The Crow – Wicked Prayer (2005)
Dir. Lance Mungia (primarily known for the wacky indie “Six String Samurai” from 1998).
Dear Christ, this is some next-level weird-ass fuckery. It’s all so deeply bizarre that I had a needling suspicion after a while that it was like the Hellraiser movies: a Dimension Films tax write-off that allowed them to also hold onto the rights for The Crow film series until it – inevitably – came back into vogue and they could make some real money with the property. Because this movie – it’s like The Crow was sort of crammed into an entirely different, and very strange, film that wanted to be about:
- The ugly economic realities of modern Native American cultures living in the desert states. In this case, its a need to choose between jobs in a waning mining industry or buy into – of course – the building of a new casino.
- How cults can spring up from such a situation. I guess? In this case, it’s a wild Satanist cult with a leader named Luc Crash (get it, Lucifer?) who, along with his girlfriend Lola Byre (get it, Crash and Byrne? The full deck we’re playing with here!) Anyhow, they are looking to become immortal by bringing about the anti-christ through ritual murder. Or something. I don’t know, it was also very weird because Luc is also known as “Death” and his three homies are “Pestilence,” “War” and “Famine.” So they’re sort of self-proclaimed four-horsemen who drive cars that are painted for each of their personas. It’s as dumb looking as it sounds.
- A Romeo and Juliet story about a girl named Lily of Native descent (her last name is “Ignites the Dawn) and her boyfriend, a Latino ex-con that did time for the noble crime of killing a rapist. He’s your lead, a guy named Jimmy Cuervo – yes, Cuervo, which is Spanish for Crow. And he’s played by Eddie Furlong, who, if you were wondering doesn’t in the slightest look in any way that he could be of Latin descent. Hell, I’m Lithuanian and Scottish and I look more Latino than Furlong
- Ultimately, this tries to be a violent murder fantasy that shares the fundamental DNA of a “Crow” movie. This is essentially the following:
- Lovers are murdered in a particularly brutal fashion: in this case, Crash and Byrne hang Jimmy and Lily, then cut out Jimmy’s heart and Lily’s eyes. They next have to do something even more crazy – get hitched before El Nino, who is some kind of Satanic Priest played by – I shit you not – Dennis Hopper. What the fuck is even happening here?
- A mystical crow resurrects the man and imbues him with super strength and nimbleness, while also costuming him in leather, white face paint and heavy black eyeline. He then broods and looks emo for a while before exacting his revenge.
- All the bad guys must have terribly idiotic villain names. In the first movie, it was Top Dollar, T-Bird and Skank. Which was ok, because you had terrific, memorable character actors like Michael Wincott (Greatest voice ever?) and David Patrick Kelly (“Warriors, Come out and playyyyyy”). Here you have Yuji Okumoto (who my white-boy ass 100% thought was Ken Leung from Lost) and Tito Ortiz, the ex-MMA fighter.
- The Crow has to be injured, which briefly puts the hero in peril when he suffers the same fate as the bird. But have no fear! Because Danny fucking Trejo is on deck doing a mystical “Crow Dance” that resuscitates them both.
- It’s all, as you can see, very, very convoluted. But it could have been fun! I mean, I don’t know why anyone would cast TV’s Angel and Bones, David Boreanaz and Tara Reid as a Satanic Bonnie and Clyde, because holy fuck, are they out of place. In fact, everyone is. Not a single role in this movie seems like it’s appropriately cast with the possible exception of Emmanuel Chriqui as Lily, but she has zero character, really, and is dead within the first 10 or so minutes.
- But still, IT COULD have been a batshit Gothic action movie because let’s be real here, The Crow isn’t really concerned with plot or character. It’s violent noir hinging on bad guys getting theirs in smokey gang hangouts and rain-slicked streets. But there’s no rain in the desert, no smoke gang hangouts in the Southwest, so what we get is a bar that looks like a soundstage and a church… that look like a soundstage. And no fun – not even a little bit. The energy here is flat and oh God, is it dull. Like, cure insomnia dull. It’s like attending a big religious wedding between two people that YOU KNOW aren’t going to last more than a couple years. It’s an endurance test of religious mumbo-jumbo and quasi-concerned white-guilt for the plight of non-white people living in Southern border towns.
- And then there’s the fight scenes. Good lord. Back when I used to make no-budget flicks with my friends or whatever, we’d be wise not to have too much “action” in our flicks because, well, we’d look pretty dumb doing stunts because none of us were particularly physically fit. And when we did, we’d make sure to get a LOT of takes and shoot from a bunch of angles so we could edit something interesting together. Here, NO ONE can fight and the director’s solution was to put it all in slow motion. So now, instead of bad fight choreography happening in realtime, you get bad fight choreography happening in slow-mo.
