The Psychosemantic Podcast

Do you want to do a preamble or just cross that bridge if we end up coming to it? like in regards to why I'm kind of low energy and shit, like letting the audience know, hey, I just spent two weeks with fucking COVID. Which you could have already just done because you know me, I'm always recording. Right. Pretty much as soon as I dial, this one was just a little bit afterward. But yeah, you could say that. If you like, you know, I don't push anybody to spread their personal business unless they feel like it, As I have told you, there are some people that have been on here after recovering from COVID, and they said it on the recording, and there are other people who didn't, not for some weird thing, but just because some things people keep closer to their chest with a respiratory disease. That was not meant to be a connection like that. No pun intended. Yeah, no pun intended. I mean, fuck it. We can just jump right into it. Yeah, this is episode two of the the. Does this have a different name or is this just still a side project kind of deal for Psycho Semantic cast? This is the second comic book movie show that we've done here so far. Yeah, we're trying to come up with something a little bit more concise than the series of comic book movie shows we're doing for Psycho Semantic for the Legion Patreon, which will almost always end up being in the regular feed eventually. That's that that's hard to put on a T-shirt or a poster. Right. um but yeah so we're this month we're taking a little break from the marvel stuff which uh i think since the last time since we recorded that captain america there has been two marvel movies that have come out in that span of time shang chi and eternals eternals was one of the last things i did before i contracted fucking covid in the in the same day we went to the theater which is opening weekend we sat you know away from away from most people there's me my fiancee and one of her friends uh and i saw eternals which i like quite a bit we'll get we'll get back to that later on this series at some point uh my the long and short of it is i think it's a great like marvel movie for grown-ups it's kind of the polar opposite of like the like tom holland spider-man movies which i think are very much directed at like teenagers and kids and stuff eternals is like the first mcu movie that i felt was like truly kind of trying to shed itself of its uh you know pulpiness it's it's uh which i i think is reflective like you know i haven't read a lot of eternals like the the actual comics but i think they came out in a time where people were a little burnt out on the kiddie stuff and they wanted something a little more grown up which is but that's pretty much what eternals is it's uh i i liked it quite a bit it's it's not super deep but it also doesn't you know it's not catering to all the dumb dumbs in the crowd that need everything spoon-fed to them basically uh and the other one was shang chi which i had a lot of fun with that was basically just like the biggest budget martial arts movie i think i've ever seen uh it's got some it's got some cool action it's it's it's a it's a decent uh mcu origin story that has almost nothing to do with uh any of the rest of the movies you can kind of jump in that shang chi and you don't really need to know there there are one or two parts which i I won't spoil if there's people who haven't seen it. It is on Disney, the D-plus at time of recording this. But yeah, Shang-Chi was a lot of fun, too. It's got some pretty rad action scenes in it. But let's go around. We're taking a little break from the MCU. I think we'd originally intended to do this episode in October. Be mostly, my reasoning was mostly because the movie at least takes place on Devil's Night, which is the night before Halloween. You're a big folklore, dude. I mean, I guess we can you've probably seen the title of this episode, which is The Crow. We're going to be talking about the James Lopar comics and the 1993, I think, film starring Brandon Lee. But yeah, we'd originally intended to do this in October. Mostly that's because of Devil's Night. If you explain real quick to the kids at home, what the hell Devil's Night is, since it's not really something that's actually practiced, I don't think anymore. Thank God. yeah okay so yeah devil's night is sort of a regional thing some parts of america and other places it's mostly in the united states as far as i was aware there's you know philadelphia and all actually i don't know if the thing the article i looked up was just watching the crow But they said in Detroit, where the crow takes place. Right. It is associated with acts of serious vandalism and arson since the late 1960s, which sort of has. We'll get to it in a little bit. But I mean, Detroit is a heavy influence on this comic. That's where James O'Barr, the guy that wrote Andrew the comic, grew up. The characters' names, except for maybe The Crow, but more like the Tin Tin and Top Dollar and all that shit, were names that he saw in graffiti when he was going around the city. And, you know, all the streets and intersections and shit were from his memory from when that happened. fucking uh eric the crow his his body and physicality is based on iggy pop who is also michigan uh a product of michigan so there's yeah um so that's basically devil's night is the chaos before halloween it's can be it can happen in lots of places but it actually is called that regionally in some places, particularly Detroit and whatnot, like I said. And as far as I know, I kind of think the whole Devil's Night thing really mostly only plays in the movie and not so much in the book. I didn't actually the so the the original back issues, there's three like trade paperbacks, I think, of the crow that originally appeared. Those are very, very, very hard to find. there is a collection of these that you can get off of Amazon. I think for like Kindle, it was like 16 bucks and the collected like print version of that's like about 20 bucks. I didn't get a chance to go back and read that obviously because the last like almost two weeks I've been like fairly bedridden and short on cash from not working or not. There is a whole slew of Crow comics that are available that came a little afterwards. A lot of them from IDW and I think Dark Horse did a bunch of Crow comics. You can find those on Comixology and they're free to borrow or whatnot if you are on their Amazon Prime payment deal with Comixology. I did get a chance to read a few of those. Those are very interesting and very similar. Here and there, James Ibarra contributed to those. But yeah, the original ones are a little more tricky to track down right at the moment. But because those were those were released by Caliber Comics starting January 1989. And there were four four issues and then a fifth one added a little bit later, like as a epilogue. But the death of Eric Draven. And then all the other stuff afterwards, I ended up watching. About a 45-minute interview with James O'Barr a little while after the movie had come out. I forget what the date was from, but he specifically says in the thing that he's now 40. So whenever, from whenever that, whenever he turned, whenever he was 40. But he was in his little basement or downstairs drawing area. Kind of him talking at the camera. And, you know, it starts out, he's telling everybody or the person in the house to be quiet because he's going to be talking. And then, yeah, he goes on talking about this. You know, like he fell in love with a girl that Shelly is based on when he was 16. And when they right after high school or right around the time high school was ending, she was killed by a drunk driver. he said pretty much the what's her real in real life her name was Beverly but he said Shelly is a copy of her and he did Eric Draven as I forget who he said his face looked like but he said his physicality and his body was based off Iggy Pop because he didn't like to draw himself and it was all therapeutic Dick, you know, he was basically thinking about killing himself and he drew the comic instead, but he had to stop every couple pages. That's why he said the chapters are four to five or five to ten pages long because he just had to like do it. And he said it took him something like nine years to do the series. Right. Right. And what one of the reasons why I got to this was Caliber Comics. That was like a guy at a comic book shop where he hung out that liked the T-shirt designs that he sold for him. And he asked him if he could do like a comic strip and publish it. So that's why that shit's always hard to find, because it was like some fucking punk rock label. And. yeah and i think i read the original yeah the original prints of those where there there were they did a couple of you know really really small like probably a few hundred of each issue or whatever and then there would be reprints but it was never more than like a thousand on the a thousand new copies on the reprint so uh yeah good good good luck tracking down those original comics thankfully they've been reprinted a few times and they're they're floating around uh i i did i did watch a little bit of a documentary on youtube i found those basically just two huge comic nerds like going through the uh the the the collected version of the the original you know you know for for three or four issues or whatnot and uh yeah definitely one thing you can well you're talking about how long this took to uh get finished you can definitely tell the art style progresses like like there's more and more like different tricks that kind of come out as as as the issues go on like chronologically almost you know there's a lot of it's at the beginning is fairly simple just like black and white you know it all all the issues are black and white of this original run but like yeah the original is a lot of just like fairly basic ink drawings um largely inspired uh they they pointed out a lot of comparisons to like the the frank miller stuff that was coming out at the time and like some alan moore stuff um just just in the kind of art style and how how uh stuff was drawn kind of but as you go on the art gets like a lot more complicated and there's different you know combinations of uh you know stuff like watercolors and crosshatch and all these, all these different art styles. And