Laserdiscs
are okay but unremarkable and, in addition to many other gags about bad smells, include a re­ turn appearance by the skunk encountered in two earlier car­ toons. It was tired the first time around. While the laser medium tends
to make the shortcomings of the source materials somewhat less forgivable than they seem on tape, these two volumes contain a great deal of imagination, cleverness, color and graphic beauty. They preserve in detail an important and valuable chapter of anima­ tion history that is too often rel­ egated to footnotes.
THE CROW
1994, Miramax Home Video #3034AS, D/S/SS/LB/THX/CC, $39.98, 101m 28s
This dark and gritty film, based
on a graphic novel by James O’Barr, tells the story of rock musician Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) who, after being murdered with his fiancée Shelly by long­ haired outlaws in the employ of crime boss Top Dollar (Michael Winslow), returns from the grave—accompanied by a magi­ cally-empowering blackbird fa­ miliar—to avenge their deaths. As everyone knows, this film’s intended design was upset by the tragic, accidental death of its 24 year-old star, and much state-of- the-art pixel manipulation was required to “insert” Brandon Lee into scenes he never filmed. The early resurrection scenes are the repository of most of this com­ puter wizardry, and they are also the most powerfully staged se­ quences in the entire picture, imbuing Lee’s character with a larger-than-life, superhuman quality that is sadly lacking in the footage in which he actually appeared.
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Brandon Lee, stopping the slings and switchblades of outrageous villians, in THE CROW.
Unfortunately, as sympathetic
as viewers will be to Eric’s ven­ detta, very little background is offered to document the happy, loving life he lost (and that which is included is extremely clichéd, the kind of material relegated by mainstream movies to “good­ time” musical interludes), a short­ coming which leaves us with a hero only superficially distin­ guished from the Gothic goons he’s bent on killing. Despite his ghostly status, Eric is presented as neither an ethereal or spiritual presence; he is a heavy-booted spectre seen by everyone, imper­ vious to bullets but capable of handling a variety of solidobjects from cigarettes (“These’ll kill ya,” he warns friendly cop Ernie Hudson) to pocket lighters (which he requires to sign his crime scenes with the giant blaz­ ing outline of a crow). The com­ ponents were in place to suggest that Eric’s ghost was summoned back by the restless hearts of those who shared his pain and sense of outrage—namelySarah (Rochelle Davis), a street urchin
neglected by her morphine- addled mother (Anna Thomson as yet another porcelain hooker), and Albrecht (Ernie Hudson), a policeman at the crime scene who watched over Shelly’s slow hospital death—but David J. Schow and John Shirley’s script is less concerned with spiritual probity than with rocking out. Instead of taking intermittent ref­ uge in the death state in which he and his lover are presumably to­ gether, Eric finds solace in his old guitar and amplifier, which some­ how survived the arson blaze that gutted his towering apartment building. CJp on the roof, limned by moonlight, we see his fingers frenzying up and down the neck of his guitar, haunting the rav­ aged city with music—not the soul-searing blues one would suspect of an obsessive, aveng­ ing angel, but a kind of pompous, dexterous, cocksmanlike solo reminiscent of Journey or Van Halen. He’s an essentially con­ fused hero, unaware of the super­ natural rules governing his own return, whereas Top Dollar is
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