- Of course, the big question is “Hey, how was Eddie Furlong?” And you know what? I didn’t want to hate Eddie in this. I went in with the hope that this thing might surprise and he’d be good. Because honestly, I feel bad for the dude. Say what I will about how he was horribly cast as the young savior of humankind in T2, I know the guy once had a promising career. And this seems like an attempt to get back on the right side of things after a few years of wandering in the wilds, screwing up the way young actors often do. But this is a trainwreck and while I’d argue it’s not his fault and that he’s trying his best, dear God, what do you do when you’re Eddie Furlong and you’re forced to wear white pancake makeup and ridiculous eyeliner while saying lines like “I’m the fairy fucking godfather that’s gonna save your fairy fucking tales!”
- Director Lance Mungia broke onto the indie scene with a wacky, hyper post-apocalyptic action-comedy called “Six String Samurai” which is a cup of tea for some and a cup of piss for everyone else. I liked it, it reminded me of Robert Rodriguez’s “El Mariachi,” but with more off-the-wall action and a far more absurdly comic story. Here there’s no sign of that wild energy or creativity. It’s a film made by a guy who, a few years later would become the head of a public access station in SIerre Madre, California for a decade before resigning, effective immediately in 2017. In more recent years, he’s directed a documentary about “remote viewing” which is basically like the psychic powers Eleven has in Stranger Things where she can see (and come into contact with) things that are a considerable distance away.
Bottom Five Direct to Video Titles:
DId you know that The Crow: Wicked Prayer is TECHNICALLY not a direct-to-video release? It had a one-week, VERY limited theatrical run back in June 2025. I mention this not because I’m trying to quibble with the rationale for the Bottom Five because, Hell, I’m the one who decided Vanilla Ice qualified as a musician in our last episode. Rather, I wanted to point out that I kept running into these bullshit limited releases with movies I was trying to put on my list, and it made this bottom five very, very challenging if I counted them. Not only that, but Bottom Five Franchises ate up a LOT of my picks for DTV, as did our Bottom Five Fourth Installments. So basically, I was struggling MIGHTILY with this one because I don’t watch a lot of this drek and it seems the only things I could choose from were shitty Disney sequels to big name films from the 90’s and softcore thrillers. And that, my friend, does not an interesting list make. So how did you fair?
5.) Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)
Played for about a week or so in February 2019.
Dir. Dan Gilroy
This was a case of unmet expectations. Jake Gyllenhaal, John Malkovich and Rene Russo in a satirical comedy-horror film about the art world? Sign me up! I like Gyllenhaal in almost everything I see him in – he’s got the quirky leading-man thing down pat, and he’s oddball enough to always seem unpredictable. That should work great in a film where he plays an eccentric art critic named Morf who starts hallucinating that paintings by a mysterious artist are coming to life, but there’s something horribly amiss in the tone and pacing of this film. As a result, I found it really hard to follow and focus on, consistently disappointed when good ideas appeared only to be portrayed lifelessly. In a movie that’s all about the purity of art and how those who sell-out should, basically, be killed by their art, it’s interesting to see this film on Netflix where there’s no box office to measure the alleged value of a film. I like that kind of subtext, something I doubt was accidental as director Dan Gilroy’s most well-known film, the excellent Nightcrawler which also stars Gyllenhaal, had some smart things to say about news as media and how it’s produced. Too bad watching this film doesn’t feel as clever as all that and, instead, it’s just boring and unfunny characters being violently massacred in deeply weird, yet banal ways.
4.) Dracula 3-D (2012) aka Argento’s Dracula
Shown in six theaters for one week and grossed $4500.
Dir. Dario Argento
This charmless shitpille from one of the masters of Italian Giallo and horror has been on my shortlist of garbage to make you watch on the show at some point, but man, I don’t know… it really does belong on this list. It was a surprise to me one night when I was perusing horror titles on Dentyne+ or whatever and I was all excited because it was fairly recent Argento and, to be quite honest, I lost the thread on the guy after the late 80’s. So I was intrigued and then, wow, what a turd. What’s more, he once again has his daughter all kinds of nekkid in it which, while I kind of like, is all sorts of weird because it reminded me of the controversy surrounding him when she was young and he had graphic depictions of her in “The Stendahl Syndrome.” Anyway, naked daughters being directed by their dad aside, this is Argento’s first digital production, and while it’s budgeted at $7.7 million, I gotta tell ya man, you’re seeing about 1% AT MOST of that budget on screen. It’s insanely cheap looking, with community theater sets and CGI gore that looks like it came out of a Commodore 64. If Coppola’s Dracula was a celebration of the history of cinema, Argento’s is a lament about how video killed the movie star.
