The Crow: Stairway to Heaven

to take on a role that became so identified with an actor. Particularly when the actor died while performing the character. Brandon Lee was just entering his prime when he tragically lost his life while filming the motion picture "The Crow". After he died the film took on an almost mythical aura to it. For anyone who has seen the sequel movies you know how the actors playing the title role has fallen flat. Yet in this television series the star managed to avoid the trap of simply doing an imitation of the late star. Mark Dacascos took the role of Eric Draven and made it his own.

While there is a vast difference between this series and the parent movie, the producers should be applauded for not trying to do a simple carbon copy. They knew they could not get away with the more graphic and disturbing elements of the source material and instead tried to capture the overall feel of "The Crow". The series spends more time on the emotional turmoil that Draven deals with being dead while existing in the world of the living, and having to do what he can to get back to the one thing he came back for.

For those who claim that Dacascos is just a pale imitation of Lee and that the series does not go as far as the first movie did into the Gothic I have to say take off the blinders and look at this for what it is. It doesn't try to be Brandon Lee's "The Crow", it just tries to be a syndicated television series based on the same source material.