Last night, I saw that A League of Their Own was on Netflix. I tried to get my sister to watch it with me, but she just told me that she liked the high ones and called me a nag. (It makes sense if you’ve seen the movie.) So I rewatched it by myself and cried all over again.
In case you’re one of the two people who haven’t heard of this movie, A League of Their Own takes place during World War II. With professional baseball players either enlisting or getting drafted, people worry there might not be another season of baseball until the war ends. Candy-bar manufacturer Walter Harvey (played by director Penny Marshall’s brother, Garry) creates the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, with the requirement that the players not only know how to handle a bat but also look good in the impractical short skirts he expects them to wear while sliding into home. The movie follows the first season of the Rockford Peaches. Geena Davis plays Dottie, the catcher whose husband is serving overseas. Lori Petty plays Kit, the pitcher who struggles to hit high fastballs and who is also Dottie’s sister. Rosie O’Donnell and Madonna play two players from New York. Tom Hanks is Jimmy, the alcoholic former player turned manager who says, “There’s no crying in baseball!”
It may be heresy to admit it, but A League of Their Own is not my favorite baseball movie. (That would be Major League.) Most of the actresses, especially Geena Davis, are convincing as baseball players, and I love that the movie shone a light on the real-life AAGPBL. (Sixty former AAGPBL players appear in the movie.) But as a baseball fan, it’s always bothered me that the movie doesn’t really examine any of their games in depth. We know that Dottie is a good catcher, that Kit is a good pitcher, that Madonna can catch a baseball in her hat, and that Evelyn (Bitty Schram) cries when she gets yelled at, but we don’t learn much about the other players on the team and what they’re good at. The Peaches win games, but I would have liked to see more of how they won.
I still love A League of Their Own, though. The bonding between the players gets to me. They’re all from different parts of the country. Some of them are married and some of them are definitely single. But from the minute they’re selected to play in the AAGPBL, they form a family of their own. When one of them reveals that she’s never learned how to read, the players teach her. When Evelyn needs to bring her bratty problem child on the road, the team looks after him. When Jimmy makes Evelyn cry, the team rallies around Evelyn. Everyone remembers Jimmy saying there’s no crying in baseball, but they forget he got kicked out of the game afterward. (Jimmy eventually becomes a better coach.) When one player gets the telegram that her husband has been killed in the war, everyone cries. In the film’s epilogue, Evelyn’s son says that she was never happier than when she was playing for the Peaches, and I can understand why. The heart of the film is the relationship between Dottie and Kit. Even though you can guess from the start that Kit and Dottie are eventually going to end up on different teams and face each other in the big game, it’s still an emotional moment when they find themselves on opposite sides of the plate.
A League of Their Own is on Netflix, so watch it if you haven’t seen it before. Or, if you’re like me, rewatch it and try not to cry all over again when the former players reunite at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Hurry up, though. It’s leaving on September 30th.
Congo is the kind of movie that makes perfect sense as a guilty pleasure because it is always hovering just above the level of complete nonsense, yet it has enough energy and conviction to remain enormously watchable. Directed by Frank Marshall, the 1995 film turns Michael Crichton’s jungle-thriller premise into a sprawling mixture of monster movie, treasure hunt, corporate conspiracy, technological anxiety, and old-fashioned adventure serial. It is loud, messy, often ridiculous, and loaded with moments that should not work at all. But that is the pleasure of Congo: it commits so completely to its bizarre material that the movie becomes difficult to dislike.
The setup is wonderfully overstuffed. A corporate expedition disappears while searching for a legendary diamond mine in the Congo, apparently after encountering some mysterious, deadly force. At the same time, primatologist Peter Elliot is preparing to return Amy, a gorilla he has raised and taught sign language, to the wild. Amy has recurring dreams—or perhaps memories—of a strange jungle city, and she communicates through a glove that translates her signs into a robotic voice. Before long, Peter, Amy, corporate representative Karen Ross, Romanian explorer Herkermer Homolka, and a mercenary guide named Captain Munro Kelly are all headed toward the same lost city, where diamonds, ancient ruins, and murderous white gorillas await.
That synopsis alone explains why Congo has developed such a devoted guilty-pleasure reputation. It is a movie where satellites, laser weapons, genetically engineered guard apes, corporate greed, sign-language research, volcanoes, and ancient African mythology all exist in the same story without anyone pausing to question the sheer overload of it. The movie treats every development with sincere urgency, even when the audience is watching Amy the gorilla say “Amy good gorilla” through a computerized voice device. It is impossible not to admire the confidence. Congo never winks at the audience, never admits that its premise is wild, and never cuts itself down to a more manageable size. It simply keeps adding more adventure-movie ingredients until the whole thing becomes strangely hypnotic.
Laura Linney’s Karen Ross and Dylan Walsh’s Peter Elliot are meant to anchor all of that craziness, but they are also among the film’s blandest elements. Linney is a talented actress, and she brings a professional focus to Karen’s corporate mission, but the character is written in such functional terms that she rarely feels like more than the person carrying the plot’s technological and business-related exposition. Karen is competent, determined, and occasionally vulnerable, but she never develops a particularly distinctive personality. Linney plays her with a seriousness that fits the film’s overall tone, yet that seriousness can make her feel oddly distant. She is there to make sure the satellite plot, the diamond plot, and the rescue plot keep moving, rather than to provide much spark on her own.
Walsh has an even tougher assignment as Peter. He is essentially the emotional center of Amy’s story, and the film needs the audience to believe in his paternal, almost codependent relationship with her. But Peter is such a mild, generic protagonist that he often gets swallowed by the movie’s more eccentric ideas. Walsh is not bad, exactly; he is simply too subdued for a film filled with volcanic eruptions, killer gorillas, and Tim Curry speaking every line as though he is announcing the end of civilization. His performance has a sincere gentleness that helps the scenes with Amy, but it also makes him feel like he wandered in from a quieter, more conventional family adventure. When the movie becomes bigger and stranger, Peter’s personality does not expand with it.
That blandness becomes especially noticeable because Ernie Hudson and Tim Curry are having such an obviously fantastic time in their roles. Hudson plays Captain Munro Kelly with the relaxed confidence of someone who knows he is the coolest person in the room. Munro is a professional guide, a fighter, a pilot, and a survivor, but Hudson does not turn him into a grim action-movie cliché. He gives the character humor, charisma, and a reassuring calm under pressure. Whenever the group faces another disaster—whether it is hostile terrain, dangerous animals, mercenaries, or the increasingly unhinged situation inside the lost city—Hudson makes Munro feel like the one person who might actually know what he is doing.
Hudson’s performance also gives Congo a sense of fun that the central characters sometimes lack. He has an easy screen presence, and he seems to understand that the film works best when it leans into the pleasures of a grand, pulpy adventure. Munro is not a particularly deep character, but Hudson makes him memorable through timing, attitude, and sheer likability. The movie becomes livelier whenever he takes charge, whether he is negotiating with people in the field or calmly reacting to another completely absurd revelation. If Karen and Peter are the story’s functional leads, Munro is the character who gives the audience someone to enjoy following.
