The Crow review – Brandon Lee’s heavy metal horror is a potent goth fantasy

Just over 30 years ago, emerging action star Brandon Lee – son of Bruce Lee – was killed by a prop gun accident, fatally shot in the stomach on the set of this Gothamesque revenge fantasy thriller. It was a desperately sad event that generated more spurious talk of a family “curse” (Bruce died at age 32), rather than a conversation around movie location safety, which continues to be a problem to this day.

Now The Crow, which was released in 1994, a year after Brandon’s death, has been rereleased for its 30th anniversary. Brandon had largely finished filming and the movie was completed by finessing certain scenes in rewrites and using stunt doubles and digital superimposition of his face, which was camouflaged by the rainy, murky cityscapes and the eerie whiteface makeup. Now, audiences can savour once again the irony of a movie bringing its star back from the dead in a story about someone coming back from the dead. Screenwriters David J Schow and John Shirley adapted the hugely successful comic book series by James O’Barr, which drew on his real-life anguish at his fiancee being killed by a drunk driver, and also his memories of a newspaper story about a couple getting killed by a robber for their engagement ring.

The setting is a futurist Detroit, which has collapsed utterly into the ruin-porn chaos for which that city has sadly become a byword. On Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween, the city descends into a bacchanal of lawlessness, and it is on this date that rock musician Eric Draven (Lee) is murdered and his girlfriend Shelly Webster (Sofia Shinas) raped and killed by four thugs. The assailants had been hired by a sinister gang boss, because Shelly was courageously organising a protest against exploitative landlords who are organising mass arson in their insured slum properties all over the city. But a supernatural crow brings Draven back from the grave to exact terrifying vengeance on the four assailants, and gives him superhuman powers to withstand violence as he does so. The problem is that his superpowers only last as long as he is dispatching those four assassins. If he wants to attack the man in charge, which he very much does, his normal human vulnerability will be restored. Ernie Hudson nicely plays Daryl, the good-natured cop who has to keep a lid on all this.

Director Alex Proyas brings terrific energy and a swooping, sweeping camera to this grungy story of the living dead, drawing on Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop and James Cameron’s The Terminator, as well as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner with its incessant rain. Eric’s band apparently have a track on their album about the rain, plaintively insisting that it can’t last for ever; well, it certainly looks like it will. The Crow is a kind of lo-fi forerunner to the Wachowskis’ The Matrix.

The strange thing is that we don’t see much of Eric’s previous life in the flashback-fragments and he doesn’t look like a regular nice guy radicalised into vengeful violence by the horror of his and his girlfriend’s deaths. His badass death-metal makeup, accessories and general attitude almost make him seem similar to the four murderers from the very beginning. So the ordinary business of motivation is of far less importance than the general atmosphere of cartoony retribution and doom. It’s a potent slice of goth fantasy anarchy.

• The Crow is in UK cinemas from 31 May.