you can definitely tell that the dude progressed quite a bit as an artist, as this book went on, which I think is kind of neat. It would be cool to go, to go through the comics because I'm a bit more into comics now than I was when the movie came out. Right. And then finding more stuff out about the creation of the comic and the stuff that, I mean, there's so many, we'll get, a little bit more into it when we talk about the movie, which we did watch instead of the comic book that we tried to find issues of. But, you know, he was, the way he describes himself when he was 16 or so as a teenager sort of exemplifies a lot of the people I knew in high school who were really into this movie. Right. And stuff. And also some of the things that happened in his life translate directly into the comic book and the movie. And I know he was pretty happy with the way the movie ended up. He said something about how there was one producer, and he thought he was joking, but a producer was talking about making it a musical and having Michael Jackson play The Crow. Oh my God. and he just freaked out after he found out he was serious and he's like why can't somebody just make my comic like it into a movie like it's supposed to be because i'm a big movie fan and i drew the comic sort of like storyboards and i i think it would be good like that and he was pretty happy with the people that took over the project and made everything that way but he he did mention one thing is the way he liked to look at it, especially with the sequels. I have never seen one of the sequels. I don't know. I watched one of them for this, the second one. Is that the City of Angels? We'll get to that here in a minute, because I got at least a little bit to say about that fucking movie. He said, having seen the sequel, maybe you'll appreciate this a little bit more. He said that he likes to think about way back in the day somebody asked Raymond Chandler what he thought of what Hollywood did to his books and he said they haven't done anything to my books they're all right there on the shelf what they did with the movie is what they did with the movie right it's a huge point of contention with comic book artists and and Hollywood kind of I mean just fucking for Alan more and like what they did to his fucking babies and you can kind of understand why you know especially smaller indie artists that you know their book was like a you know like a passion project and they put a lot of blood sweat and tears into it and then they make a fucking awful movie based on based off of it it's it's like i can understand why a lot of artists would be a little gun shy to even like entertain the idea i mean the money i'm sure is super tempting because i'm sure you know they don't the the original artists that's another thing they tend to get fucked over a lot when uh the the their characters and stuff they they created makes a leap to the silver screen um that that happens way more than it probably should but um yeah i i think maybe not at this point when the crow was coming out there wasn't really a lot of good examples this was a few years after uh tim burton's batman movie had come out and made a bazillion dollars um but yeah this was kind of one of the earlier comic book adaptions which is kind of wild to think about because it's i mean a little little baby book done by one guy you know printed in super small prints but you know gained enough of a cult following kind of that uh eventually the movies were optioned and you know mirrorbacks uh had hired producers and directors and stuff to to you know bring it bring it to life basically um but yeah this movie could have turned out a lot fucking different i mean i suddenly was remembering the uh attempted a fantastic four movie that roger corman had made like even a few years prior to uh tim burton's batman movie and that was so fucking bad that they buried it and then never came out and you can only find it in dodgy bootlegs at comic book conventions now but yeah i could i could understand where barb was would be coming from if he was like a little nervous about them like bringing this to the big screen because not only were there not a lot of i guess this is a weird time in comics you should probably talk about that kind of the early 90s was like kind of uh i i would i would feel fairly confident in saying the early 90s was kind of really the punk rock era of comic books and when things like took a really drastic turn and i think a lot of that has to do with you know the publishers probably looking at what their actual demographics for people that were buying comics at the time were and it was a lot of a lot of kids that had grown up in the 70s and 80s that now had a little bit more disposable income and had kind of a craving for more you know aimed at adults kind of comic books like this is a few probably around the time he started writing it was wasn't too far after uh frank miller well first he had his long run on daredevil which uh i think took that character in a definite a definite different direction than a lot of stuff that marvel been putting out just a lot more violence a lot more uh everything just felt kind of grungier and uh eventually the uh the frank miller batman comics like dark knight returns had come out like late 80s kind of i think that was a huge huge turning point for comics in general and like that book was such a humongous success and was so critically acclaimed that all the other publishers were like well i guess comics really aren't just like for kids anymore and we can start writing stuff that's a little more adult oriented and this like weirdly is when i really kind of started getting into comics was the early 90s and i remember really specifically the uh the the ongoing batman series that came out like around this time. So it's like after Bane has broken Bruce Wayne's back, he's basically like a paraplegic that doesn't really do a whole lot. He hires new Batman who is like way more brutal and way more violent in the books, like not just in story, but in, you know, the terms of the art, like kind of reflected this very dark turn that a lot of these books took. Not everything. I remember the Spider-Man comics are still pretty kid-friendly around this time and a lot of stuff Marvel's putting out. But there's also this big resurgence of indie comic publishers that were kind of coming out of the woodwork. This is around the time that Todd McFarlane started Image Comics. Once he left his – he's another one. his run on the Spider-Man books of Marvel is all the art. The art style is very weird and gangly and just kind of gross and strange looking. And the stories, the stories got considerably darker and yeah, this is, yeah, roughly around the same time that Todd McFarlane fucked off from Marvel and started image comics and started writing spawn, which has a very very similar story to the crow i mean it's basically about somebody is killed wrongfully and you know has some sort of uh agreed agreement with you know the powers on the other side and they come back from the dead kind of for revenge it's it's very similar the books themselves are very very different i have read a lot of the early spawn comics and like even just the art style is like it's like speaking a different language basically it's it's colorful it's it's kind of a grotesque like you know uh it's kind of his take on superhero stuff and like oh it's got this weird grotesque kind of uh angle to it but uh the crow is kind of kind of a different beast it really kind of like you know even even these newer ones that idw put out that i was reading are all have like a very a lot more grounded kind of feel and look to them like they largely i think stuck with the black and white which i think lends itself to kind of its uh the gothic nature of the story and the art and um yeah uh it's it's a really interesting time in comics like where everything and I was young. I mean, in 1993, I would have been seven years old. So thankfully, this was still a time when you could get comic books at the grocery store and I didn't have to. We had a hobby shop, I think, that sold comics in my town, but that's not true. There was also a gaming store that primarily, I think, sold dice and Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer and stuff like that, but they also had comics. So I kind of bounced between the three as far as buying actual physical copies of comics back then. And yeah, a lot of it was that run of Batman. I think fans jokingly refer to it as the pointy ear era of Batman. His ears on his cowl just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Yeah, everything was just super weird and grotesque and dark. And I think a lot of that inspired, you know, my taste in art and film and stuff like that in general, because this was I mean, this is where you would get these kind of stories like there wasn't a lot of movies or TV shows being made that had this kind of tone to it. uh obviously video games were so fucking crude at this point that like you weren't really uh the storytelling wasn't really a thing in video games at that point so kind of where i think a lot of this turned to is comics and you would get you know something outside the realms of traditional storytelling and traditional art and it kind of appealed to the weirdo outsiders the the angsty goth kids much like eric draven himself so um yeah that's that's about i mean you're you're pretty close to the same age i mean you're like a year a few years older than me what were i mean do you did you have kind of similar experience with comics like in the early 90s or because i i know you eventually like were you got exposed to a lot of comics by having band practice at a comic shop but like what was your like experience like before that kind of comics before that yeah it was the early thousands when you started practicing at the comic book shop and that's when i sort of got a little bit more back into it i mean i kind of grew up around comics a little bit my dad had a lot of old ones from the 60s like the stuff R Crumb drew for or stuff like the fabulous Furry Freak Brothers that I think is an animated show on Tubi now by three stoner dudes I think, I don't even know, like Woody Harrelson, I'm guessing, does a voice. I don't know if I'm making that up just because it's Woody Harrelson. And