It's so damn hot that I woke up and can't get back to sleep. It seemed like as good a time as any to report on a movie I forgot to mention last time: The Crow: Wicked Prayer. I didn't have any great expectations for this straight-to-video installment in the Crow series, and it certainly continued the trend of each successive iteration being proportionately more horrible. Edward Furlong was just a bad choice for a brooding action hero - he acts all tough, but looks like the kid who got rejected from My Chemical Romance. And all these big guys like David Boreanaz and Marcus Chong have to keep acting like he's threatening and stuff. The plot was awful, injecting all this faux spirituality into the Crow mythos that wasn't there before, now connecting it to indigenous tribal worship (a 'tribe' which seems to be a confusion of whatever the film-makers needed from Native American, Mexican and Aztec cultures). The script is full of non-sequiturs and bad puns about good and evil, designed no doubt to imitate the whimsical dialogue of the first movie and the comic book upon which it was based (with all the references to Poe and Milton and such). Biggest mistake is a dead heat between Danny Trejo doing "the crow dance" and Dennis Hopper talking hip-hop. I swear, I couldn't make this stuff up. He actually says "badass-itude". And the worst thing is, just like with The Crow: Salvation, if you listen to the DVD commentary you discover that the director and producer firmly believe they were creating art, constantly congratulating both themselves and the actors on making something so wonderful and new, and not just warming over the ol' franchise. Which is essentially all they did - the same arc from all the other movies is there: guy and girlfriend/family member senselessy murdered by colourful group of individuals, guy gets resurrected as the Crow (this time from inside a junked refrigerator) and finds some excuse to mimic Eric Draven's make-up from the original, guy starts hunting down said colourful group, working his way up from the bottom before confronting the head bad guy, who cripples his powers by disabling the bird itself, before a dramatic turn-around in the third act sees the Crow's powers restored and the bad guy's ultimate comeuppance. Along the way, the Crow stops to help someone incidental to his revenge, and perhaps learns a little something about himself to boot. Did I mention Tara Reid is in this one? Which is kind of appropriate, because the only other movie I can remember seeing recently that sucked this bad was Alone in the Dark.

All is well with Nibbler. He gobbled down his breakfast too fast yesterday and wound up sicking up a little, but I cleaned it up right away and he was otherwise in fine fettle (I promise!). We watched a movie together, and he commenced his by now customary assault on my ears. When permitted, he continues depillating the feather-based toy Beau and Mary left him to enjoy. I shall be visiting him again soon to provide him with his morning repast. This has been Nibblerwatch.