David (Angel) Boreanaz stars in Crow movie number 4 as a peyote eating satanic cult leader who escapes from a chain gang and heads to an Indian reservation to murder Redskins.  Edward (T2) Furlong plays a white dude who’s messing around with a hot Indian chick (Emmanuelle Chriqui), and that doesn’t sit well with Boreanaz and his nutty girlfriend (Tara Reid), so she eats Chriqui’s eyeballs while Boreanaz rips out Furlong’s heart.  If you’ve seen the other movies in the series, you know what comes next:  A crow shows up to bring Furlong back to life so he can paint his face white and make like a Ronald McDonald version of Charles Bronson. 

I always thought the first Crow movie was a tad overrated and that people usually forgave a lot of that film’s many shortcomings because Brandon Lee died while making it.  Crow 2 wasn’t bad, but it suffered from a horrendous performance by Vincent Perez as the new Crow.  I somehow managed to avoid the next installment, but let me tell ya, 3 must have contained a LOT of plot cuz this one didn’t make a lick of sense to me.

Okay, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the first two (and probably the third too) movies take place in a bargain basement Blade Runner future?  And if so, how come this one takes place in the present day and on an Indian reservation no less?  I have not a clue. 

Anyway, the cast for this flick is probably the best ever assembled for a Crow movie, but it doesn’t exactly help when everyone is woefully miscast.  When you think of The Crow, Edward Furlong is about your 191^st choice for the role.  With his cherubic face and his braindead stare, he looks more like an Emo Hot Topic douche bag and not a supernatural specter bent on revenge.  If anything, Boreanaz would’ve been much more suited to play the title character.  He’s tall, stoic, and muscular, all traits befitting a hero.  I didn’t exactly buy him as an evil Satanist cult member either.  To me, it just looked like he was just biding time until Angel got renewed.

The misguided casting aside, some of the movie actually works.  The revenge genre is pretty hard to screw up, and although director Lance (Six String Samurai) Mungia tries his damnedest to sabotage things at every turn, parts of this mess are surprisingly watchable.  The scene where Boreanaz murders the lovebirds has a kick to it, and some of the action scenes are well staged.  (The characters fly through the air so much that the movie’s subtitle should’ve been Crouching Tiger, Hidden Crow.)  Although the kills are kinda watered down (baseball bat to the face, impalings, stabbings, etc.), the movie does feature one of the nuttiest death scenes I’ve ever seen in a motion picture:  Death by Bug Zapper.  I’m not kidding.   

Although the flick sorta lost me around the time Boreanaz became the second coming of the Antichrist and started acting like a game show host on LSD, I say to you that any movie in which Dennis Hopper plays a Mexican pimp named El Nino, can’t be all bad.   

Hopper of course gets the best line of the movie.  While presiding over a satanic wedding he says, “I now pronounce you devil and his shorty!”