I remember the death of Superman was really big and I liked those movies and things. And my best buddy's dad is and was a cartoonist. So there was all kinds of comics at his house. You know, he had the original, I think, I think it was the book. If not, it was a poster of the cover. But, you know, the original Fantastic Four framed in his drawing room and shit like that. But I never really got that into the regular comics. So I was just kind of aware of stuff and would read random shit. But the independent things and the image comics things and Marvel Zombies, which was much later. But, you know, that stuff sort of brought me back into it when people started experimenting a little bit more. because I think, yeah, some of the older comics that weren't those weird or odd underground comic things was my dad did have a couple of the old Batman and Superman fighting each other comics. Right. I remember reading those. And my parents actually took me to see The Crow at the drive-in when it came out. And I had written down here that it came out in the spring of 1994. So yeah, I was still, when I was still doing, going to the movies with my parents, you know? Right. It was a little bit, not that it, I mean, I could totally respect that people liked it, but I was a little bit bored or disinterested with regular comic book stuff. but when people put something in front of me where somebody was a little bit more experimenting with the medium or the shorter run stories that didn't require a massive commitment, I was in. Yeah, because that was hard to do. It was almost impossible living in a small town where you didn't have a super dedicated comic shop and the disposable income to keep buying the books in a series like collecting a whole run of just about anything was basically impossible as far as like my my childhood comic buying would go so yeah i definitely have better memories of the one shot stuff i definitely i still have an issue somewhere around here of uh batman the dark knight where batman goes to a small louisiana of town and is like trying to solve a murder and he kind of has to team up briefly with swamp thing i think which yeah that's that's the i still have that and like a handful of other comics but like when i was very very young laying around here and i remember that one and that one is that that issue is still like one of my favorites because the art style in it is so spooky and like it's it's drawn like a horror movie basically and reading that when i was like i don't know seven eight nine ten somewhere around in there like i i definitely didn't get a lot of the nuances about the story but definitely the art style i feel like kind of grabbed me um so yeah it's it's an interesting interesting time in comics when all this stuff is coming out and i I feel like it kind of comes and goes in waves because, yeah, around the early 2000s and then again kind of around the 2010s, this stuff starts happening. I think the early, about mid-2000s is kind of when I started reading The Walking Dead, which I feel like is another, like, that's, I forget which comic label that is. I used to have a whole complete run of those, but another one where it's kind of back to basics. It's a, it's another black and white, uh, drawn, you know, by one, one or two dudes, uh, fairly violent, kind of not really like a traditional comic book, you know, it's, it's not a Cape book at all, basically. And, uh, I don't feel like, yeah, the, the crows also kind of like that. Um, I think walking dead was also image comics. Yeah, you might be right. Actually. I think they do believe so. I used to have a bunch of those later on. I don't know where the hell they all went, but, uh, But so, yeah, so if it took if it took that long for James Abar to write The Crow, I think it's pretty safe to assume that he probably started on this like like late 80s. Like you said, the character of Eric Draven, our protagonist is kind of based on Iggy Pop. And there are lots of I think his face kind of is modeled after the guy from Bauhaus. uh and the makeup is the in the documentary that i was watching it's they say that it's based on uh the the the mask for like irony like the um you know i'm talking about is that like greek where you have like the the theater masks basically and i knew i knew about the two like you know uh comedy and tragedy and irony i think is basically the ones kind of in between but yeah it's very similar uh the other thing what i was surprised i didn't bring up was uh the guy from the killing joke which is a band that i'm sort of familiar with i'm not a huge killing joke fan but i definitely recognize uh i i would assume probably the killing joke dudes makeup came before the crow because the original Crow books are also littered with song quotes and lyrics. There's some Joy Division that pops up in there and The Cure. And it was also a really interesting time in music when this thing came out. The comic, I think, yeah, I would imagine James O'Barr was big into the Death Rock scene, stuff like Joy Division and The Cure and Killing Joke and Bauhaus. and it's just kind of like downbeat gothic kind of like minimalist guitar kind of music is how i would describe death rock if you're not really familiar um it's sometimes i think kind of could refer to as post-punk too it's the the kind of the end of uh you know punk music had gone gone through got through quite a few phases at this point like we'd had our early you know garage inspired stuff and you know there's a little bit of thrash inspiration in there and the new wave uh and then eventually somewhere along the line they settled on death rock i think towards the late and end of the 80s basically um so which i think is kind of cool and unique i can't really think of a lot of other comics that incorporate music like that kind of i think watchmen does a little bit of that um but typically it's the the two mediums don't really meld all that well together so i can only assume that probably comic artists tend to avoid that stuff but james apart kind of embraced it uh there's just like i think it just adds to the overall you know the overall tone and aesthetic of the books basically when it plants the seed of like this music and uh by the time the movie came out somebody I mentioned on my Facebook earlier that we were recording a show about the Crow and somebody was like the Crow's soundtrack is on heavy rotation in my house obviously that soundtrack pulls from stuff that's like a little bit later than what I think James Zobar was kind of referencing in the books and it's more of the post-grunge type era like I think at this point Nirvana had kind of come and gone and just a lot of interesting shit going on in music at this point. Like definitely the nine inch nails needle drop that comes like towards the middle of the movie. I was like, Oh, okay. This puts me in a, a mind frame and a place like, like when all this, this stuff was coming out again, I was pretty young when the book and the movie of this came out. So a lot of this I've gotten later in life. I wasn't really so much aware of any of this, I think, at that age, really. Definitely one thing that everybody, I think, was aware of by the time the Crow movie came out was what ended up happening to Brandon Lee, which I feel like was never really properly explained to me what actually happened until a year or two ago when Shudder put out a series called Cursed Films. Did you end up watching that or have you seen that episode about the crow on that at any point? I didn't watch that, but I did look into it a little bit and see a couple, you know, The Curse of Brandon Lee fucking documentaries that everybody made around that time where they basically went through. And did you watch the did you rewatch The Cursed Films one? I did. I take the lead on telling the story of the tragedy. And if I have any additional information, I can interject. By the way, he specifically, Obar specifically mentions Joy Division as being a big influence when he was writing and drawing the comic, as well as Jim Carroll. okay i mean that makes perfect sense that's all uh fairly morose downbeat kind of you know it fits the it fits the mood of the book like perfectly which yeah it makes it makes a lot of sense why he why he put that stuff in there i think it just adds to the mood but yeah i mean a lot of the stuff that pops up in that episode of cursed films i think you can get from other other sources like wikipedia and stuff but um yeah basically so in a nutshell kind of the reason there's really only like two actual things that i can really point to why people would think that it was like a cursed production because this is another thing that comes up every 10 or 15 years like the you know the the other movies that they did episodes on were like the exorcist poltergeist uh the twilight zone movie and i think the omen was another one where just like weird shit happens like happens on set and you know people get hurt and you know the i feel it's i feel like it's kind of a lazy way out of just attributing that all to it's it's a cursed production or there there's something evil surrounding the production i really uh like not so much in the case of the crow but like those other movies a lot of it was because there were fucking egomaniacs in charge of these productions and people that had no uh consideration for people's safety or you know because studios cutting corners and stuff that kind of i think is what led to a lot of the bad things that happened on these productions and it's kind of hard to say like there's there's some discussion on the crow as far as that goes uh so basically kind of what happened the first day they're filming uh they had an accident they're they're on i forget which backlot it might be the warner brothers backlot or some uh for people that don't know backlot is It's basically just like a, you see it a lot used as exteriors, and it's usually like they're basically just fronts of buildings that have been built to look like a city street, but it is in fact like, you know, it's the back lot. It's behind where the giant indoor studios on, you know, a studio property is. So they build these like fake streets basically. uh apparently there were a couple of electricians working on this movie that got into their truck that had like you know like a cherry picker boom