5. The Crow: Stairway To Heaven
I will admit, this show was something of a guilty pleasure for me in high school, as I was obsessed with The Crow. Originating as an independent comic by writer/artist James OBarr, The Crow tells the story of Eric, who along with his fiancée, are brutally murdered by a gang of criminals. One year later, Eric returns from the dead, watched over by a mysterious crow, and exacts brutal revenge on the men who killed him. The comic was adapted into a movie in 1994, which is notable not only for being an excellent movie, but also for the tragic on-set death of lead actor Brandon Lee. The 1996 sequel, The Crow: City of Angels, featured a new character resurrected by the crow and turned into a failure. Then in 1998, producer Bryce Zabel was assigned the task of developing The Crow as a syndicated TV series. Zabel based the story on the 1994 film and the pilot was a condensed version of the movie. However, at the end of the story, instead of returning to the Land of the Dead to be with Shelly, Eric was stuck on Earth, required to set the wrong things right in order to balance the cosmic scales so he could be with Shelly. The comic featured very graphic violence and mature themes, and the movie received a hard R rating. So to be acceptable for network syndication, and to accommodate the much-smaller budget, a lot of corners had to be cut. While The Crow was a very dark film with almost every scene taking place at night, Stairway To Heaven featured most of its scenes set during the day. The make-up used for the character also appeared washed out and very faint, and the fight scenes needed a lot of work. With a few exceptions, Eric never killed anyone, as it was established that anyone killed by a Crow would be resurrected as a Snake, their evil counterparts. While there were some good, dark episodes that showed what the shows potential could be, ultimately it was extremely limited by the restrictions of broadcast TV and suffered from cheesy writing, generally-awful guest stars, and poor fight choreography. Despite this, Mark Dacascos and Marc Gomes did pretty good work as Eric Draven and Detective Albrecht. They werent as good as Brandon Lee and Ernie Hudson were in the film, but they were far better than theyre given credit and had pretty good chemistry together.