The Crow/YMMV

• Adaptation Displacement: Though not for hardcore comics fans.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Until comic sequels and the movies confirmed Eric's supernatural nature, many readers thought that Eric was not supernatural, instead having survived the incident with the gang and insane from survivor's guilt. His masochistic tendencies and flashbacks throughout the original series give credence that this might have been the original intent.
  • How the hell? In the comic we see him being shot in the head in the bar scene. Funboy even comments on this. Then later he takes couple of dozens of shots at close range to his chest, then teleports away.
    • Yeaaaah, if you'll look around the wiki you'll find that a lot of so-called "Alternative Character Interpretation" doesn't make a damned bit of sense.
• Awesome Music:
  • Both Graeme Revell's score, which won awards, and the soundtrack, which featured notable bands as My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, The Cure, a Joy Division cover by Nine Inch Nails, among others. Mostly James O'Barr's favorite bands at the time he created the comic and whose songs were frequently referenced and used thematically in the comic.
  • Yes, for a graphic novel. Trust Obey released a soundtrack entitled "Fear and Bullets: Music to Acompany the Crow Comic Book" and is specifically made to play while you read.
• Complete Monster: Top Dollar and his henchmen. Three of them rape and beat to death a harmless girl and also have her boyfriend (Eric) shot and thrown out the window. But Top Dollar is the one who ordered it, and that makes him even worse than them.
  • Top Dollar only ordered his goons to attack Shelly and make her stop her complains. The two lovers died because Eric came home too early. Tin-tin first killed Eric and the rest of the crew decided that it's easier to just kill them both than try to cover it up. Yes, they are monsters, but the point is that Top Dollar never gave order to "kill them both and rape the girl".
    • T-Bird: "We needed to put some fear into that little lady, she wasn't going along with our tenant relocation program. Then her idiot boyfriend shows up and turns a simple, sweep´n´clear into a total cluster fuck! "
  • The comic version of Funboy is inhuman. "Dude, half her head's gone." "I ain't interested in her head, man ..." Oddly, Funboy is the only villain in the comic who doesn't get brutally murdered by Eric, and is instead allowed to die by a self-inflicted heroin overdose. Though just before he dies Funboy seems to realize what a waste of space he is, and while he admits he feels no guilt about his deeds, he knows that he should.
• Designated Villain: Gideon, whose only crimes are being an opportunist (it's not as if he killed all those newlyweds off of whom countless criminals pawned wedding rings) and trying to stop a weirdo with a painted face from intruding on his property late at night. But that doesn't stop Eric from vindictively torching his pawn shop with gasoline.

Eric: Each one of these...is a life. A life you helped destroy.

• • It's even worse in the comic, where Eric cold-bloodedly shoots Gideon dead with his own Walther handgun.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: The movie is about a guy who returned to life after being shot dead, starring a guy who was accidentally shot dead during filming. Not that this is funny, but Eric's occasional flippancy about being dead and people intending to kill him definitely qualify for this. One particularly jarring line, "Take your shot, Funboy - you got me dead bang" is spoken to the character whose actor pulled the trigger.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The film famously quotes the line "Abashed the Devil stood and felt how awful goodness is" from John Milton's Paradise Lost. Director Alex Proyas is currently (As of 2012) working on a film adaption of the epic poem.
• Narm: Some of Eric's dialogue in both movie and comic can fall flat, particularly when he starts going really off the deep end after the Gin Mill. Of course, he is pretty nuts, so this might be the singular case where Narm is a Justified Trope.
• Special Effect Failure
  • The compositing of Brandon Lee's face over his double after his death is not that noticeable, unless you are paying attention. But you gotta cut them slack under the circumstances - no one had ever done the effect before.
    • Well, someone had... in a crappy attempt to make a sequel to one of Brandon's father's movies. Of course in that case, the effect was quite literally a still picture of Bruce Lee's head cut out and pasted over the actual actor's face in post-production, so it's arguable if it even counts.
  • Michael Wincott's hair extensions to give him those long, flowing locks are, well, pretty obvious ...in more than a couple of scenes.
• Sequelitis: In both media.
• Squick: In the movie, when Eric grabs Darla's wrist and magically causes the morphine in her veins to leak out.
  • Also, the eyeballs. Egads, the eyeballs.
• Tear Jerker: From the beginning to the end.
  • Eric's farewell to Sherri in the comic...actually, pretty much any scene with Sherri in the comic.
  • The letter by John Bergin that acts as the introduction for the graphic novel.

At least take this lesson from The Crow: Think about what you have to lose. If you are someone who has nothing to lose, then you are already here...and your lesson is a much more difficult one.

• • The dedication card at the end of the movie. Christ.

For Brandon and Eliza.

• The Woobie: Eric and Shelley. Hot damn.

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