arm on the back of it uh i'm not super clear as to why but apparently one of the dudes was driving the truck and one of the dudes was in the cherry picker and they backed into a high voltage power line that was powering the entire backlot like lights you know everything that required electricity they backed into it this dude gets like absolutely fried in the cherry picker because the electricity just goes right through the boom arm up into where he's standing his body is covered in second and third degree burns and he you know loses some of his face facial features that have basically been burnt off this is fucking day one of the shoot and the shit happens uh a little bit later yeah it's it's a bad tone that's not how you want to start your fucking movie production uh they were also blasted by i guess i guess some of this wasn't filmed on like a studio back cloud they must have like rented out a space or something somewhere it was in the eye of whatever the hell hurricane there was that year this is before katrina i can't remember offhand which hurricane this is but a whole bunch of their sets got destroyed in this like you know unprecedented storm that came about it like just a horrible fucking hurricane that just destroyed a bunch of their sets and set the back and you know made the budget for this thing balloon quite a bit um that's when some of these stories kind of started getting leaked to like some of the entertainment like magazines and shit like entertainment weekly and variety and stuff we're running stories about oh this is a troubled production and at some point somebody coined the term the curse of the crow uh and this this was before what happened to brandon lee which is uh like everybody knew about this like when we were kids which is basically they were filming a shot which i don't think actually like you can't you can't like scrub through the movie and be like this is the exact shot where brandon got fucking um so basically what happened they destroyed it after the investigation right and the scene still i mean the the actual shot that he so basically what happens um there's a couple different ways that you can use blanks in a movie like for gun type stuff and this obviously uh they haven't really come out and said yet but i'm pretty sure this is what exactly happened with fucking alec baldwin here pretty recently on the filming of that western rust where a cinematographer was killed and a director was shot um there's two different ways you can kind of do it you can take like if you need a shot where as big on westerns and stuff where you see them loading the bullets into the chamber of like a revolver or whatever uh you can make what's known as a dummy round where it's basically a live bullet but it's had the gunpowder taking taken out and like uh so it's it's just like the the shell and the lead tip of the bullet basically um what they're pretty sure happened on the crow is that they used one of those like a few weeks maybe prior to shooting the scene with brandon and they there there's like a firing i forget what it's called i'm not super huge in a gun so if i get my terminology wrong here i apologize but uh basically um they shot like a dummy around which if it's got no powder in it i mean it doesn't it's not going to really do anything really all it did was like strike the uh like firing pin i guess in in the end of the the cartridge and the lead the lead bullet like the actual bullet hollow point uh came out of the shell and is stuck in the barrel of this fucking revolver it's like a 357 magnum or something like big big mean fucking gun uh so nobody checks this gun uh there's there's speculation that at this point in the shoot there they were only about five days away from being completed with principal photography on this i think this was like a 57 day shoot or something and this was uh day like 52 somewhere around in there um there's for sure there's there's speculation that the union uh arms handlers who were you know held to a very high standard uh there there's a reason that this doesn't happen very often on movies at least on union shoots uh there's speculation that that guy got sent home like as towards the end of the uh the shoot and they were legally allowed to bring in like a local guy uh to to fill in for him and they're pretty sure what happened is no nobody ever checked the barrel of this prop quote-unquote prop gun which is very much a fucking real gun uh that it's the ammunition that's the prop and the you know part that makes it not real uh nobody ever checked this gun for like uh something stuck in the barrel they go to shoot a film or they go to film a shot which they kind of changed on the day like originally i think he's supposed to get like a knife thrown at him and they had you know makeup and prosthetics all all stuff set up for this and like on the day they decided they're like no let's make it so that he gets shot basically i guess i figured maybe they could have that film a little bit quicker or whatever and uh yeah basically they go to do the shot and the gun goes off you know there's powder and smoke it's it's they've loaded the right kind of cartridge into the gun that doesn't have an actual bullet it's just you know gunpowder so you get the smoke and the the visual aspect of it and they point the gun right at fucking brandon lee and pull the trigger and he hits the dirt and uh yeah they do a little demonstration in that episode of um cursed films and it's maybe not as gnarly as being shot like full force with like an actual bullet but like they they do like a demonstration and it goes through like fucking two to six inches of fucking plywood like it's nothing so you can imagine what that would be like if that was your fucking torso so um so brandon lee ended up dying uh it's super fucking sad for a lot of reasons uh this was definitely supposed to be the movie where brandon lee uh kind of this this was going to be his big break he made a few movies before this that were mostly martial arts movies and action movies but none of them were like humongous successes and this was kind of going to be his you know big break this is going to be the movie that made him a huge star and uh that obviously didn't didn't end up happening which is super fucking sad there's also a really weird uh thing on the last bruce lee movie bruce lee obviously you know being his father uh i can't remember what the name of the movie is but there's totally a fucking scene where the exact same thing happens and it's like i mean it's it's it's like scripted into the movie like it's it's part of the character or whatever he plays a a martial artist and it's like a movie within a movie kind of deal where yeah he he gets murdered on camera because a guy switches a fake bullet out of a fucking quote-unquote prop gun which is super spooky i believe so yes that sounds right which is super duper spooky uh Bruce Lee obviously died under really weird conditions too. He had this, and this totally sounds fucking fake, but evidently it's, it's a real thing. He'd had his sweat glands removed so he could look better on screen. And at some point was hanging out with some chick that they're fairly certain he was having a, having an affair with and he took a painkiller and he fucking died from it. And like, not, not to like, I don't know why there were no doctors in Bruce Lee's life. They were like, maybe this is like taking out your sweat glands thing is a bad idea, but cause he ended up having like a seizure on the filming of that last movie. And, uh, like, yeah, they're pretty sure that kind of contributed to it. He, he took the, they think also that like this painkiller that he took, he might've just had like a horrendous allergic reaction to like, they just didn't know that that was obviously it wasn't something prescribed to him. So they had no way of knowing how he would react to it or whatever. And I mean, it's it's a bummer, but it's there's nothing, you know, spooky or cursed about how Bruce Lee died. But I got a sip of tea here. OK, there I had not heard about the sweat glands thing, I don't think. And if I did, I think I put it in with, you know, oh, he got his ribs removed so he could suck his own dick. Well, yeah. But I did see in a documentary that he was hanging out with his almost definitely mistress, and he took a painkiller drug that was given to him by a friend, and they said that it was an extreme allergic reaction. Yeah. So there's enough connecting information there that, yeah. And I know that people said that, well, you know, he and Brandon were both killed because Bruce Lee wouldn't pay the triads for, you know, it's like, no, that's that's a fantastic story. But usually, yeah, especially with, I mean, workplace accidents due to neglect, exhaustion and incompetence are much more common and much more. Likely, especially a night shoots, you hear a lot of weird shit happens with night shoots like they're they also kind of attribute that that to like kind of how Heath Ledger died, I think, because he was. like working really weird hours and taking, you know, different kinds of prescriptions and like, I I'm a, I'm a firm believer that like humans are not meant to work overnights for like fucking long, long stretches of time. And that is when accidents and weird shit kind of happens. It's not, and there's nothing, yeah, there's absolutely nothing supernatural about it. It can all just be contributed to, you know, people get exhausted and fuck up things and the accidents happen kind of deal you know yeah overworked people in the movie industry oh the people at paramount weren't making sure everything was up to snuff because that that was who had it first like paramount and then after uh brandon lee died miramax took over right and got the movie finished being made and um what's his name uh who played fun boy was the guy that shot him and right he quit acting for a year or two. And I don't know. I think the next thing we should probably transition to is to talk about the cast in a larger sense because what a cast And I remember it being huge that it happened and yes bringing up Heath Ledger and movies that were going to make you make the person that next jump up. And yeah, because I don't think I had heard of Brandon Lee before The Crow came out. Now, it wasn't a big action movie. I'm sure I watched, you know, Commando and Terminator and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. And, you know, maybe a couple other things. Bruce Lee, but I definitely wasn't seeing the type of action movies that Brandon Lee was working in. That, you know, you would see on Cinemax after the porn ended or before the porn. Yeah, he really hadn't made much. I still don't think I've seen any of these other movies that Brandon Lee has been in. And I don't really, I've never really heard anybody be like, you should definitely check out this one. Or like, this is his other like really great movie. Like, I don't think it was a very fortunate thing for him. I'm sure at the time, like that he was, he was attached to play at the star in like a very buzzed about comic book adaption. which like that, that even that right there, like had a completely different meaning in 1993 when they started making this than it does like now, like I don't think it was, I think it was fairly unheard of that comic books were getting made into movies. They were, they were very few and far between. So like, this was really meant to be a big fucking deal to Brandon Lee. And he kind of got robbed of that. Yeah. People like Tim Burton made comic book movies at that time. and that was part of his deals with studios to make other movies that would make them money uh i i i'm sure i saw showdown in little tokyo but that was because of dolph longgren okay and yeah uh the the crow when they weren't on the back lot and stuff they were shooting in wilmington north carolina okay right in hurricane alley yeah i remember that added to the tragedy i mean it's just all these layers of tragedy folded upon each other that make the crow there's james o'barr's tragedy that's the story bait that the story is based on and the lost love and random sudden death and then, yeah, multiple accidents and things on set and then Brandon Lee's accidental death. And then, I mean, the movie did well when it came out, but it just became this thing in culture. You know, like every goth girl I knew in high school loved the fucking crow. all the guys that I was just like man this guy's so sad why is this guy always so sad that guy liked the crow and you know I I didn't dislike it but I didn't latch on to it at that age you know when I was becoming a teen and stuff I I was just like okay yeah there's there's the crow but I was also that guy was like too many people like this and they're all sad. I'm not sad. I'm not going to give a shit about this movie. You know, I didn't shit on it or anything like it did with other things, you know, trying to or not trying to. But, you know, the goth, the goth kids loved it. I think I think we were more a little more into like the punk rock stuff and kind of skipped over, you know, stuff like this. and like uh the other one is the the sandman comics but neil guyman those are fucking huge with the goth kids they all worship that shit and yeah it kind of passed me over too as like a teenager and whatnot like i mean everybody i think was familiar with the the circumstances around the movie but like any any other like source material and stuff i think uh completely passed by the majority of people but uh i yeah i feel like i finally reached the age now where i kind of have an appreciation for how incredibly morbid and sad these fucking books and these movies are um i don't know why that is exactly i guess i'm just a little more a little more in touch with my emotions at the age of 35 than i would have been at like 17 or whatever but this movie isn't exactly about me that sort of thing you get beyond that where it's like i don't completely identify with the protagonist now i of course also that's a bit of a shallow look because i think when you get older or you appreciate more levels of movies and art and stuff there is an easy relatability with the characters there's i mean everybody pretty much everybody is loved and lost yep there's also when you something that i totally missed like this whole thing is like uh landlord terrorizing tenants so that they can take over a neighborhood and gentrify or uh anti-tenants rights shit like that's what this whole thing was was because shelly was organizing tenants in a building and what's his fight? Top dollar in this. In the comic book, from my understanding, Top dollar and Tintin and all the other people are all kind of like on the same level. But since this is a movie, there has to be the final boss. So they kind of added on. So there's, let's see the characters. There's Fun Boy. and T-Bird, who might even be more of a main guy in the comic. Tintin, played by the guy that played Lord Nikon in Hackers. Who else? In the comic, there was Tom Tom, but he was kind of rolled into that skank character that hangs out with T-Bird and seems like he's had a couple head injuries. Oh, right. And Top Dollar, who was played by Michael Wincott, who was the sheriff of Nottingham's cousin in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. I fucking loved that movie as a kid. And he is like such an incredible fucking villain. And in both of these movies, like that dude just exudes like this like greasy kind of fucking. I don't know. He's he is a great goddamn bad guy. Yeah. Yeah, Alien Resurrection. I remember he was in Strange Days, but it's been so fucking long since I've seen that. Yeah, great fucking villain with his witch girlfriend's sister. Uh-huh. I've kind of forgotten that it's implied that they're brother and sister, which is also super gross and weird. And they, like, fucked a woman to death or something when T-Bird is waiting and chit-chatting with Candyman henchmen. The fucking cast, man. There's, you know, Brandon Lee, Ernie Hudson as Sergeant Albrecht, who's pretty much straight out of the comic. Michael Wincott as top dollar. Bai Ling was the witchy girlfriend sister. David Patrick Kelly, Michael Massey, Tony Todd. What was his name? Grange. But he was the henchman. I really like Ernie Hudson in this. he plays an incredibly likable character in this he's like uh a cop that's not a piece of shit in fact like he he gets demoted from like a detective to a to a beat cop because he's doing his job too well which i think is kind of a hilarious commentary on the the cops in this movie which are not like they're really the cops don't play a whole lot into this except for ernie hudson he's kind of our uh our every man you know kind of explains what the fuck is going on to the audience kind of character which is sort of needed like i mean i bet in the comics they probably used him a lot less because you get like a lot of monologue between eric draven and like the crow that follows him around that only he can like talk to basically i i would imagine a lot more of the story and plot probably goes between those two where that doesn't, that's not really the crow doesn't fucking talk in the movie. Cause that would be super silly. I think just a step too far for just general audience kind of stuff. So that that's kind of where Ernie Hudson's character comes in as he does some investigating and finds out that, yeah, about, you know, um, about Shelly's stuff with, you know, being an anti, uh, uh eviction advocate basically and that eric draven was like a rock star like up and coming kind of um which doesn't really play into the i think that's the other things different from the comics and the movies i don't think he's a like a rock and roll star in in the books but he is in the movies i think that's what purely uh like it looks cool kind of thing because we get the shot of him playing his fucking jet black guitar on top of the building and it's super gothic and moody and I'm sure it makes all the goth girls in the crowd swoon but yeah that's later on in the second rooftop solo yep but yeah yeah Ernie Hudson is great in this I think this is like one of the he plays like side characters and like you know I think he got kind of typecast with Ghostbusters where he kind of plays a token black guy in a lot of movies whereas in The Crow he uh like he he is he is the audience's eyes in this movie basically and he he actually like it's a fair amount of stuff to do he has like kind of a relationship with the girl the little girl sarah that uh eric and shelly kind of you know help out and take care of and are kind of friends with i don't know she's like a dirtbag drug addict for a mom and uh so those two get kind of a get kind of a character arc uh this movie made me really hungry for hot dogs for some fucking reason there's those street dogs that ernie hudson's fucking buying at the onions on it like i was the grocery store today i was like i'm gonna buy hot dogs this movie makes me want makes me want a good good old good old-fashioned street dog um hot dogs yeah there's lots of onions um yeah uh tony todd's another one he gets to play kind of uh like he's another one that i think gets kind of typecast is like you know he plays a lot of bad guys i don't know where this took where this came out in relation i think candy man was like within it had to have been like 94 95 or something so uh tony todd's also about to become a really big deal once candy man comes out and i think that kind of affects the trajectory of his acting career quite a bit whereas in this he basically gets to play like the main bad guy's kind of right hand and he's kind of one of the only competent ones of these guys he gets the cool gun he dresses like cool like he's he's in a suit like he's he's the distinguished scumbag of this like basically gang of fucking terrible people that uh eric has come back from the dead to kill but they should have known right then and there that Tony Todd was going to be a big deal that dude's voice just his voice alone is so fucking iconic but this is also kind of a great example of he's really kind of a chameleon of an actor, that dude can just slip in and out of parts and make it look just completely effortless but he's probably one of my favorite bad guys. I didn't really enjoy the parts where T-Bird and the other guys have their they're just having so much fun doing these fucking crimes and they have their little catchphrase that they do. What is it? They're like, fire it up. Oh yeah. When they're running around acting like the gang from Robocop. Yeah. They're definitely super chewing the scenery, but they're a lot of fun to watch. They kind of crack me up and almost made me not want them to die horribly, but they keep flashing back to the murder and implied rape scenes just enough that you're like, oh yeah, these guys are pieces of shit. You're just like, get them. This came out two years after Candyman came out. Oh, okay, that's weird. But, I mean, 93 was when Brandon Lee died, So it was almost basically a year. They were working on it about a year after Candyman came out. Okay. And I feel like Candyman got a bit more popular once it came out on tape. Not that it did poorly, but yeah. So this was, and the movie before this, Tony Todd was in, fuck, I can't remember the name, but it was like an action type movie. So yeah, this was the second movie in a year and a half, basically, after Candyman came out. So Tony Todd doing what Tony Todd does. He had two movies come out in 86. Three came out in 87. Two came out in 88. Then 89, 90. Two movies came out in 90. Two movies came out in 92, one of them being Candyman. then 93, 94, 95, 95, 96, 96, 96, 97, 97, 97, 98, 98, 98. Oh, yeah. The man stays busy. He has done an absolute ass load of movies over the years. Yeah. You know, Final Destination was 2000 or 2001. Shit on me, as the pawn shop owner would say, for some weird reason. I don't know if that's from the comic. I think that's another thing about the movie is there are some parts that I don't know. I don't know if you would say they didn't age well, but there's some parts that definitely look like a comic book movie. You know, there's parts where the scenery all looks like it's painted on. So there could be some things that people would say is a flaw of the movie, but I think it makes it more comic book-y. You know, how over-the-top ridiculous Top Dollar is. Right. like that well i mean even like the uh like the set design and stuff it's it's definitely i'm sure super duper inspired by like uh i mean the super obvious one that my mind jumps to is tim burton's batman movie which was all you know like they basically just like picked and chose a lot of stuff from 50 years worth of people drawing gotham city and kind of what that looks like uh it definitely i'm sure it definitely evolved like over the years where you know sometimes it looks a lot more dystopian than it normally would and i 90s comics i definitely feel like leaned really hard into uh urban decay and just you know the shitty concrete jungle that's full of you know piss and fucking drug addicts and hookers and uh the the sin city books i think played a lot into that too and just in general like i think frank miller loved to love to play around with that stuff where you know it's super cliche but the the city becomes a character in itself well this doesn't you know take place in gotham city but it definitely i think i feel like borrows from just the scuzzy city look of uh the the way cities are drawn in comics at the time and then the they did try really hard I think on a fairly small budget to translate that to the movie when the movie came out but yeah where my mind immediately goes is the Tim Burton Batman movie because it's just like it looks like it never stops raining it's everything is just like has just like a sheen of grease over it it feels like and they took a lot of the color out on purpose yeah which helps you know that that's kind of a fairly traditional kind of you know not even really just an art like a film trick but like an art trick is yeah you you dull the colors for uh everything except for what you want there to be emphasis of color on like i mean the yeah sin city is a great example of that where the majority of the books are you know just straight of black and white but uh there would be these little little schindler's list-esque flares of color like hidden in there for emphasis kind of uh obviously they couldn't do the crow like even even back then like trying to do the crow movie in black and white probably would have been box office suicide and people would have walked out of him like i didn't pay fucking four dollars or whatever a ticket cost back then to watch a black and white movie so they had doing color so yeah kind of the way you do that is your sets are uh very minimally lit and colored basically which i think is cool it's like we were saying earlier it's it's kind of of the time but i also feel like this movie came out quite a bit before a lot of movies that like tried to do way the same exact thing like it's not really a name for the kind of sub-genre that this inspired like you know movies like the matrix and uh slate like a lot of like action movies i feel like borrowed from this in in like the story and like i mean this this is around the same time like tarantino's starting to do some fairly violent subversive movies and like uh it was a weird time for comics and movies kind of like the early 90s like a lot of the you know people that like we consider like pioneers of like film now kind of we're starting to get their start in the early 90s and we're making some pretty experimental wild shit and uh the crow like even though it is a you know ostensibly a studio movie i think is super duper ahead of its time in that respect and in look and tone and feel kind of so one thing I took away from this watch because I've seen this a few times I didn't see this until quite a bit later in life like my early 20s I would say I kept doing this thing where I knew so we should probably explain what a fake shemp is that's a term that was kind of coined by Sam Raimi when they were filming the original Evil Dead movies and kind of where that comes from is the original three stooges uh shorts that came out in like the 40s and 50s or whatnot there was actually a fourth stooge that died and was replaced with i think curly and they used to film those three stooges you know shorts uh like three or four of them at a time like basically i think whenever they could borrow uh sets and you know stuff like that from from other productions and then, you know, get the Stooges on there and film or whatever. So they had a whole shitload of shorts that were not finished when this guy, I forget what his first name is, but his last name is Shemp. He's kind of a weird looking guy. And he's like the older, he like, he's considerably older, I think, than the other two Stooges at the time that these were filming. So he dies like in the middle of filming a whole bunch of these. and like they couldn't just abandon you know these these shorts that they've shot the majority of uh so what they would do is they would try and find basically a body double or somebody that looks enough like him at least from like the back or the sides that they could squeeze them into the shots so that there's you know three of them there he wouldn't have any dialogue or whatever but uh yeah sam raimi kind of you know had enough of a keen eye as a young filmmaker and a huge stooge fan that they would play a like basically they made like a game out of it where you would spot the fake shimp uh so that kind of became the term for uh on when they filmed filmed the first evil dead movie and they started losing cast members because it went way over schedule and people were just like fuck this i've had enough i'm leaving but their characters you know still had it still had to shoot stuff with those characters so they would do basically the same thing where they dress somebody up and put like a bad fucking wig on them and shoot them from from the back um there is a little bit of fake jumping going on in the crow and i'm fairly certain that like most of that comes in like the first like 10 or 15 minutes of this movie and the majority of the rest of this i think they had in the can by the time the accident happened with Brandon Lee, but you can always tell. And like, I mean, this happens on movies where your actor is still alive. Like there's absolutely nothing. Like this is a fairly common practice, mostly because I think a lot of it's to save money because it's a lot cheaper and easier to get, you know, like say Chris Evans body double on set for a day than it is to get actual Chris Evans. Like if you don't have, if you don't absolutely have to have your star on, Like, I mean, it's always kind of a shortcut and something that I don't think like probably a lot of people even notice kind of. But yeah, I definitely could tell there's a lot of shots at the beginning of The Crow that are filmed either like from behind Eric Draven's character or it might just be like his feet or something. or like if you go back and watch it like yeah you can kind of make a game out of it it was just like spotting all the shots that are probably not him or probably his body double um there's apparently also like i didn't know this either until i watched that episode of cursed films but uh they did need a few shots of eric draven in the crow makeup like from the front so they got his body double who like he looks fairly like the dude like except for in his face basically they apparently made a fucking mask of brandon lee and made this dude wear it for a couple shots and they said that it freaked everybody out big time on on set and that they really didn't want to do it but i i think there's you know maybe a couple of shots that kind of where they need like if you stuck him in the background you probably like i said you probably wouldn't know that that's not him or if you know the focus is a little soft on him like you probably wouldn't be able to tell but yeah this is the the makeup effects guy said that that was like one of the hardest things he ever had to do and that it was really fucking creepy on set like because they all they all loved brandon like they they he was he was you know he was he was a really cool guy And yeah it hadn been I don think a lot of time passed between the accident and when uh basically his family and stuff with Brandon Lee family was like you should finish this movie Like you would have wanted people to have seen this. And this was, you know, something he was really excited to do and you need to fucking finish the movie. Uh, so they, you know, they did the best they could. they uh they they rewrote some parts uh michael berryman was apparently supposed to be in this movie he was going to play a character that is in the comics like called the skull cowboy it was another kind of like omnipotent like being that pops