Back when posters for The Crow appeared in movie theater lobbies, underground record stores and head shops, just about everyone I could think of who wore black or had at least one body part pierced was hatching plans to get to the premiere of the film. Not only was this a relatively big-budgeted adaptation of O'Barr's goth-with-guns comic already famous with said set (and many others, too), but the flick already had a gruesome mythology around it. Brandon Lee, son of Bruce, had died during the last days of filming in a preposterous accident involving a stunt gun that hadn't been properly emptied.

Me, I was reserving judgment – my experience with movies that come with a built-in mythology has been that the myth winds up being more interesting than the movie. Older readers may remember grindhouse 8mm porno producer Michael Findlay's Snuff.  That was a cheap-jack Argentinian slasher movie with a fake-verité ending tacked on by Findlay. The film, even with its gore-guts ending uncut, is a slimy bore, but Findlay orchestrated an amazing amount of real-life publicity (hiring women to picket the theater it was being shown at, etc.) to drum up notoriety for the movie: someone is being murdered onscreen! To this day, many people stupidly continued propagating Findlay's Big Lie tactic about this being "the bloodiest thing that ever happened in front of a camera!" I was grateful for learning that the footage of Lee's death had bene destroyed in camera, though: the last thing we needed was fodder for another Faces of Death installment.

In the abstract, The Crow has a complete package for action/comic/RPG lovers: a violent, gloomy storyline; a jet-black antihero on a mission of vengeance from beyond the grave; a dank, brooding cityscape that seems to stretch out in all directions forever; etc., etc. It centers around a young man and his girlfriend, both of whom were murdered in their apartments – apparently because the girl was involved in some kind of rent-strike activism. A year later, the murdered man, Eric (Brandon Lee), is brought back from the grave, and goes on a one-man hunt for the killers. Meanwhile, a cop (Ernie Hudson – will someone please give this man better roles?) winds up trying to pick up after him.

Brandon Lee was a very serviceable martial artist, and he does things on camera that even despite what we know about kung-fu in the movies, is still damned impressive. Having him storm a boardroom full of baddies with John Woo two-guns blazing away at everything in sight is probably less a matter of creative recycling and more like simply touching all the bases in a film like this. The film's short on plot and long on vision, and that's exactly what they were aiming for.

There’s never a lack of something to look at, whether it's the thugs chugging back shots of whiskey with a .38-caliber chaser, or the almost animé-esque bosom of the evil head honcho's Asian black-magic-wielding sidekick. It's not a film that bulks large with motives except for the most operatic ones: revenge, lust, betrayal. You don't see a movie like this because you care per se, but because you identify on an archetypal level, for better or worse, with that Avenging Angel/Dark Warrior we've seen so much of lately. (I once made a bet with a friend that we would have to wait at least another 15 years before we got a movie about a sunny, cheerful chap who saves the day, without irony. So far I'm winning.)

It's the archetype, more than anything else, I think, that has such draw with certain audiences.  Almost every teenaged boy I bumped into, on- and off-line, during that summer was mad about The Crow (for the same reasons they would also fetishize Blade in '98): Here was a cinematic version of their fantasy: a dark, misunderstood loner who comes in and kick acres of ass.  And can justify every single bit of it, too – which is always the hard part.  Without the motives (which we're thankfully privy to), it's hard to feel empathy for a multiple murderer of such astonishing sadism and creative savagery.

Maybe a more complicated story would have gotten in the way. To the director's credit – Alex Proyas, who also did the far more visionary and intelligent Dark City – he makes all of this stuff work, even if you don't buy into the mythology being proffered. He knows his sources – comic books, Hong Kong action movie, Hollywood action movies, manga/anime – and those incredibly gory and violent Italian spaghetti Westerns that seem to've sadly fallen by the wayside lately, all of them brimming with unshaven trigger-happy loners. He knows what works and what doesn't. He was also charged with the thankless job of making a movie out of 2/3ds of a movie: when Lee died, there were still several key scenes to be filmed, but the movie uses some careful CGI and a stunt double, as well as some judicious editing, to smooth over the gaps. The curious are invited to read the script (which is out there on-line) and compare it with the finished product.

What the film does best is define a look and a mood – the same look and mood that has been at the heart of all those Vampire LARPs you've ever been in: a world that's not just bleak, but black – but not without redemption. It doesn't break storytelling ground or offer us some knotty social problem to wrestle with, unless you'd consider the question, "Do trigger-happy scumbags deserve a fair trial or an Angel of Death with six-guns?" to be a corker. But in an era where too many movies are either about Adam Sandler's excretory functions or people standing in underlit rooms talking at each other, it's always good to see more movies that give us something to see.

SysOp Gline claims to have never, ever seen the Canadian muscial sci-fi comedy romance cannibal dance extravaganza, “Big Meat Eater.”