Then there is Tim Curry as Herkermer Homolka, who delivers what can only be described as a masterclass in hammy, scenery-chewing entertainment. Curry does not merely play Homolka; he devours the role with a kind of operatic enthusiasm. Every line is delivered in his grand Romanian accent with the force of a proclamation, and every gesture suggests that Homolka believes he is the hero of the greatest expedition in history. Curry appears to be enjoying himself so much that it becomes infectious. He is not interested in realism, restraint, or subtle characterization. He is there to make every scene larger, louder, and more theatrical.
Homolka is already a ridiculous figure on the page: a pompous explorer with a famous family name, an exaggerated ego, and a dramatic flair that makes him seem less like a real adventurer than a flamboyant villain from a lost serial. Curry recognizes that the only correct way to play him is at maximum volume. His performance turns every bit of dialogue into an event. He gives the impression that he has spent years preparing speeches for this exact jungle expedition, waiting for the chance to announce his discoveries to the world. Even when Homolka is making selfish or foolish decisions, Curry makes him too entertaining to hate.
The contrast between Curry and the more restrained leads is one of the reasons Congo feels so odd. Linney and Walsh approach the material with a level of seriousness that suggests they are trying to preserve some emotional credibility. Hudson and Curry, by contrast, seem to recognize that credibility is not really the point. Hudson brings a cool, knowing charm, while Curry turns the movie into a one-man theatrical spectacle whenever he appears. Neither approach is necessarily wrong, but the difference creates a tonal imbalance. The film’s heroes feel flat because its supporting players are so much more alive.
The killer gorillas, of course, are another major source of the film’s guilty-pleasure appeal. These are not normal gorillas defending their territory. They are pale, vicious creatures bred to protect the diamond city of Zinj, and they attack with the exaggerated menace of monsters in a haunted-house ride. The effects have not aged gracefully. The suits and animatronics are visible, the movements can be stiff, and the creatures are often more amusing than frightening. Yet they remain memorable because the movie gives them a distinct, nightmarish look: white fur, glowing eyes, sharp teeth, and sudden appearances from dark corridors or jungle fog.
Frank Marshall directs the action with enough pace and polish to keep Congo from collapsing under the weight of its own silliness. The jungle setting, the ruined city, the expedition equipment, the satellite imagery, and the volcanic finale all give the movie a bigger sense of scale than its reputation might suggest. It feels like a genuine studio blockbuster from a time when Hollywood would spend serious money on an unapologetically strange idea. The film is not elegant, and it is certainly not believable, but it is never boring for long.
As a conventional adventure movie, Congo is uneven. Its African setting is often treated as a vague, dangerous backdrop, and its plot is overloaded with enough corporate jargon and techno-babble to distract from the more entertaining monster-movie material. But as a guilty pleasure, it is hard to beat. The movie is too bizarre to be generic and too sincere to feel cynical. Laura Linney and Dylan Walsh may be stuck playing bland characters at the center of the chaos, but Ernie Hudson and especially Tim Curry make the journey worth taking. Curry’s performance alone is a treasure: a joyous, magnificent display of overacting that turns Congo from a merely strange blockbuster into something genuinely unforgettable.
The Transformers: The Movie from 1986 was a must-see for me as a 13-year-old boy, but the anticipation of watching it and the actual experience were two entirely different things. The former was filled with excitement, the kind that comes from counting down the days until you finally get to see your favorite characters on the big screen. The latter, however, was something else entirely—a scarring moment that taught me, in the final year before entering high school, that not even afternoon cartoon characters were exempt from onscreen deaths. It was a harsh lesson in the unpredictability of storytelling, and it left an impression that has lasted a lifetime. And I wasn’t alone. The film shocked and scarred millions of children who flocked to theaters or gathered around their VHS players, expecting their beloved Transformers cartoon to simply be bigger and louder on the big screen. Instead, they were met with the brutal, unforgiving reality of watching their favorite characters die in battle, one after another.
The film was released during the height of Transformers mania in the mid-1980s, a time when the toy aisle was dominated by Hasbro’s robotic heroes and villains. But here’s the thing: The Transformers: The Movie wasn’t just about selling toys—it was about replacing them. Hasbro had a new line of Transformers ready to hit the shelves, and the movie served as a way to phase out the older generation of characters. The result? A shockingly brutal narrative that saw many fan-favorite characters meet their end in ways that were far removed from the relatively tame Transformers TV series. This wasn’t just a Saturday morning cartoon stretched to feature length; it was a full-blown sci-fi epic with stakes that felt real, and consequences that were permanent. For kids like me, who grew up watching the TV show, the film was a jarring wake-up call. The deaths of major characters like Ironhide, Prowl, and even Optimus Prime himself were not just unexpected—they were traumatic. It’s no exaggeration to say that The Transformers: The Movie left an entire generation of children with lasting emotional scars, all because it refused to sugarcoat the cost of war.
And yet, that’s exactly why it worked. The film’s willingness to go dark and take risks is what set it apart from so much of the animated fare of the era. The story picks up in the year 2005, with the Autobots and Decepticons still locked in their eternal struggle. The Decepticons, led by the ever-scheming Megatron, launch a full-scale assault on Autobot City on Earth, and the battle that follows is one of the most intense and visually stunning sequences in the film. The animation, while a product of its time, holds up surprisingly well, with vibrant colors and dynamic action that still feels exciting today. But what really sticks with you is the emotional weight of the story. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the cost of war, and the loss of life—even for animated robots—feels genuine. It’s a far cry from the often lighthearted and episodic nature of the TV series, and that contrast is part of what makes the movie so memorable.
At the heart of the film’s emotional impact is Peter Cullen’s iconic performance as Optimus Prime. Cullen’s voice work in the Transformers TV series had already made Optimus Prime a beloved figure, but in the movie, his role takes on an even greater significance. Though his screen time is brief, Cullen’s delivery of Optimus’s final words—“Until that day, ‘till all are one”—is nothing short of legendary. It’s a moment that has been etched into the minds of fans for decades, a testament to Cullen’s ability to convey both strength and vulnerability in a single line. Even now, nearly 40 years later, that scene remains one of the most powerful in the entire Transformers franchise. Cullen’s work helped elevate Optimus Prime from a toy commercial mascot to a genuine hero, and his influence can still be felt in every iteration of the character that has followed.
The film’s legacy is a fascinating study in how a movie can transcend its origins. On paper, The Transformers: The Movie was a 90-minute commercial designed to sell a new wave of toys. But in practice, it became something much more. The bold storytelling choices, the emotional depth, and the sheer audacity of killing off major characters in a children’s animated film ensured that it would be remembered long after the toys it was promoting had been forgotten. For the kids who saw it in theaters or on VHS, the film was often their first exposure to the idea that stories could have real consequences, and that heroes didn’t always make it out alive. It was a formative experience, one that left a lasting impression and helped shape the way a generation of fans engaged with media.
Of course, the film isn’t without its flaws. The pacing can feel uneven at times, and some of the new characters introduced in the movie—like the Dinobots and the Junkions—don’t get as much development as they deserve. The humor, while present, sometimes feels out of place amidst the darker tones of the story. But these quibbles do little to detract from the overall impact of the film. The Transformers: The Movie is a product of its time, but it’s also timeless in the way it handles its themes of sacrifice, leadership, and the cost of war. It’s a film that refuses to be pigeonholed as just a kids’ movie, and that’s part of its enduring appeal.
