There’s no harm in Hollywood deciding that a critically-acclaimed and commercially successful movie based on a recognizable IP is destined for the franchise treatment, but continuing to mine The Crow for new content in the wake of leading man Brandon Lee’s tragic death never sat right with a lot of people.
Without the actor’s iconic performance as Eric Draven to anchor the character’s ongoing adventures, there was no real reason to keep making them. And yet, we ended up with three sequels and a short-lived TV series, and there’s nobody out there who can argue that things didn’t hit rock bottom with the release of 2005’s Wicked Prayer.
City of Angels and Salvation were widely panned in their own right, but the fourth installment in the series that should have never extended beyond Alex Proyas’ 1994 cult classic is an altogether different matter. Not only does it hold the rare and entirely unwanted distinction of a zero percent Rotten Tomatoes score, but it’s comfortably one of the entire genre’s worst-ever efforts.
That being said, in a twist of fate that could only happen on the internet, The Crow: Wicked Prayer has come in for such a vicious trashing on Reddit that people are genuinely and morbidly fascinated to discover for themselves just how bad it really is.
The lengthy tirade doesn’t hold back, but the fact one of the top-voted comments at the time of writing is “This is the only movie in the series I haven’t watched, but now I want to” sums it up neatly.
There are some films so irredeemably awful they have to be seen in order to be believed, and it looks as though The Crow: Wicked Prayer is one of them.