Amazon.co.uk Review
The Crow set the standard for dark and violent comic-book movies (like Spawn or director Alex Proyas’s superior follow-up, Dark City), but it will forever be remembered as the film during which star Brandon Lee (son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee) was accidentally killed on the set by a loaded gun. The filmmakers were able to digitally sample what they’d captured of Lee’s performance and piece together enough footage to make the film releasable. Indeed, it is probably more fascinating for that post-production story than for the tale on the screen. The Crow is appropriately cloaked in ominous expressionistic shadows, oozing urban dread and occult menace from every dank, concrete crack, but it really adds up to a simple and perfunctory tale of ritual revenge. Guided by a portentous crow (standing in for Poe’s raven), Lee plays a deceased rock musician who returns from the grave to systematically torture and kill the outlandishly violent gang of hoodlums who murdered him and his fiancée the year before. The film is worth watching for its compelling visuals and genuinely nightmarish, otherworldly ambience. –Jim Emerson

The Crow

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Twenty years before the Farrelly Brothers turned raunch into acceptable film comedy, the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker exploited it first. The college threesome made it big with Airplane in 1980, but this 1977 cinematic version of their live theatre show was the ground zero for their talents. Kentucky Fried Movie is a mish-mash of sketches, fake commercials, and parodies with no central theme–except their crudeness and laugh-out-loud humour. Highlights include a commercial for “Scot Free”, a board game based on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy; “The Wonderful World of Sex”, in which a couple goes through foreplay with a self-help narrator instructing them step-by-step; and a 20-minute spoof of Bruce Lee films entitled “A Fistful of Yen”. Brazen to a fault, the movie will reach for any punchline, no matter how crude (and those who flocked to the film’s initial release looking for R-rated sex will remember the final sketch and the infamous trailer for “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble”.) Directed by then-unknown John Landis (who went on to make The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London) on a shoestring budget, the film has aged. But crassness, when this funny, is forever. –Doug Thomas, Amazon.com

Kentucky Fried Movie

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