Today, The Transformers: The Movie holds a special place in the hearts of those who grew up with it. It’s a cult classic, a film that’s celebrated as much for its flaws as for its strengths. For many adults, revisiting the movie is like opening a time capsule, a chance to reconnect with the wide-eyed child they once were, the one who sat in front of the TV or the big screen, completely unprepared for the emotional rollercoaster they were about to experience. The film’s legacy is a testament to the power of storytelling, and to the idea that even something as seemingly commercial as a toy-based animated movie can leave a lasting impact. Whether you’re a lifelong Transformers fan or just someone who appreciates a good underdog story, The Transformers: The Movie is a film that’s well worth revisiting. Just be prepared for a few emotional gut punches along the way.
Today’s scene that I love comes from Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Von Trier is always going to be controversial filmmaker but no one has ever matched his brilliance when it came to capturing the end of existence.
In Melancholia, a depressed woman (played in a revelatory performance by Kristen Dunst) finds unexpected strength in the end of the world. As can be seen in the scene below, it’s a beautifully sad film, one that ends on a note of triumphant apocalypse:
“What is light without dark? What are you without me? I am a part of you all. You can never defeat me. We are brothers eternal!” — Darkness
Legend is one of those films that feels like it should be a masterpiece even before it begins. It has Ridley Scott behind the camera, an extravagant fantasy premise, elaborate practical effects, striking production design, and a cast that includes a young Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, and Tim Curry. Released in 1985, the film arrived as a dark fantasy event that had been heavily anticipated, especially because Scott had already earned a reputation for visually stunning films. Alien and Blade Runner had established him as a director who could make entire worlds feel tactile, mysterious, and overwhelming. The idea of Scott applying that sensibility to unicorns, goblins, forest sprites, demonic lords, and fairy-tale mythology was exciting on paper. Unfortunately, while Legend is often gorgeous to look at, it becomes an uneven mess that is only saved from becoming a major disappointment by Tim Curry’s performance as Darkness.
The setup is familiar enough to sound almost deliberately archetypal. In a magical forest, Jack, played by Cruise, is a woodland boy who lives in harmony with nature and has fallen in love with the innocent Princess Lili, played by Sara. The world’s balance is tied to a pair of unicorns, embodiments of purity and light. Darkness, a devil-like ruler who wishes to plunge the world into permanent night, sends his goblin servants to kill the unicorns and take one of their horns. Lili’s fascination with the unicorns sets the tragedy in motion, and once one of the creatures is slain, winter and darkness descend upon the land. Jack must rescue Lili, restore the horn, defeat Darkness, and return light to the world.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a simple fairy-tale plot. In fact, Scott’s strongest instinct in Legend is treating fantasy with a sense of visual seriousness. The forest does not look like a clean studio set built for children; it looks damp, overgrown, foggy, and vaguely dangerous. The trees loom like ancient creatures, shafts of light break through the branches in painterly bursts, and even the beautiful areas of the film carry an eerie quality. Scott and cinematographer Alex Thomson create images that often resemble illustrated storybooks poisoned by a nightmare. The film’s environments are its greatest achievement. Whether it is the glowing forest, the icy wasteland after the unicorn’s death, or Darkness’ fire-lit underworld, Legend makes a serious effort to create a fully realized fantasy space rather than simply dressing actors in costumes and placing them in generic medieval scenery.
That visual commitment is why the film remains so fascinating despite its flaws. You can pause almost anywhere and find something worth admiring: a strange creature in the background, smoke drifting through a cavern, an enormous set textured with roots and stone, or a costume that looks handmade rather than mass-produced. Scott’s eye for atmosphere is undeniable. The film has an unusual physicality, too. Its magic is created through prosthetics, makeup, puppetry, matte work, and elaborate sets, so even when some effects have aged, they retain a handmade charm. Modern fantasy often has the advantage of digital flexibility, but Legend has the kind of tactile design that makes its world feel like it has dirt under its fingernails.
Still, visual beauty cannot completely compensate for a story that never finds a consistent rhythm. Legend often feels less like a fully developed narrative than a collection of spectacular images and half-formed fairy-tale ideas. Characters appear with little introduction, emotional shifts happen abruptly, and major story developments can feel rushed or strangely underexplained. The theatrical cut in particular carries the sense that important connective material has been removed. There are moments when the movie seems to expect emotional investment simply because the images are grand or the music swells, but the script has not done enough to earn that reaction.
Jack is also an unusually bland hero for a film that needs a strong center. Cruise was still early in his career, and there are flashes of the screen presence that would soon make him a major star. He is physically committed and looks believable racing through forests, climbing ruins, and confronting danger. But Jack is written as a generic pure-hearted fantasy protagonist, and Cruise never gets enough material to make him feel specific. He is brave because the story says he is brave, romantic because the story says he loves Lili, and destined to save the world because that is what these stories require. He does not have much inner conflict beyond the expected guilt and determination.
Lili is similarly underwritten, although Mia Sara does bring a dreamy, otherworldly quality to the role. The film wants her to embody innocence, temptation, and romantic idealism, but it does not give her much agency until she becomes corrupted by Darkness’ influence. Her transformation into a dark bride is visually memorable, especially in the elaborate black gown and makeup, but it also highlights the film’s habit of prioritizing imagery over character. The sequence is beautiful, eerie, and loaded with gothic fantasy appeal, yet Lili’s emotional journey into that role feels more decorative than dramatically convincing.
The supporting characters are more colorful but not always more useful. The dwarfs, elves, and forest companions give the story occasional energy, particularly the sarcastic fairy Oona and the armored dwarf Gump. Yet their presence can make the film feel tonally scattered. Sometimes Legend wants to be haunting and mythic; sometimes it wants broad comic relief; sometimes it drifts toward romantic melodrama. Those modes do not always blend. The result is a movie that can move from an ominous demonic ritual to a goofy side-character exchange without establishing a stable tone.
Then there is Tim Curry, who walks into the movie and immediately makes every other problem less important. His Darkness is one of the most iconic fantasy villains ever put on screen, and it is not difficult to understand why. The makeup design alone is astounding: massive horns, red skin, cloven hooves, muscular proportions, and a towering silhouette that makes him look like a medieval illustration of Satan brought to life. But the design would be nothing without Curry’s performance. He does not merely hide beneath the prosthetics; he gives Darkness a voice, posture, and seductive intelligence.
Curry plays Darkness as both monstrous and theatrical. His deep, measured delivery turns lines about night, desire, and evil into something genuinely alluring. He understands that the character should not simply roar or sneer. Darkness is persuasive. He offers Lili beauty, power, and escape from innocence, which makes him more interesting than a villain who only threatens destruction. His scenes with Sara have a strange, almost operatic energy, mixing horror, seduction, and camp in a way that fits the film’s most ambitious visual impulses. Curry makes Darkness feel ancient, vain, cruel, romantic, and weirdly funny all at once. He gives Legend its pulse.