up to kind of i think move the story of the comics along a little bit more and kind of tells like eric draven like what's going on like He's not like the angel of death, but kind of along those lines, basically. And he's just like a rotted away skeleton looking dude that's like a cowboy, basically. And Michael Berryman was supposed to play him in the movie. And they shot like a couple shots towards the beginning of production. I think mostly to figure out like the because it was a fairly complicated like prosthetic suit that Michael Berryman was wearing, which is kind of a travesty in itself because that dude is so fucking interesting why would you want to cover him up with a bunch of prosthetics like those you know get a skinny stunt guy my michael barryman i think it's a little bit too fucking good for that but uh anyway they uh they had to cut like pretty much all of that shit that they had originally scripted with the the the skull cowboy because i think almost all of it was uh him speaking directly to eric draven's character which i they were smart enough to not try anything that was gonna involve like any dialogue that they obviously didn't have recorded or anything like they had to they had to move some stuff around and re rewrite some stuff and sadly the skull cowboys i think one of the first things that got the axe because they hadn't got around to filming the rest of it until towards the end of production but uh yeah michael barryman is such a fucking man that dude is so fucking rad i met him in denver at film festival at some point and that's kind of a bummer that he's not in the movie i think it could have been pretty rad i mean he's he would have been basically unrecognizable under all that makeup and i'm sure they would have dubbed his voice something a little spookier but uh really cool dude and yeah it's the stuff he had to say about this production i think is almost like makes it worth checking out that episode of cursed films really interesting dude kind of a bummer yeah this whole entire character got the axe after uh the accident so um yeah really really weird movie to re-watch all these years later knowing all of this right i think we should take a quick break and then when we come back you can tell me about watching the sequel and oh yeah whatever else that comes up and then i'll let you go rest your voice how's that all sound good sounds good yeah i'm gonna go make a cup of tea real quick hello hello who is this who are you trying to reach i don't know i think you've got the wrong number do i i'm gonna hang up wait don't hang up what's that noise popcorn you're making popcorn I only eat popcorn when I listen to podcasts. I'm about to listen to a podcast. Oh, really? Which one? Probably the podcast on Haunted Hill. Is that the one with the two guys with the beards? Yeah, Dan and Gav. Dan and Gav, yeah. That podcast was scary, I liked it. Most episodes they look at two different horror movies. Each episode they look at a world of the strange, where they look at weird things from around the world. Sometimes they even do special episodes where they look at different genres or directors' discographies and talk about them. Hmm. Do you have a boyfriend? Maybe. So where can I find the podcast on Haunted Hill? Well, you can go to legionpodcasts.com, Facebook, Twitter, or just go into iTunes and search for the podcast on Haunted Hill. So are you going to ask me out? Um. Are we back or are we not back? I don't know, are we? Yes, we are. And you're going to tell me about the Crow City of Angels, maybe, maybe just a little bit. And then we'll we'll say goodbye to everybody and all that fun wrapping up stuff. So the Crow City of Angels is the first of three fucking sequels in movie form. There was also a TV series of the Crow, which I completely fucking forgot about. I think it aired on Fox in like the late 90s, early 2000s. uh the crow city of angels was the first one uh also put out by miramax i think a lot of the same producers that worked on the first movie worked on this one uh came out in 1996 so only about three years after the original crow movie comes out uh brandon lee's been replaced by an actor named vincent perez um who has mostly done a lot of spanish language stuff that i have never heard of He also directed a few features here fairly recently. He has a very, very difficult job of, you know, replacing like one of the probably most widely publicized, like, you know, film accidents in fucking history, with the exception of maybe like the Twilight Zone movie, which has an awful, horrible, fucking sad story about it. so i i had never seen this i remember it coming out i don't remember if this played in theaters at all uh there there is a box office gross listed on wikipedia this made 25 million dollars apparently which is weird to think about because it's definitely this movie looks like it cost more than 25 million dollars i mean it doesn't have nearly as many uh like big stars as the first movie does but um it get the the production value carries over like i mean this there's there's not a huge drop in quality of like what you're seeing on the screen as far as like sets and special effects goes like it's a pretty pretty heavy movie in terms of that i and yeah like i said i remember i remember this came out uh we had satellite at my house so direct tv was like advertising the shit out of this and wanting you to watch it on whatever their equivalent of pay-per-view at the time was um and i i'm pretty sure i distinctly remember asking my mom about this and i was like didn't the guy that played the crow die how the hell did they make another movie about this and that's i'm sure she was like well i'm sure they got a you know new new person to play him basically um i didn't i sat and watched this a couple days ago because you can watch the first two if you're a paramount plus subscriber right now um there there like i said there is two other sequels one of which is on no fucking streaming service which is the third one the crow salvation i i was gonna sit and watch all these while i was on quarantine these last two weeks but the crow salvation is almost impossible to find and the fourth one uh the crow wicked prayer which came out in 2005 on that last one salvation came out in 2000 uh edward furlong plays our main character the crow and i watched a few trailers for that fourth one and it just looks like the fucking cheapest piece of shit movie i've ever like i i couldn't i couldn't bring myself to pay four dollars or rent that thing because it looks like a fucking tommy wiseau movie like phenomenally like low quality and low budget across city of angels isn't bad uh it's basically kind of it's it's similar to the comics in the respect that it's basically the same thing over again just different characters like i think they could have kept like i mean they kept making crow comics after the movie came out like you're like Like I said, Dark Horse, I think published quite a few. And then IDW Publishing picked up the rights and did quite a few of them in the 2010s. And quite a few of them are really good, but they all kind of follow the same story. Like they're all kind of like somebody dies and is brought back by the crow and kind of embodies the character for one reason or another. Vincent Perez plays the main character in this. His name is Ash. uh he's like a like a car mechanic or something and he doesn't really have like a lady in his life uh but he he does have a son his the son's mother apparently fucked off at some point before the movie because she was a drug addict there there's lots of anti-drug messaging in this movie like almost all of our main characters are like drug dealers and junkies and lots of stuff uh sarah the little girl from the first movie is now a grown-up character uh she's played by mia kirschner who uh she's probably the best part of this movie she's got incredible screen presence and this is gorgeous and uh she plays kind of a she she plays a little girl grown up so she's familiar with eric draven and shelly and all that and kind of knows what's going on like as far as she's in this one she's kind of the audience's eyes and kind of explains to ash like what's going on and he's you know come back from the dead for a pretty specific reason mostly revenge um and so it's kind of the basis basically kind of the same thing it's it's a revenge story um iggy pop is actually in this fucking movie which is wild uh he plays like one of the uh one of the the scumbag, you know, gang member guys, uh, we get like a new big bad. He's this guy, uh, for, uh, Judah played by Richard Brooks, who's, uh, another, it's kind of, it kind of fucked up. He's kind of like a, a knockoff version of Tony Todd. He's, he's like this, like tall, skinny black dude that has like this incredible fucking voice. Like I'm sure I, I'd have to look it up, but I'm sure I've heard his voice like somewhere. But he's he's like this like scumbag drug dealer dude that it's it's fairly random. Like I think Ash and his son witness a bunch of Judas dudes like basically murdering somebody out on the street. So to make it so there's no witnesses, they kill those to shoot those two and tie them up and throw them into the fucking bay. Kind of. It's it's all very similar. It's, it's all kind of treading fairly familiar territory. Uh, Iggy, Iggy pops pretty great in that he has like a very like, uh, he's, he's got like blonde hair and he's wearing like fairly thick eyeliner and looks kind of like a, like a mom that would yell at like a Walmart employee basically. There's also a really weird choice where they play a Stooges song while Iggy pop is like, I think he's walking into a porno theater where one of his fellow gang members has just been arrested, and the needle drop that they use in that is... I think the song's called Now I Want to Be Your Dog. I'm pretty sure. Yeah, he's easily the most recognizable Stooges' song, and for some reason they chose to use it while Iggy Pop is on camera, which I thought was a bizarre fucking choice. Thomas Jane apparently pops up in this somewhere. I don't remember who the hell he plays. He plays a character named Nemo, who I assume is probably one of the other other scumbaggy gang member characters. Doesn't really sound like I'm missing much having not watched the second one. Not that it's like