Crow, The: Stairway to Heaven (1999)

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General		Extras
Category	Horror	Main Menu Audio Featurette-Get A Life, Voices
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	81:34 (Case: 90)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Kari Skogland T. W. Peacocke Steven Hilliard Stern
Studio Distributor	Magna Home Entertainment	Starring	Mark Dacascos Mark Gomes Sabine Karsenti Katie Stuart
Case	Click
RPI	$29.95	Music	Peter Manning Robinson

    The original movie, The Crow (with the late, lamented Brandon Lee) has spawned a minor industry with a couple of sequels and now a TV series based upon it. This disc, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven is taken from the series and contains a retelling of the original movie with some major plot changes, plus a couple of bonus episodes from the series.

    To begin with, this isn't the original by a long shot. It contains the original script rehashed, with some additional subplots that are, to be honest, very weak. It is a very lightweight remake, with inferior acting, which attempts to play down the less palatable (to the TV audience it seems to be pitched at anyway) supernatural/occult slant and put in place a less gothic, more human look and feel that misses the mark totally. The original has the status of a bit of a cult classic, but it seems this 'incarnation' lacks even the zing of the original's 'kick a***' martial arts!

    There are basically 3 episodes on offer here.

1. Stairway to Heaven - 81:34

    If you've seen the original you'll know the score. Eric and Shelley are murdered and Eric returns as an unfulfilled soul with a crow guardian in order to take retribution and restore balance.

2. Get a Life (Episode 4) - 42:06

    Shelley appeals to Eric to save the life of an innocent man accused of killing his girlfriend and help resolve an injustice.

3. Voices (Episode 3) - 42:06

    A circus is in town and one of the performers is claimed to be able to speak to the dead. After a woman is found murdered, suspicion falls on the circus and Eric decides to investigate for himself with some surprising results.

Video

    The most salient point to be made here is this is a TV series adapted to DVD and not a movie. Surprisingly enough though, apart from the use of a few shaky cameras, this is a reasonably good transfer.

    The disc is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (4x3), Full Frame (not Pan and Scan) and isn't 16x9 enhanced.

    There is persistent but low levels of grain throughout the three episodes, with Voices suffering the most from this. Still, it was quite tolerable overall. The sharpness is only fair with a lot of softness in the look of the show but there was no visible edge enhancement detected. The softness is consistent throughout the episodes and consequently fine detail suffers slightly, but overall it was reasonable. Shadow detail is good without being exceptional and as you would expect there is no low level noise on offer.

    The colours vary throughout. There are a lot of dream sequences with deliberately oversaturated colours, but for the most part the colours are faded and drab. Whether picked deliberately to add a 'grainier' feel I couldn't be sure but there was no colour bleed or oversaturation during scenes that wasn't deliberate.

    There were almost no noticeable artefacts on offer, with none of the usual missing flecks or scratches on show. The only problem I found at all with the transfer seemed to be some sort of tracking problem. Unfortunately, I couldn't pin these down but if you watch the disc every now and again you'll see something for a split second out of the corner of your eye. They last about a single frame and occur regularly throughout.

    There were no subtitles on this disc. Being a TV show, this isn't surprising.

    Although Dual Layered, no layer change could be discerned. Possibly this was because of the episodic nature of this disc, with the episodes split across the two layers.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There wasn't too much to get excited about in the audio on offer here, although I would consider it better than average for a TV show since the Dolby Digital encoding is vastly superior to the often mono offering from TV. Hopefully with the advent of HDTV, we'll see superior quality soundtracks becoming available for television series in the not-too-distant future.

    The only soundtrack on offer was in English Dolby Digital Stereo 2.0 at 192Kb/s. Naturally I listened to this.

    The dialogue was clear and reasonably articulate throughout. There were a couple of times when I had to strain a little but overall it wasn't an issue. There was a noticeable audio sync problem at around 9 minutes in when Mark Dacascos is obviously miming a song. Apart from this, the syncing was spot on.

    The music was interesting. For the most part I found it was too obvious and overpowering. In some of the quieter scenes it was okay. There were some excellent incidental tracks added into the nightclub scenes from groups such as Crystal Method, Day of the New and Lunatic Calm. These were welcome reliefs from the overlaying title soundtrack, which started to become fairly turgid after a couple of hours of reviewing.

    There was no surround or LFE usage on offer with this disc.

Main Menu Audio

    The main menu is nothing surprising with a static picture and some overlaid music.

Featurette

    Although listed as bonus features, since this is basically three episodes from a TV series, I've viewed them in this fashion.

    There doesn't appear to be a Region 1 DVD on offer of this series at this time, making the Region 4 the disc of choice.

    I can't honestly say I disliked this disc. Even though the original movie is one of my Top 20, this passed the time fairly well without too many disconcerting moments. I guess for the purists this will be considered a travesty, but I found it innocuous enough. I do, however, wish they would release TV series in running order in Region 4, though. This concept of grabbing a couple of episodes at random really does suck!

    The video is reasonable, but the tracking errors were disconcerting. Overall, though, it was superior to many of the films I've recently viewed and reviewed which is definitely in its favour.

    The soundtrack was a bit annoying, but the use of different incidental music was welcome. Reasonably solid given its source.

    The extra episodes were okay giving a little more flesh to the overall concept.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall