20 Films That Prove The 1990s Was The Worst Decade For Horror

It's not hard to see why a sequel to The Crow seemed like a good idea. The 1994 original overcame the tragic death of leading man Brandon Lee to become an instant cult classic, and the core concept of a tortured soul returning from the grave to exact revenge could easily be applied to new characters. However, as we've seen time and again, just because you can make a sequel doesn't mean you should - and there's no better evidence of this than The Crow: City of Angels.

Writer David Goyer (who went on to far greater success with the Blade and Dark Knight trilogies) and director Tim Pope are both said to have distanced themselves from this film, claiming the studio Dimension Films significantly re-edited it to bring it closer to the first Crow movie, when their intention had been to make something very different. But any way you cut it, The Crow: City of Angels just doesn't work.

It's a tepid, almost blow-for-blow replay of the original, which feels crass given the tragic circumstances surrounding that earlier film. But even overlooking that, it's simply a badly made film; it looks terrible, the dialogue's awful, the performances are limp, and from start to finish it's trying desperate hard to come off as hip and cool - and, as we all know, you'll never be hip and cool if you have to try.