The famous confrontation between Jack and Darkness should be the film’s crowning achievement, and visually it almost is. Darkness’ lair, lit by flames and surrounded by infernal architecture, gives Scott room to indulge his talent for monumental images. Curry’s villain towers over Cruise, making the hero look small and vulnerable. Yet even here, the fight is more memorable for its atmosphere than its dramatic construction. It is a good example of the whole film: rich in aesthetic invention, less persuasive as storytelling.
The music also reflects the movie’s fractured identity. Different versions of Legend are associated with different scores, most notably the Jerry Goldsmith score and the Tangerine Dream soundtrack used in the American theatrical release. The Goldsmith material feels more classically mythic and orchestral, while Tangerine Dream’s electronic music gives the film a distinctly 1980s dream-pop atmosphere. Both have their supporters, and both alter the experience considerably. That split feels appropriate for a movie that has always existed in multiple forms and competing moods. Legend is never quite one thing.
In the end, Legend is a flawed cult fantasy rather than a lost masterpiece. Its reputation rests largely on its imagery, its practical craftsmanship, and Curry’s towering performance, not on the strength of its plot or its emotional depth. Ridley Scott clearly wanted to make a dark fairy tale that felt ancient and sensual, but the finished film too often gets trapped between mythic grandeur, children’s fantasy, gothic romance, and broad adventure comedy. It is an uneven mess, but it is a beautiful one. And every time Tim Curry’s Darkness enters the frame, Legend briefly becomes the extraordinary film it was always trying to be.
“When someone you love dies, you will know emptiness… You will never forget, and you will never, ever forgive.” — Eric Draven
The Crow is a remake built around a reasonable idea—returning to James O’Barr’s graphic novel rather than photocopying Alex Proyas’s 1994 cult film—but Rupert Sanders’s 2024 version never discovers why this material matters beyond its tattoos, bruises, and black eyeliner. It arrived dead on arrival with critics and audiences alike, not simply because it was measured against a beloved predecessor, but because it offered so little of its own identity. The film is dour without being haunting, romantic without generating much chemistry, and violent without making its revenge feel especially cathartic.
Sanders’s film stars Bill Skarsgård as Eric and musician FKA twigs as Shelly, lovers brutally murdered after stumbling too close to the secrets of criminal impresario Vincent Roeg, played with sleek, vaguely supernatural menace by Danny Huston. Eric awakens in a liminal afterlife, is granted a path back to the living world, and returns armed with supernatural endurance and a need to avenge Shelly. The fundamentals are familiar: love is destroyed by violence, death cannot sever that love, and vengeance becomes a darkly mythic expression of grief. Yet The Crow continually confuses the bare outline of that story with the emotional force that made it endure.
The production’s troubled history almost feels encoded in the finished movie. A new Crow film spent more than a decade trapped in development hell, cycling through different studios, directors, screenplays, and potential stars. Relativity Pictures held the project for years; Sony eventually became involved; various versions had names such as Bradley Cooper, Luke Evans, Jack Huston, and Jason Momoa attached at different stages, alongside filmmakers including Stephen Norrington, F. Javier Gutiérrez, and Corin Hardy. The project repeatedly stalled under changing rights arrangements, creative disagreements, and the general instability that often turns a familiar title into an endlessly recycled pitch deck. A fresh production effort was announced in 2020, but the Sanders version did not actually begin shooting until 2022 in Prague.wikipedia+2
That prolonged development makes the final product feel less like a passionately argued reinterpretation than a compromise that survived by default. Every era of the project seems to have left a trace. There is a prestige-minded desire to make Eric and Shelly psychologically damaged and contemporary. There is a franchise-minded urge to expand the supernatural mythology. There is also a music-video impulse toward body art, club scenes, fashionable misery, and sharply composed violence. None of these ingredients are automatically bad. But Sanders never finds a way to make them cohere into a world as tactile, strange, or emotionally immediate as the one Alex Proyas created in 1994.
The suspicion around the remake was understandable from the beginning. Most people involved in the original film have either expressed mixed feelings or outright disapproval about revisiting the property. The 1994 The Crow is not merely another cult favorite awaiting intellectual-property renewal. It is permanently linked to Brandon Lee, who was killed in an on-set shooting accident during production. The completed film became a memorial as much as a comic-book adaptation, and its emotional impact cannot be separated from the knowledge of what happened to its star.
The strongest objections have come from James O’Barr and Alex Proyas. O’Barr, writer and artist of the original graphic novel, has questioned the need for a remake for years, once calling the idea of remaking a then-15-year-old film “kind of ridiculous.” Proyas, meanwhile, has been even more direct. He argued that The Crow was not simply a movie because Brandon Lee died making it, and that the 1994 film should remain part of Lee’s legacy. When the new film’s reception turned hostile, Proyas called it a “cynical cash-grab” and mocked the lack of financial reward supposedly waiting at the end of it. The tone of those comments may strike some people as harsh, but the remake never makes a convincing counterargument.
To be fair, Sanders does not ask Skarsgård to imitate Lee. That is one of the film’s better instincts. Skarsgård’s Eric is physically slight, heavily tattooed, insecure, and visibly wrecked by the life he has lived before death. He is not a supernatural rock-and-roll avenger in the same way Lee was. Instead, he resembles a wounded, emotionally arrested young man forced into a mythic role he does not fully understand. It is a potentially interesting angle, especially for a story about grief turning someone into a monster.
But the screenplay, credited to Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, does not give that approach enough shape. Eric is vulnerable, then dreamy, then brutally efficient, then mournful again, depending on what the scene needs. The film treats emotional instability as character depth, but those are not the same thing. A character can be fractured, contradictory, and self-destructive while still possessing a recognizable inner life. Skarsgård does what he can with the material, bringing real physical discomfort and sadness to Eric, yet the movie seems more interested in how his pain photographs than what it reveals.
The same issue affects Shelly. FKA twigs has an immediately magnetic screen presence, and the film wisely spends much more time on Eric and Shelly before their deaths than the 1994 film did. In theory, that should be a major advantage. If the viewer sees the relationship develop, then Eric’s return from death should carry more emotional force. Instead, the early sections feel like a montage stretched into an act: rehab, drugs, late-night intimacy, mutual confessions, music, dancing, sex, and shared trauma. The movie repeatedly tells us that these two are soulmates, but it rarely gives them the specific dialogue, humor, disagreements, or small gestures that make a romance believable.
Their relationship becomes a collection of poses. The camera understands that they are beautiful, sad, damaged people; the script never quite proves they are deeply connected individuals. That is fatal in The Crow, because Eric’s entire mission depends on the audience accepting that Shelly is not merely the woman he loved but the person who made life worth returning to. The movie substitutes trauma bonding for intimacy, assuming that shared wounds automatically equal love.
Huston’s Vincent Roeg is similarly underwritten. Roeg is introduced as an elegant criminal figure with occult powers, someone who preys on young women and sustains himself through a diabolical bargain. It is a significant departure from the relatively grounded gangland evil of the 1994 film, and it could have opened the door to something genuinely grotesque. Instead, the mythology grows more complicated while the villain becomes less interesting. Roeg speaks in the familiar language of immortal bad guys who are convinced that cruelty makes them profound. He lacks the memorable theatricality of the original film’s antagonists and the unnerving specificity that a character like this needs.
