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Posts Tagged ‘Marcus Chong’

The Crow: Wicked Prayer

Thursday, April 11th, 2024
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I don’t know why I never got around to seeing the THE CROW sequel from the director of SIX-STRING SAMURAI. Always was curious. Still took me 19 years. Lance Mungia’s THE CROW: WICKED PRAYER, just like the previous one, was meant for theaters, but I think it only played somewhere around here? Wiki(dprayer)pedia says its theatrical run was only in Seattle and only for one week, and I do remember seeing an ad for it and being confused, but I was thinking it was in Eastern Washington. Anyway, I didn’t go.

It’s the only THE CROW movie so far with a writer/director. Mungia wrote the script with THE CROW series producer Jeff Most, and then there was a rewrite by Sean Hood (HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION, CUBE 2: HYPERCUBE, Masters of Horror: Sick Girl, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, THE LEGEND OF HERCULES). Oddly it’s “inspired by” a circa-2000 THE CROW tie-in novel by Norman Partridge, who later wrote the book Dark Harvest that became a pretty cool movie last year. (read the rest of this shit…)

Panther

Wednesday, January 14th, 2015

tn_pantherPANTHER, directed by Mario Van Peebles, written by his dad Melvin Van Peebles based on his own novel, shows the formation and rise and dissolution of the Black Panther Party For Self Defense. That last part of the name is usually left off, which makes sense because it sounds a little awkward. But if they left it on it would make it a little harder to pretend they’re the Kill Whitey Committee.

This is a ’60s period piece made 20 years ago and never even released on DVD in the U.S. as far as I can tell, but it’s timely and provocative because it’s about a community that gets fed up with the shit end of the stick and tries to figure out a better way to deal with it. It opens with a boy riding his bike, taking in the sights of his Oakland neighborhood. He and an older man both watch in delight as a bus blasts by a dressed up lady at a bus stop, blowing her skirt up like Marilyn Monroe. They love that they get to see her garters, and don’t seem to notice that some racist bus driver didn’t stop to pick her up. The innocence of childhood. Nostalgic first person narration is telling us this is where it all started, so it’s a bit of a shock when that kids gets nailed by a car.

He’s not the narrator as a child, it turns out. He’s the dead kid who convinced everybody that they could no longer take “No, you don’t need a stop light at that intersection” for an answer. (read the rest of this shit…)