the other ones that came after it, but seems like a series that maybe could have been left alone. yeah i think these are just like really these are cheap cheap cash-ins like definitely direct to video type shit which uh made miramax a lot of fucking money in the late 90s and early 2000s uh just appealing straight to that uh name recognition direct to video type of shit uh the city of angels isn't a i wouldn't call this a terrible movie it's definitely nowhere near as good as the original uh i think the biggest like the biggest downgrade is vincent perez himself like he's nowhere near as interesting or as charming as brandon lee like he's he's kind of he just doesn't really do anything interesting in this movie whatsoever and he doesn't have like a nearly as much screen presence and yeah it's it's kind of it's it's kind of just a waste like the whole the whole thing like they really could have i mean the comics i from what i've read do a pretty good job of free you know of introducing new characters that embody basically kind of the same thing like i i guess if you want to be kind of a detractor you could say that like they you know basically just do the same fucking story over and over again but it kind of works because you can kind of change things that like it seems a little bit more fresh but still has like a lot of the same uh you know look and feel to it basically and i don't really see a whole lot of reason why they couldn't have done that with the movies except for i think maybe audiences weren't quite ready to you know have like because it was just it was so well known that brandon lee had died on the first one and obviously wouldn't be back to do any sequels that like i don't think audiences are ready for somebody to replace him i think the movie was fairly well liked when it came out and i think a lot of people just thought it was in poor taste to jump in like not even a couple years later and like have somebody else playing him even though that's totally something that like works in the comics like it's it's only eric draven in the original ones and then it's different people throughout the rest of the the reboots and reimaginings of the series kind of deal so um yeah you're not really missing anything not watching city of angels i thought it was interesting and uh they almost they it had potential but like yeah you're you're kind of fighting a losing battle trying to replace an actor that has died that was like fairly well loved in in the original so yeah that's that's that's pretty much the long and short of it you don't really need to i would be kind of curious to see like what the fucking tv series looks like nowadays because i'm sure it's probably aged horribly and was probably a cheap cash and just like the sequel the movie sequels i'm just curious how how bad it might be but uh tv series is almost fucking impossible to find anywhere streaming uh like i said the third sequel isn't playing on any streaming services it's like basically unlisted on amazon prime or like this video is no longer available and yeah i didn't didn't want to fork over four dollars to watch the terrible looking edward furlong one because that one looked really cheap and really bad well maybe now that who owns oh is it paramount you said owns the property now uh the last bunch of them were all put out by Miramax. So you said you saw them on Paramount plus the, Oh yes. Yeah. Yep. Um, so, and I know who, cause so one of those company, well, no Miramax is still going on as far as I know. I don't know. I sort of stopped paying attention. I was going to say, are you saying that the Bob and Harvey Weinstein did something crass and shitty? Uh, this, yeah, this is one on a long, long list you're here to say but i mean eventually disney will own everything and they'll put everything out again so they can make money again so that'll be when you watch the crow is when it's a it's a ride at universal studios and it's on disney plus or whatever the fuck it'll eventually be but uh well and they've been talking to they've been trying to get a fucking reboot off the ground for like many many years like i think most recently jason momoa was attached to play the crow in some kind of remake and thankfully they've thought better of it like i mean i don't really it's i don't again it's something like it could be really interesting because i think there's a lot of like room for reinterpretation of the character and you can kind of do the same thing but different like over and over and over again like a great many comic book characters that will have much longer lives than either of us will uh but also yeah that i would imagine i would have to imagine that jason momoa probably thinks it's a little bit in poor taste and that the original the crow movie has aged just fine it's there's absolutely nothing wrong with it there's like a couple little like slightly dodgy blue screen shots and like i said playing spot the fake Shemp is kind of distracting. But other than that, I don't think the original Crow movie is aged like particularly badly. I think it still holds up on its own and like people still fucking love it. So why, why, why dink around with that? You know, cause money goes money. Artistically, no reason. There's plenty of other stories and all that, but yeah, eventually it'll, it'll get redone. I know Jason Momoa is a, fan of comics. But yeah, I saw that he had been attached, but nothing happened and he's moved on. He would have been like a berserker crow. He's pretty big and buff compared to all the other interpretations. I mean, yeah, fucking Iggy Pop. That dude's a 0% body fat and looks like a fucking skeleton a lot of the time. Yeah. Anyway, I think that was the episode. I think I think that I think that about wraps it up. Yeah, this was a good one to talk about because I wasn't super. I guess I was pretty familiar with the movies, but not super familiar with the comics. And yeah, definitely go check out that episode of Cursed Cursed Films. At least watch the one that's about the crow. It's super duper fucking sad, but it kind of explains some of the stuff a little bit, a little bit better than I could. I think it's like 30 minutes to it. It's like a pretty quick watch. but um yeah i i think i probably will still end up tracking down that collected graphic novel of the original uh four issue james james abar run because uh the the more modern ones i was reading i really liked i really enjoy the art style that that's another thing that i think appeals to me now more now than uh you know when i was like a teenager like when i was first starting to get into comics is black and white art is kind of an under appreciated uh art form and like some of my favorite comics now all these years later black and white like i really love the original bunch of walking dead comics and like there's there's a really gorgeous uh comic adaption of night of the living dead that came out uh like early mid 90s i've since tracked down like i think i own like three different versions of that one but the art style reminds me a lot of the crow there's this like all all the great black and white art tricks that you can do like with you know crosshatch and watercolor negative space and stuff like that and they they did with the night of living dead comic it's it's really fucking good i hope i still have a copy of that over here somewhere but um yeah this uh this was a good one i i think we'll probably we'll jump into something a little more traditional for the December episode. I do like the fact that you pointed out to me putting this out in November. You're like, well, it's kind of a bird month, at least for us Americans. So happy Thanksgiving. Watch the fucking crow. Maybe stay home because you don't want to give your family fucking COVID, which will leave you in a two-week depression and you'll be starting to identify with Eric Draven maybe a little bit more than you should. Definitely if you're listening to this on the main psychosemantic feed uh consider supporting the legion podcast patreon i i i'm a member i get my podcasts uh way before they go out on the main feeds and sometimes you get fun little exclusive stuff and i think i pay like five bucks a month for it so uh it's it's totally worth it um i unfortunately had to pass on uh beau invited me to he's got me in like a group uh group chat for his show the dark parade i'm pretty sure it's called we we did night of the demons in october which was a lot of fun to listen to and yeah that was on the patreon feed like a good i don't know two or three weeks before it went out to the main legion feed so yeah if you're into that sort of thing you'll see some familiar faces on some of those shows and i i forget what the hell series he was doing for uh the one that i had to pass on but he he he sent he sent out the ask like between like me and six or eight other people i think if they wanted to come and be guest hosts on it the day that i got my fucking uh covid diagnosis so i unfortunately had to pass on that one but i i will be back on some of those shows and obviously we're gonna try and get back on track and do one of these comic book movie shows once a month-ish So, yeah, I guess we'll probably jump into something Marvel for the next go around. I don't know if we're if we're still doing the the MCU movies in chronological order. I think Captain Marvel is up next. I mean, unless you count Eternals is kind of a weird one because it jumps all over the place, like spanning like a thousand fucking years, like in terms of time. So you could make the argument that that one probably is now the first one in chronological order. But I'm not sure Black Widow falls into any of this either because that's a fucking prequel. I think it takes place in the – well, I think it takes place – well, obviously it's definitely before Endgame. But I forget kind of where it's at as far as that goes. But yeah, I don't know. We'll talk about it. Maybe we'll abandon the chronological order and pick something else. But it might be Captain Marvel for next month. We will find out. And yeah, if we miss a month, we will try not to miss two. That's kind of how we're doing this. Tune in next time for the adventures of... Insert thing! Whatever the fuck this show's called. He did what we all must learn to do. You. And you. And you. And you. And cover.