There were two curses that were said to have
been fulfilled on March 31, 1994, on the set of one of the most enduring genre
films that resonate with horror and gothic cinema fans to this day.
First was the curse of the Lee family. A curse
that started with the mysterious death of the young martial arts icon Bruce Lee
back in 1973, and ending with the equally untimely death of his son Brandon Lee
on that unusually freezing day in North Carolina, on the set of the movie he
was starring in.
Second was the curse of the movie itself that
Brandon in: The Crow. Something which has since become enshrined on the
tabloid archives of Hollywood superstition as “The Most Cursed Movie” of all
time, or at least right up there on the Top Five.
This year marks 25 years since The Crow
was released to critical acclaim, and the haunted nature of what happened on
that production and to Brandon Lee still resonates like the strongest of
ghosts.
Brandon starred as Eric Draven, a guitarist and a rock musician whose fiancée, Shelly
Webster, is raped and murdered. That same gang also kills Eric with an overkill
of stabbing, shooting, and throwing him out a window.
A year later, Eric is brought back from the dead by the elemental avatar of the Crow God.
Naturally, the newly revived Eric is not a happy
camper and becomes a literal reanimated spirit of revenge, whose only mission
is to kill everyone involved in his murder.
It’s a pretty grim plot from the original comics
by James O’Barr that makes for great cinema,
especially in the grungy 1990s. But since day
one, incidents in the production department of the movie might have seemed like
plain bad luck. But eventually their frequency just seemed like awful juju.
For one thing, you don’t really expect sub-zero
temperatures in North Carolina, where most of the set was located, in the
middle of the year. But that nine-week shoot wasn’t just a hell of a freezing
bad time, an unusual number of hurricanes also delayed shooting.
The number of on-set accidents were also through
the roof with their gruesomeness, things that just shouldn’t plain happen to
veteran production people who’ve worked on movies before.
Among them: someone in the art department getting a screwdriver shoved through their hand; a stunt actor falling through the rooftop set, breaking multiple ribs; a carpenter working on one of the set’s many metal girders comes into contact with a set of power lines. How? Nobody knew. But that carpenter had severe burns to his face, hands, and chest.
The April 2 issue of Entertainment Weekly
stated that the cast and crew had already pronounced the movie deeply full of
ill luck, talking about what they called “the curse of The Crow.” Still, the
worst was still coming.
The most macabre and horrific event to cap the
string of accidents on set was the death of Brandon Lee himself, something
that was, from many accounts, a clusterfuck of coincidences that could have
been avoided.
There’s a scene in the movie where Eric Draven
is shot by a character named Funboy (Michael Massee) using a .44 magnum
revolver, with Eric holding up his hand to the barrel to mockingly stop the
bullet.
What should have been a gun that contained only
a blank instead had a real slug in front of the blank. So when Michael Massee
fired at Lee from 15 feet away, the bullet pierced Brandon’s hand for real,
hit the stem of his aorta, buried into his abdomen, and damaged his spine.
After a series of unsuccessful blood transfusions and six hours of surgery, Brandon Lee died. He was almost 28 years old. Doctors say the entry wound was about the size of a silver dollar and the injury extended in a straight line to the spine.
As far as multiple sources could piece together,
Brandon Lee’s death was the result of a string of very unfortunate events,
primary among them was that the on-set weapons and firearms master for the film
was sent away early for the day. As in a scene from Final Destination, it
ended with a slug that still had gunpowder in it going into a round of blanks.
It had to happen that the bullet fired at Brandon was the loaded one.
Twenty years prior, on July 20, 1973, Brandon’s
father Bruce Lee died at the age of 32, the cause of which was related to
cerebral edema. Autopsy reports on the body of the martial arts icon later
revealed he had an allergy to the ingredients in his painkillers. Doctors in
Hong Kong officially ruled it a “death by misadventure”.
Up to now, multiple questions remain on the
what-ifs of Brandon’s death and how it could’ve been avoided. What if the
weapons master had not been sent home early? Who the fuck sent him home anyway?
What if the crew had not played with the gun?
The North Carolina police later classified the
incident as an “accidental shooting,” and the movie was later completed with
stunt doubles and released posthumously, as a tribute to Brandon. Very spookily
like his father’s posthumous release, Game of Death.
The Crow was a
sleeper hit that ultimately grossed more than $50 million above its $23 million budget. It
quickly garnered a strong cult following and critical praise, with Roger Ebert
calling it “a grungier and more forbidding story than those of Batman and Blade
Runner.” The Fangoria Chainsaw Awards also gave Brandon a posthumous award
for Best Actor.
It also had a kick-ass OST album featuring songs
by The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Stone
Temple Pilots, and Pantera that still makes it
to the Best Of soundtrack lists to this day.
However, the “Curse of The Crow” doesn’t end
there.
Remember Michael Masse aka Funboy, the guy who held the gun that shot Brandon dead? He was naturally devastated and took a long sabbatical from acting afterwards. He later told Extra in 2005 that he was still haunted by his shooting of Brandon, saying “I don’t think you ever get over something like that.”
There’s also the forgettable and increasingly
awful sequels that followed in The Crow: City of Angels (1996), The
Crow: Salvation (2000), and The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005), until Hollywood
decided to reboot it in 2008, even going into early stages of pre-production.
However, the curse has remained and the reboot
has sat in limbo for one reason or another, with various actors confirmed as
the new Eric Draven and then dropping out without good explanation, from Luke
Evans, Jack Huston, Jason Momoa, and even Bradley Cooper. By 2016 the rumored
remake had ripped through three directors in three years.
What of the original? Although his lead actor died in one of the most gruesome accidents to ever happen on a movie set, director Alex Proyas’s OG adaptation of the comics by James O’Barr remains one of the shining moments of gothic action-adventure cinema that stands up pretty damn well up to this day, 25 years on.