The Crow: Wicked Prayer (DVD)

What exactly Dimension Films was thinking when they greenlit this script is a mystery to me as The Crow: Wicked Prayer is a travesty of a film when compared to almost any film. The story is brutal, the dialogue is painful and Edward Furlong as The Crow is an obvious bad decision, you may have well cast Macaulay Culkin.

Wicked Prayer stars Furlong as Jimmy Cuervo a young man whose life is suddenly ended when his girlfriend and he are killed off by a satanic cult who are making an effort to turn their leader Luc Crash (Boreanz) into Satan, yeah, you got it... Beelzebub, or if you prefer, The Devil. What, is that not normal? Oh, did I forget to mention that this will happen in a wedding ceremony while Crash is marrying Lola Byrne played by Tara Reid?

Lucky enough for Cuervo he is chosen to return from the dead as our latest incarnation of "The Crow" and avenge his woman's death, only he will soon have to face the literal powers of Hell to do it, luckily Satan ain't too tough, even for the weakling who debuted in Terminator 2.

This film is flawed in every way as writer/director Lance Mungia shows zero writing talent and on the directing side he shoots this film as if it were a cheap made-for-TV feature. The characters are paper thin and somehow Mungia managed to round up a respectable list of actors including Dennis Hopper for this feature. What is Hop thinking?

Just to give you a taste of the dialogue, Dennis Hopper as El Nino, the "priest" anointing Crash his powers as the Antichrist, says in his opening bit of scripture, "Oh Satan, what's up holmes? This is El Nino calling you up man. Quit your basking in the darkness, and come up here. Hitch your bitch." He continues to use lingo as if he is reciting from a book of '80s street slang including the use of the word "bad-assitude." To top it off, as things are getting sticky we are supposed to simply accept Crash saying, "Hurry up! Make me the fucking Antichrist!" Who would read this and think it was good? Is the Crow franchise really this popular?

As for the features found on the DVD they are numerous considering this film saw little to no theater time including a 30 minute making-of featurette, a couple of worthless deleted scenes, storyboards, a couple of homemade featurettes, production and still galleries and four commentaries, yeah... four useless commentaries.

The first commentary features Mungia and producer Jeff Most; the second is with Mungia, cinematographer Kurt Brabbee, editor Dean Holland and sound designer Steven Avila; the third one features Mungia and music composer Jamie Christopherson; and the fourth featurette is with Mungia and Furlong. Of these four, of which I did sample all four, the fourth one is the most entertaining, but that is saying very, very little. The truly amazing thing is that Mungia had the stomach to sit through this film four separate times and managed not to say anything bad about it all four times, truly remarkable.

Overall, I think it goes without saying that I did not like this film, this DVD or anything to do with this feature. I strongly recommend all fans steer clear unless wasting your money on a movie you will watch once is your thing.