3.) Bitten (2008)
Dir. Harvey Glazer
Back in the days of video stores, there were dozens of movies you’d never heard of with fantastic, thrilling, wild and often enticing, ahem, video covers. In fact, there’s a whole-ass coffee table book I own called – perhaps uncreatively – VHS Video Cover Art by Thomas Hodge. Anyhow, you’d scan the shelves, looking at titles like “Blood Sisters,” “Slaughterhouse” and “Neon Maniacs” and, inevitably, one of their awesome, evocative, colorful and raunchy covers would get its hooks into you. You’d rent it, go home, get the popcorn popped, lower the lights and then feed the tape into the VCR only to be greeted with some horrendously terrible trash that made you seriously consider going back to the video store and putting up enough of a stink to get your $1.59 back. Honestly, a great Bottom Five would be something like Bad Movies with Great Cover Art, because we’d have plenty to choose from. So, now we’re in the age of streaming and, somehow, the same goddamn tricks are working! Enter “Bitten,” a 2008 vampire movie starring Jason Mewes as a charisma-less chud whose new girlfriend is a bloodsucker. I cannot remember much about this flick except that star Erica Cox looked quite terrific, a fact that didn’t help matters one iota since she kept being given dialogue to deliver. So of course, the cover of the film is a really striking image of her, fangs bared, that any red-blooded dude who likes the ladies would want to, um, see more of. As it turns out, this flick is exactly the kind of movie you’d expect sandwiched between “Van Wilder: Freshman Year” and something called “Kickin’ It Old Skool” (With School spelled with a K) which is exactly the case with director Harvey Glazer’s resume. Dull, dumb and as direct-to-video as direct-to-video gets, “Bitten” has zero bite and even less bark, a horror movie with no horror or thrills to offer, despite a cover that promised quite the opposite!
2.) Caress of the Vampire 2: Teenage Ghoul Girl a Go-Go
Dir. Bill Hellfire
This one probably could have landed as number one on a list of direct-to-video titles if I had indeed only listed titles and not actually have seen any of the movies. But, perhaps hilariously and likely far too tellingly, I’ve actually seen this shot-on-video mess from New Jersey’s EI Independent Cinema. Director Bill Hellfire’s done some sketchy-as-fuck “movie” work over the years, with several of his flicks giving 100% adult-store backroom vibes. But this 1996 improvisational experiment is less trashy and a little more funny than most anything else in his oeuvre. There’s no real story, and while it was packaged with its lesbian-vampire lead-in, Caress of the Vampire, there’s no lesbians or vampires, from what I can recall. What you do get is a bunch of drunk kids fucking around with a video camera, one of whom is Hellfire himself who delivers a line with such gusto that I still say it myself to this day, some 25 years after I first saw it. “Good goddamn this place is PHENOMENAL!” But, yeah, it’s awful stuff because really, that line is all that’s good about watching this otherwise pointless video essay of how to coax your female friends into doffing their kit for your “movie production.” Oh Heidi Honeycutt, wherever you are, I hope it’s a better place than in Hellfire’s bedroom with a VHC camcorder pointed at you while you awkwardly take off your shirt.
1.) Crystal Force (1990)
Dir. Linda Keats
Sooner or later, I was bound to dive deep into some kind of erotic “thriller” or another, but this 1990 film from director Laura Keats, her only feature-length effort, is a real softcore GEM. (See what I did there?) Incompetently made, filled with abhorrent acting and with almost all of the female cast inexplicably dressed in the same navy blue color, thank god for the nudity, because that’s about the only thing that makes this 90 minute patience tester even remotely bearable. And by remotely, I’m honestly saying, not really bearable at all because truthfully, even some exquisite breasts amply bared cannot make this something worth anyone’s time. If I recall correctly, the story involves some kind of bizarre crystal centerpiece that’s given to a family by a creepy antique store owner that somehow leads to death, possession and demon sex. No really, I mean, sex with actual rubber-suited demons. And not like, you know, typical writhing around missionary stuff, but actual doggy-style demon ramming, the likes of which you’re only like to see in far more explicit – and disturbing – detail on pornhub. The movie has to be seen to be believed, and it was a terrific beer and pizza movie with a group of friends who weren’t overly embarrassed by the atrocious filmmaking, absurd special effects, missing plot, and, yeah, copious scenes of Demon Sex. And if you can’t watch this kind of shit with your friends, then what good are they anyhow?