The remake’s expanded mythology is perhaps its biggest miscalculation. O’Barr’s original premise has always been powerful because it is so direct: a murdered man is allowed to return, guided by a crow, because love has been violently cut short. It is gothic, but it is simple. Sanders’s version adds a network of afterlife rules, soul exchanges, purgatorial spaces, and supernatural transactions. The more the film explains, the less mythical it feels. Grief does not become larger through lore. In this case, it becomes bogged down in mechanics.
Visually, Sanders has moments of genuine flair. The film’s strongest sequence comes late, when Eric tears through an opera house during a lavish performance. White costumes are stained red, the setting’s exaggerated grandeur clashes with Eric’s raw violence, and the action is staged with a sense of grotesque spectacle. It is the one scene where Sanders’s instincts as a visual stylist really connect with the source material’s heightened pulp melodrama. The sequence is bloody, theatrical, and almost absurd enough to become exhilarating.
Yet it arrives too late and feels disconnected from much of what precedes it. For large stretches, The Crow is subdued to the point of visual anonymity. Its darkness looks digitally smoothed rather than dreamlike. Its city does not have a personality. Its criminal underworld feels interchangeable with any number of slick streaming thrillers. The 1994 film’s Detroit-like nightmare city was impossible to separate from its mood: rain-slicked streets, scorched interiors, industrial rot, grotesque criminals, and an unforgettable goth-grunge soundtrack all fused into one singular aesthetic. Sanders’s movie has better technology but far less texture.
The soundtrack, in particular, exposes the remake’s uncertainty. The 1994 Crow became inseparable from its music, which drew together alternative rock, industrial, metal, and goth influences into an extension of Eric’s world. The 2024 version clearly wants to speak to a newer generation through contemporary pop, electronic, and melancholy club sensibilities. There is nothing wrong with modernizing the musical language, but the choices do not build a coherent subculture around the film. They play as individual selections rather than part of a living, breathing atmosphere.
This is why the remake’s negative response was so predictable. It was not doomed merely because it remade a movie people love, nor because any new Eric Draven would inevitably be compared to Brandon Lee. A remake could have justified itself by drawing more deeply from O’Barr’s graphic novel, creating a truly different visual language, or foregrounding the grief at the center of the story with more honesty. Sanders instead gives us a film that is constantly signaling pain while remaining emotionally remote.
There are fragments of a better Crow scattered throughout: Skarsgård’s willingness to play Eric as fragile and unglamorous, twigs’s spectral intensity, and the opera-house massacre’s gleefully excessive bloodshed. But those fragments never combine into a whole. The Crow has the eyeliner, the tattoos, the wounds, and the bird, but it never finds the heart beneath them. The original film endured because it turned loss into a piece of feverish gothic pulp. This remake turns loss into an aesthetic, and that is not nearly enough.
“If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.” — Sarah Mohr
The Crow is one of those films whose reputation has become inseparable from the tragedy surrounding it, yet reducing it to that tragedy misses why it has endured so powerfully. Alex Proyas’s 1994 adaptation of James O’Barr’s graphic novel is a revenge story, a gothic romance, a comic-book nightmare, and an MTV-era industrial-rock mood piece fused into something singular. It is not flawless, and its storytelling is often more archetypal than psychologically deep, but that directness helps its emotional force. The movie does not ask viewers to untangle a complicated moral puzzle. It asks them to feel the enormity of a love violently interrupted, and then to watch that grief return from the grave with black feathers, white face paint, and a very personal sense of justice.
The premise is almost mythically simple. On the night before their wedding, musician Eric Draven and his fiancée Shelly Webster are murdered by a gang of thugs who break into their Detroit apartment. A year later, on Devil’s Night—the annual pre-Halloween ritual of fires and chaos that hangs over the film’s ruined cityscape—Eric rises from his grave, guided by a crow, to hunt down every person responsible. The classic revenge-movie structure is there: identify the killers, stalk them, punish them, move closer to the figure at the top. But The Crow distinguishes itself by making revenge feel less like triumphant macho fantasy and more like an extension of mourning. Eric does not become a cool killer because pain has made him stronger. He becomes an avenging specter because he cannot accept a world in which Shelly’s final moments are left unanswered.
Proyas directs the film like a fever dream built from wet asphalt, broken glass, empty tenements, and perpetual night. The Detroit of The Crow barely operates as a realistic city, but realism is not the point. It is an expressionist landscape, a metropolis that seems permanently trapped between a crime scene and a graveyard. The production design gives the movie its extraordinary visual identity: towering shadows, alleyways lit by flame, apartments that look like mausoleums, and a skyline that appears to have been abandoned by daylight itself. This is Gothic cinema filtered through comic-book panels, German Expressionism, punk fashion, and the darkly romantic visual language of early-1990s alternative music videos. It has been imitated constantly, sometimes lovingly and sometimes clumsily, but the original still feels unusually tactile. The grime, rain, fire, and shattered architecture have physical weight.
That sense of atmosphere is helped enormously by the soundtrack, which operates as more than a collection of era-specific needle drops. Songs by The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Stone Temple Pilots, Pantera, and others create a sonic environment around Eric’s grief. The music gives the movie a pulse that is melancholy, furious, and seductive all at once. For many viewers, The Crow became a gateway text for a specific kind of 1990s gothic-alt identity: black clothing, industrial textures, romantic despair, and the conviction that heartbreak could be transformed into style without becoming trivial. Its aesthetic influence is obvious, but it worked because it was attached to an actual emotional core rather than simply a pile of cool images.
Brandon Lee is the center of that emotional core. His Eric Draven is handsome and charismatic, obviously, but the performance’s real strength lies in its shifts of tone. Lee can play Eric as tender and playful in the brief memories of his life with Shelly, then turn him into a creature of eerie stillness and explosive violence. He delivers some of the film’s most famous lines with a theatrical flair that could have become silly in another actor’s hands, but he never entirely loses the sense that Eric is broken underneath the black leather and corpse-like makeup. When he says, “It can’t rain all the time,” it does not land merely as a quotable gothic slogan. It is a declaration of faith from someone trying to recover one small piece of warmth from an overwhelmingly cruel world.
Lee’s death during production makes that performance almost unbearably charged. He was accidentally shot on set during the filming of a scene involving a prop firearm and died at age 28. The production had to regroup, rewrite and restructure parts of the film, and use a combination of body doubles, careful editing, visual effects, and previously filmed material to complete Eric’s story. That practical disruption is visible only in limited ways in the finished product; remarkably, The Crow generally feels cohesive rather than patched together. Still, the tragedy affected more than the logistics of production. It fundamentally changed the public’s relationship to the film. Eric’s resurrection, his grief over a stolen future, and the repeated imagery of a dead young man returning to finish unfinished business all acquired a terrible real-world resonance.
That connection could easily have overwhelmed the movie, turning it into a morbid curiosity. Instead, it made the film feel elegiac. Audiences did not merely see a fictional tragic hero; they saw Lee’s final completed role, an image of an actor whose life had ended before the public had a chance to see where his career might go. The contrast is particularly painful because Lee’s work here suggests enormous range and movie-star potential. He is not just doing martial-arts action or inheriting the legacy of his father, Bruce Lee. He is creating an icon of romantic anguish and dark humor. The public reception of The Crow therefore carried an unusual mixture of admiration, grief, and protectiveness. Its cult status was built partly on its style, soundtrack, and comic-book mythology, but also on the feeling that viewers were witnessing a final gift from an artist taken much too soon.
