayer novel, which is supposed to be quite good – but going from various descriptions there seems no similarity between the plots of the two.
Certainly the opening of The Crow: Wicked Prayer takes your attention – where all the other Crow films have been set in a stylized urban environment and streets that glisten with chic Gothic mood, Wicked Prayer is shot in daylight amid the open desert setting of an Indian reservation. Alas Lance Mungia fails to invest the film with any of the dark atmosphere of the previous Crow films. We get lots of confusing and pretentious scenes with David Boreanaz and hoods running around in silly masks and some rather silly blurred visions as Tara Reid receives visions. Mungia also introduces all the hoods in a series of freeze-frame introductions that have been borrowed from a Guy Ritchie London gangster film – but there’s a laughable pretentiousness as each of them are then identified with one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The whole film is perpetually verging on bad movie laughability – in one completely ridiculous scene, David Boreanaz and goons supposedly undergo a Satanic peyote ritual where we see them all standing around eating party food (!!!) and then having food fights, while Tara Reid dances with a stuffed dog.
Moreover everything has a ludicrous tameness. The scene where Edward Furlong and Emmanuelle Chriqui are killed by David Boreanaz and cronies holds some potentially quite strong elements – Tara Reid gouging out Chriqui’s eyeballs and then devouring them, Boreanaz cutting out Furlong’s heart. But Wicked Prayer, in aiming for a teen horror demographic, shows none of this – these acts are crucially only ever talked about and happen off-screen. Another similar scene that draws laughable attention to itself owing to Mungia’s pulling of his punches is the massacre at the dancehall where all the victims are shot beneath a white sheet that conveniently falls and covers them just before the bullets hit.
But the major things that kills The Crow: Wicked Prayer is the performance of David Boreanaz. David Boreanaz of course came to fame as the vampire Angel in tv’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and then in his own spin-off series Angel (1999-2004) and more recently as the FBI agent on tv’s Bones (2005– ). Alas in Wicked Prayer, Boreanaz is cast in a role that is just not him. On tv, Boreanaz has a nice guy image and it is more than apparent here that he just cannot do macho and dangerous. He gives a really terrible performance – all full of tough-guy poses that collapse into the entirely laughable. He gets some amazingly awful lines: “Hurry up and make me the fucking Anti-Christ”. Boreanaz’s bad acting goes into complete overdrive once he becomes possessed and starts ranting at 78 rpm as though he has suddenly become wired on speed about how he and Tara Reid are going to create the apocalypse all around the world.
The other thing that kills the film is the casting of Edward Furlong as the undead avenger. Edward Furlong was once seen as a promising new face with Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and delivered a number of okay performances through the rest of the 1990s but subsequently disappeared into obscurity following various busts for DUI. Brandon Lee had a magisterial power in his excellent essayal of the role of The Crow in the first film. Alas in the equivalent part here, Edward Furlong just looks too babyish and cute. Indeed once decked out in the black-and-white clown makeup, Furlong looks like no more than a pouty Baby Goth or some kind of moping disaffected emo teenager who is feeling that life is all too much for him to cope with.
Although bad performances are not limited there. Dennis Hopper turns up as a Satanic priest of some sort. Hopper at least lives up to his madman reputation and lets go for it. The results are really quite hysterical. Hopper’s conception of a Satanic priest is clearly as some kind of macked out pimp daddy dressed in a fur coat and surrounded by a harem of gangbanging hoes with guns (which include R&B singer Macy Gray among their number). Hopper appears to have ad-libbed most of his performance where he seems determined to throw in a lot of gangbanger and street slang and babbles away at it in a frenetic splurge without clearly the slightest idea about what he is saying.
(Winner Worst Film in this site’s Worst Films of 2005 list).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2007
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