Sooner rather than later every franchise ends up, by design or accident, a parody of itself; The Crow: Wicked Prayer never stood a chance of avoiding this fate, but then what movie starring Eddie Furlong, David Boreanaz, Tara Reid, and Danny Trejo would? On the other hand, we have Dennis Hopper as a pimp named El Nino who says things like “You stole daddy’s car keys, but you can’t handle the horsepower,” so it’s not a total loss.

We know that the Crow, like the Dude, must face a gang of nihilists; in this case a multi-ethnic gang whose members each identify with one of the Four Horsemen: Luc ‘Death’ Crash, War (Marcus Chong), Famine (Tito Ortiz), and Pestilence (Yuji Okumoto).

None of them really do anything thematically tied to their noms de guerre, so I guess they just thought they sounded cool. By the way, in a group of characters with thematic names, sometimes one just doesn’t fit the pattern (a trope known as Aerith and Bob); in this case that would be Lola (Reid), Luc’s girlfriend.

Luc is the “leader of a satanic cult” whose “motive” is that his “father [was] killed by an Indian.” This doesn’t make much sense until we discover that Moses (Richard Cumba), the “Indian” who murdered Luc’s father, is a priest of some religious denomination — Catholic in appearance but that allows its priests to marry and have children, and to which also belongs father Harold (Trejo), whose daughter Lilly (Emmanuelle Chriqui) is the girlfriend of Jimmy Cuervo (Furlong), who is on parole after serving a prison sentence for killing a rapist, who happened to be Moses’s son. It’s a small world, indeed.

War, Famine, Pestilence, and Lola help Luc escape from prison, and the five proceed to ritualistically murder Jimmy and Lilly; the rest, as they say, is history: Jimmy returns from the afterlife to exact revenge on his killers one by one, reserving for them such cruel and unusual punishments as death-by-bug zapper.

Oddly enough, no one besides Jimmy seems interested in pursuing the escaped convict whose gang leaves a trail of blood wherever they go. Then again, this is a movie that uses the word “Aztec” to refer to a Native American tribe.

All things considered, I’m tempted to believe that TC: WP’s self-parody is intentional; for example, Luc offering his henchmen a banquet consisting of deviled ham, deviled eggs, and devil’s cake “al flambeau”. I’m not saying it is to The Crow what Army of Darkness is to The Evil Dead but, incoherent or not, it’s the only one apart from the original that’s even close to watchable.