The supporting cast gives the film much of its flavor, especially because Proyas treats its villains as grotesque figures in a corrupted fairy tale. David Patrick Kelly’s T-Bird is nervy and cruel, Michael Massee’s Funboy has a sleazy unpredictability, and Angel David’s Skank brings a wild, cartoonish energy to the gang. Rochelle Davis, playing Sarah, provides something vital in the opposite direction. She is not merely a child sidekick; she represents the lingering human connection between Eric’s former life and his revenant existence. Her scenes with Eric remind us that he is not simply a supernatural executioner. He is still someone capable of care, humor, and memory.
But Michael Wincott’s Top Dollar is the film’s true villainous masterstroke. Wincott has one of cinema’s most instantly recognizable voices: smoky, velvety, sardonic, and faintly predatory. As Top Dollar, he makes every line sound like it has been exhaled through cigarette smoke in a cathedral. He is not a conventional crime boss in the realistic, procedural sense. He is a decadent king of the city’s underworld, a man who appears to have converted criminal power into a private religion of violence, ritual, and spectacle. His lair, his manner, and his relationship with his half-sister Myca all push him beyond ordinary gangster territory into something operatic and mythic.
What makes Wincott mesmerizing is that he does not overplay Top Dollar’s eccentricities. The character has plenty of theatrical material to work with—occult touches, ominous speeches, a penthouse filled with weaponry and strange décor—but Wincott approaches him with a serene confidence. He rarely seems rushed or rattled, even as Eric systematically destroys his organization. That calm makes him more intimidating. Top Dollar understands the city as a machine of corruption, and he sees himself as the person with his hands on the controls. Wincott’s performance gives the villain intelligence, sensuality, and a distinctly sinister elegance. He is evil, certainly, but he is never bland. In a movie full of striking images, his voice alone becomes part of the visual texture.
The action in The Crow is effective precisely because it avoids pretending that Eric’s vengeance is a balanced fight. For much of the movie, he is invulnerable, and the violence plays like supernatural punishment. The standout set pieces—Eric’s assault on the gang’s hideout, his confrontation with T-Bird, and the final tower sequence—have the heightened, almost ritualistic quality of comic-book action rather than the grounded impact of a crime thriller. That can make some of the antagonists feel less like people than targets, but again, the film is working in the language of myth. Eric is a ghost walking through the consequences of someone else’s cruelty.
If The Crow has a weakness, it is that the love story depends heavily on fragments. Shelly is more an emotional presence than a fully developed character, preserved in Eric’s memories as warmth, laughter, music, and suffering. Yet the film understands that grief often works that way. We do not always remember a person as a complete biography when they are gone; sometimes we cling to specific gestures, rooms, jokes, songs, and images. The flashes of Eric and Shelly together are deliberately idealized because they are being recalled by a man who has lost everything. The movie’s romanticism may be blunt, but it is sincere.
More than three decades later, The Crow still works because it is a film of conviction. It believes in the visual poetry of rain and ruins, in the melodrama of eternal love, in the power of a memorable face framed in black-and-white makeup, and in the possibility that a soundtrack can become part of a movie’s mythology. Brandon Lee’s death will always remain a heartbreaking part of its history, and it is impossible to watch the film without feeling that absence hovering around it. But The Crow is not remembered simply because of what happened behind the scenes. It is remembered because Proyas, Lee, Wincott, and the rest of the cast made a pulpy revenge tale feel like a dark romantic elegy—one that still takes flight every time the crow returns to the skyline.
“When two hunters go after the same prey, they usually end up shooting each other in the back. And we don’t want to shoot each other in the back.” — Col. Douglas Mortimer
For a Few Dollars More is the moment Sergio Leone’s western style starts to feel fully formed: larger, stranger, more emotionally bruised, and far more confident in its ability to turn silence into suspense. Released in 1965, it serves as the second leg of Leone’s “Dollar’s Trilogy,” following A Fistful of Dollars and preceding The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It shares the earlier film’s basic ingredients—dusty towns, morally compromised gunmen, crooked institutions, and Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable music—but it is not simply a bigger repeat. Leone takes the stripped-down revenge-and-gold framework of the first movie and gives it a darker emotional center. This is a western about obsession, damaged masculinity, and a world in which violence does not restore order so much as expose how little order existed in the first place.
Clint Eastwood returns as the Man with No Name, although he is called Manco here, and he is still the same lean, poncho-wearing opportunist viewers met in A Fistful of Dollars. He moves through the film with that familiar mixture of cocky calm and barely concealed menace. Manco is a bounty hunter, collecting rewards for dead criminals with an efficiency that makes his work feel almost casual. There is comedy in his early scenes, especially in the way he manages an absurdly large number of wanted men, but the humor has a sharp edge. Manco is not a conventional hero. He is charming because he is capable, because he has style, and because Eastwood knows exactly how little effort the role needs. A squint, a pause, or a hand resting near a gun does more than most full pages of dialogue.
The major difference is that this time Eastwood is not alone at the center of the story. Lee Van Cleef enters as Colonel Douglas Mortimer, another bounty hunter, and his presence gives the film its real dramatic charge. Mortimer is older, more formal, and more openly haunted than Manco. Where Manco seems motivated largely by money and survival, Mortimer carries himself like a man pursuing something much more personal. Their relationship begins as a rivalry, with both men circling the same targets and testing one another’s abilities. Leone gets a lot of mileage out of the contrast: Eastwood is loose and youthful, Van Cleef is rigid and calculating; one looks like he has wandered in from the wilderness, while the other has the manner of a retired officer who never truly left the battlefield.
Their eventual partnership is what makes For a Few Dollars More so satisfying. It is a buddy movie in the least sentimental sense possible. Neither man becomes especially warm or expressive, and their bond is built less on trust than on mutual respect for professional competence. They know the other is dangerous. They also know that the other may be necessary. Leone stages their alliance with a kind of deadpan amusement, particularly when Manco and Mortimer try to outdo each other with increasingly elaborate shooting demonstrations. Those sequences are entertaining because they are absurdly masculine, but the film never lets the spectacle become completely weightless. In this world, skill with a gun is not a sport; it is a qualification for survival.
The villain, Gian Maria Volonté’s El Indio, pushes the film decisively into darker territory than A Fistful of Dollars. Volonté had already played a memorable antagonist in Leone’s previous film, but El Indio is far more unsettling than Ramón Rojo. He is not merely greedy or power-hungry. He is psychologically ruined, driven by trauma and by a sadistic need to revisit it. His recurring pocket-watch motif, paired with Morricone’s chiming melody, becomes one of the film’s great inventions. The tune begins almost innocently, but Leone gradually turns it into a signal of dread. Every time El Indio opens the watch, it feels as though time itself has stopped and everyone nearby has been sentenced to wait for death.
The backstory tied to El Indio is where the movie reveals just how much more disturbing its narrative ambitions are. Leone and his screenwriters introduce subjects that are much uglier than the genre’s usual tales of outlaws and frontier justice: rape, suicide, and the lingering horror of sexual violence. The film does not handle these ideas with contemporary sensitivity, and it is not interested in exploring their victims with the depth they deserve. Still, their presence changes the atmosphere. El Indio’s trauma is not abstract; it is tied to a violent violation and the suicide that follows it. That history does not humanize him in any easy way, nor does it excuse him. Instead, it explains the repetitive, self-destructive pattern of his cruelty. He is obsessed with an event he cannot undo, and he converts that obsession into violence against everyone around him.
That theme of obsession runs through nearly every important character. Mortimer’s pursuit of El Indio turns out to be rooted in a personal wound that has shaped his entire life. His bounty-hunting career, disciplined exterior, and almost mechanical precision are revealed as part of a long-delayed act of vengeance. Manco, meanwhile, is obsessed in a different and less tragic way: with winning, with money, and with proving that he cannot be manipulated. Even the gang’s massive bank robbery has an obsessive quality. It is overcomplicated, theatrical, and clearly more about El Indio demonstrating power over his men than about securing wealth. Leone’s characters do not simply want things. They become imprisoned by them.
The plot itself is fairly direct, though Leone fills it with enough betrayal and shifting alliances to keep it lively. El Indio and his gang target the bank in El Paso, using a jailbreak as part of a larger scheme. Manco and Mortimer separately infiltrate the group, both pursuing the reward on El Indio’s head while working toward their own goals. From there, the film becomes a tense contest of patience. Leone is never in a rush to deliver a payoff. He lets scenes breathe, often lingering on faces, boots, hands, doorways, and empty spaces. In another director’s hands, this could feel slow. Here, it feels like the movie is daring the audience to notice every tiny movement before the gunfire begins.
That visual patience is one of Leone’s greatest strengths. For a Few Dollars More is full of faces that feel weathered by the landscape around them. The film’s close-ups are almost confrontational, catching sweat, stubble, suspicious glances, and flashes of fear. Leone makes the human face as important as the wide-open Spanish locations standing in for the American West. He also understands that scale works best through contrast. A showdown can begin with an extreme close-up of a man’s eyes, then pull back to reveal two tiny figures facing each other in a vast, empty space. The result is both operatic and intimate.
Morricone’s score deserves equal credit for making the movie feel larger than life. The music is less a background element than another character in the story. Whistles, bells, guitar, percussion, and that eerie watch melody give the film a sound unlike the traditional Hollywood western. It is playful in some moments and nightmarish in others. Most importantly, it makes the climactic duel feel like the culmination of everything the film has been building toward. The final confrontation is not just about who draws first. It is about memory, guilt, revenge, and whether a person can ever truly escape the worst moment of their life.
If A Fistful of Dollars was Leone proving that he could reinvent the western with attitude, For a Few Dollars More is him demonstrating that the formula could carry genuine darkness. It is still stylish, funny, and gleefully exaggerated. It still has impossible gunplay, swaggering antiheroes, and scenes designed purely to make the audience grin. But beneath all that is a colder film. Its violence is tied to trauma. Its men are defined by grudges they cannot release. Its most memorable villain is terrifying not because he is invincible, but because he is already spiritually broken.
Eastwood remains iconic, but Van Cleef is arguably the film’s emotional anchor. His performance gives the story weight without ever becoming melodramatic. Volonté, meanwhile, creates one of the great spaghetti-western villains: volatile, wounded, cruel, and unforgettable whenever that pocket watch begins to play. Leone would go even bigger and more ambitious with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but For a Few Dollars More may be the trilogy’s most focused character piece. It takes the sparse coolness of its predecessor and adds scars, grief, and a genuinely haunted sense of purpose.
Lewis Teague’s Alligator is exactly the sort of movie that sounds like a bad joke until you sit down with it and realize it is having a much better time than most “serious” creature features. The premise is pure drive-in delirium: a baby alligator is flushed down a toilet, survives in the sewer system beneath St. Louis, Missouri, feeds on discarded laboratory animals pumped full of experimental growth hormones, and eventually becomes a gigantic, people-eating urban nightmare. It is absurd from the start, but that absurdity is the movie’s best asset. Alligator is not a good film in the polished, tightly controlled sense. It is too clunky, too broad, and too openly ridiculous for that. But it is never boring, and it understands that a movie about a giant alligator stalking the sewer tunnels under St. Louis should be grimy, nasty, funny, and just a little bit stupid.
The film arrives in that sweet spot between the straightforward animal-attack movies of the 1970s and the increasingly self-aware horror comedies of the 1980s. It has some of the structure of a Jaws knockoff, of course: authorities dismiss warnings, a difficult investigator takes the danger seriously, and a creature grows into an outsized public threat before the final confrontation. But Alligator does not have the resources, atmosphere, or aquatic terror of Spielberg’s film, and to its credit, it does not really pretend to. Instead, it leans into the cheapness of its materials. The alligator is mostly an oversized practical effect, sometimes convincing enough to be threatening and sometimes looking like the kind of thing that should be knocking over miniature buildings in a 1950s monster movie. The difference is that Teague knows how to frame the thing. He keeps the creature partly hidden when that helps, lets the sewer setting do much of the atmospheric heavy lifting, and saves the full ridiculousness of the monster for when ridiculousness is exactly what the audience wants.
There is an immediately appealing trashy logic to the story. The alligator is not simply an animal that wandered into the wrong place; it is a product of environmental carelessness, corporate experimentation, and the city’s tendency to throw its problems underground. The movie opens with a young girl’s pet alligator being flushed away after it bites someone, a cruelly comic act that functions as the film’s entire moral universe in miniature. Humans dispose of an inconvenient creature, neglect the consequences, and then act shocked when the creature becomes a gigantic murderous problem. The idea is broadly ecological and vaguely anti-corporate, but Alligator never becomes preachy. It keeps those elements in the background as an excuse for gore, sewer crawling, and a steadily escalating body count.
Robert Forster plays David Madison, a St. Louis cop with the permanently tired demeanor of someone who has been forced to listen to too many witnesses describe impossible things. Forster is a major reason the movie works as well as it does. He does not play the material like a joke, but he also does not strain to elevate it into prestige horror. His performance is dry, irritated, and completely appropriate for a man investigating missing-person cases that increasingly point toward a subterranean reptile large enough to eat a car. Madison is not a particularly complicated protagonist, but Forster gives him enough weary professionalism that the audience can follow him through the nonsense. His deadpan approach also makes the film funnier without turning it into outright parody.
The supporting cast is a strange, entertaining mixture of familiar character-actor energy and exploitation-movie weirdness. Robin Riker plays Marisa, a reptile expert and Madison’s eventual love interest, and she is better than the role strictly requires. She has a brisk, practical presence, which is useful in a movie where most characters either refuse to believe the obvious or exist to become alligator food. The romance between her and Madison is thin, but it is handled with enough low-key charm that it does not stop the movie cold. It feels like a necessary B-movie ingredient rather than a desperate attempt to convince viewers that they are watching something emotionally profound.
