A few weeks back I was disappointed to find out that I had not seen The Crow: City Of Angels like I thought I had way back in the 90s. Even worse, I discovered they made two more sequels. And for the final cherry on top, they were available to watch. So let me share a little bit from each film, and Barb Wire because I watched it at the same time.

Unsurprisingly, the film isn’t very good. It’s a pale rehash of the first film. I hear there’s a print that included a bunch of material that wound up the cutting room floor. I didn’t see it, so I can’t speak to it.

Getting to the screenshot, while I know the villain is impaled before getting Tony Goldwyn’s death from Ghost (1990), I want to know why Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) is playing in The Crow universe. It made sense for Michael Myers to reference it in Resurrection. I don’t know what it’s doing here. The Weinsteins produced both films, so maybe they just really liked it.

Of the the three sequels to The Crow, this is the one I’ll remember the most. This one has a guy who is falsely accused of murdering his girlfriend. He is executed in the electric chair, and the crow brings him back. This movie would probably be memorable simply on the grounds that it has Kirsten Dunst, William Atherton, and Fred Ward. Not to me. They’re icing on the cake. The accused killer is played by Eric Mabius. Yes, the actor who plays Hallmark’s wound-tighter-than-a-drum postal worker from the Signed, Sealed, Delivered movies plays the person brought back to seek vengeance. I find that to be amazing.

Edward Furlong as The Crow. Why not? This movie also brings us Tara Reid as a person who steals someone’s ability to see the future. We have a satanic cult run by David Boreanaz. We have Danny Trejo and Dennis Hopper for good measure. The film sets up like it’s going to be like a spaghetti western, which I guess these movie were to begin with seeing as the plots aren’t too dissimilar to something like Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! (1967). It’s also the only sequel that includes a bunch of scenes during the day. However, all of it comes together as a mess that never really goes anywhere.

Here’s a bonus shot to show you how much they were trying to go with the spaghetti western look.

And yes, the other members of his gang are called War, Pestilence, and Famine.

I remember when Barb Wire came out. Baywatch was everywhere expect on my TV. Pamela was unavoidable, at least if you were a kid at the time. It only stuck with me because of the “Don’t call me babe” line that they played in the trailers. I didn’t actually see it till over 20 years later…sort of.

Have you seen Casablanca (1942)? It’s the same movie with a fictional world rather than the real one. It doesn’t even pretend that it isn’t. I know that at heart Star Wars did same kind of thing. The letters of transit are the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo is Rick, and so on and so forth. But Star Wars threw in some Kurosawa and made it all feel exciting and new. It made it its own. The only thing Barb Wire adds is post-apocalypse…and boobs. It’s Pamela Anderson. They come with the package.

You can go through almost every key element or character from Casablanca and find it here. The one upside is that WWII is replaced by a civil war that starts in 2017 and Pamela gives us an eerily accurate description of the real world in the couple of years that followed 2017.