Then there is Henry Silva. Honestly, the presence of Henry Silva alone tells you what kind of movie Alligator is trying to be. Silva plays Colonel Brockman, a professional hunter hired by the evil pharmaceutical company to find and kill Ramon, the giant gator created by its illegal growth-hormone dumping. He is not the mastermind behind the scientific mess; he is the company’s hired cleanup crew, brought in once the whole operation has become too big and too toothy to bury. Silva approaches the role with exactly the degree of swaggering, oily menace it needs. He is here to be Henry Silva in a monster movie, which means glaring, sneering, and acting as though the chance to hunt a massive sewer reptile is simply another profitable afternoon at work. Every time he shows up, the movie gets a little more fun.
The screenplay comes from John Sayles, which is almost comically overqualified on paper, though it makes more sense once the dialogue starts landing. Sayles gives the movie flashes of wit and an edge of social satire that keep it from being totally disposable. There are jokes about cops, politicians, wealthy elites, and corporate corruption, and while none of them are especially subtle, they have the right bite for a film this grubby. The story’s best satirical impulse is its refusal to make the rich and powerful merely unlucky victims of the monster. The alligator’s rampage eventually collides with a wealthy social gathering, and the movie takes obvious pleasure in turning a fancy event into a feeding ground. It is not exactly The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in its class consciousness, but it does understand that watching an enormous reptile crash through the polished facade of upper-class respectability is satisfying.
Teague directs with the workmanlike confidence of someone who knows that the material only needs to get from one entertaining set piece to another. The sewer scenes are the film’s strongest visual material. They are damp, shadowy, cluttered, and full of the sort of industrial grime that exploitation cinema loves. The setting is inherently creepy because it is both unreal and plausible: everyone knows a city like St. Louis has tunnels, pipes, forgotten chambers, and places where things can disappear, even if nobody really believes a giant alligator lives down there. The movie uses that unease effectively. When characters descend into the darkness, the tension is simple but real. You know something huge is moving nearby, and you know the special effects are not going to hold up to close inspection, but the atmosphere carries you through.
The attacks are uneven, but that is part of the charm. Some are genuinely nasty, particularly when the movie lets the creature strike suddenly from the shadows. Others are so exaggerated that they become funny in ways the filmmakers likely anticipated. There is a particularly memorable moment involving a child and a swimming pool that has the gleefully tasteless punch of old-school grindhouse horror. Alligator is never as graphic as the nastier exploitation films of its era, but it has enough blood, torn bodies, and monstrous chomping to satisfy an audience looking for low-rent carnage. It knows the basic rule of this kind of movie: if you are going to ask viewers to accept a mutant sewer alligator, you had better let it eat some people.
What makes Alligator last beyond its premise is that it does not seem embarrassed by what it is. There are many creature features that feel apologetic, as if the filmmakers know they are making junk and are waiting for the audience to laugh at them. Teague’s film is junk, absolutely, but it is crafted junk. It has actual pacing, committed actors, useful atmosphere, and a screenplay that occasionally has more on its mind than the average monster-on-the-loose picture. It is bad enough that its flaws become part of the entertainment, especially whenever the huge reptile lumbers into view or the plot makes a leap that only makes sense if nobody involved pauses to think for ten seconds. Yet it is not so bad that it becomes a chore. That is the crucial distinction.
By the time Alligator reaches its climax, it has delivered nearly everything its title promises: sewers, corrupt businessmen, cops with guns, practical monster effects, socialites getting their comeuppance, and Henry Silva looking like he would gladly accept a corporate paycheck to hunt an enormous mutant reptile. It is the kind of film best watched with an appreciation for grime, excess, and the noble tradition of exploitation cinema turning a ridiculous idea into a perfectly decent Saturday-night monster movie. Alligator will not make anyone forget the great creature features, but it earns its place as a scrappy, trashy, oddly lovable B-movie. It is not awful. It is not even truly bad. It is just delightfully cheap, mean, and goofy enough to remind you why bad movies can sometimes be more fun than good ones.
After reading a lot of negative reviews, I went into this 2011 remake of Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS expecting to not like it. I only bought the DVD because I’m a James Woods super-fan and completist. The good thing about that lowering of expectations, though, is that in my first viewing (in 2026) I was able to focus on the movie itself rather than in comparison to the original. After watching it, I would never argue that this version is a great movie, but I did find myself enjoying it more than I thought I would.
David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth) arrive in her childhood hometown of Blackwater, Mississippi, where David plans to work on a screenplay while they fix up her old family home. David’s a successful Hollywood screenwriter, but he’s not tough at all, which is at odds with the small town football and southern deer-hunting culture he now finds himself in. Amy, who’s had some success as an actress, has a history with many of the people in town, especially her old boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard). Eventually that history turns into something much more dangerous than you would ever imagine (if you hadn’t seen the original).
Because I’ve only seen the original film once or twice in my currently 52-year-old life, I don’t necessarily hold it as some sort of untouchable masterpiece of cinema, and I can like how this version of STRAW DOGS builds its tension. There are definitely some moments where I found myself wondering what the hell David and Amy were thinking. David seems intent on giving the local yokels every possible opportunity to walk all over him. Then again, as a person who always tries to be nice and avoid a fight, I don’t know how much different I would have been. I would hope that if my wife and entire livelihood was being threatened, however, I’d find the intestinal fortitude to do whatever it takes to protect them and myself. David eventually does find that nature within himself.
Amy’s unexplained behavior is even worse. After being offended that the locals ogle her when she’s exercising, she decides the appropriate response is taking her top off purposely in front of an open window so those same locals can see. While I can unequivocally state that there’s never any excuse for violence against women among rational people, the problem is that these are irrational people who don’t play by the rules of society. This is one of those cases where the only possible explanation for Amy’s behavior is because the screenplay needed her to do it. Even when the worst case scenario eventually plays out, the despicable behavior taps into our basic instincts and we want to see vengeance served.
James Marsden and Kate Bosworth are okay as David and Amy. Their characters aren’t particularly engaging, but you can’t help but pull for them in comparison to those around them. Alexander Skarsgard is awkward and creepy as Charlie, Amy’s old boyfriend. I loved him as the powerful vampire in the HBO series TRUE BLOOD. He’s something totally different here, and he eventually goes so far off the reservation you can’t help but want him to get his comeuppance. Of course, I wanted to watch the movie because of James Woods, who plays Tom Heddon, a former local high school football coach who seems to be just a drunk at the bar these days. It turns out that he’s loud, mean and incredibly nasty. In a history of playing vicious bastards, this character plays out as one of his worst. It’s an incredible performance just a couple of years before, as Woods has said, his unapologetically conservative political views would essentially get him blackballed from Hollywood.
The final scenes are extremely violent, and based on what we’ve seen, it’s hard not to feel that the violence is justified. It’s ugly, but I won’t deny that I wasn’t emotionally moved to see it. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert would say that he preferred this remake to the original. I won’t go that far, but that’s a pretty strong indicator that this film shouldn’t be dismissed just because most won’t find it to be as good as the original. What it is is a mean, violent thriller with some strong performances, especially from Skarsgard and Woods. If you’re willing to forget that it’s a remake of a superior film from 40 years earlier, you just may enjoy it!
