Here is a big one for an awful lot of reasons, some good and some bad. This was the year I graduated high school and also started college. That is enough for it to be a big year even if there weren’t a ton of movies I love released. But I also had a summer in which I had mono and had to stay home for a month without moving around much or I would die. It was the year I started working as a tour guide at Colossal Cave. It was a year that included me living in a religious cult, which thankfully ended in the first or second week of the new year. I was also cheated on for the first time (it would not be the last). I had a lot going on in 1994.
It is kind of amazing that I saw any movies during this year let alone a the volume that I did. When we get to the list you’ll find that I went to the movies a lot this year. It speaks to how important movies have always been to my sense of wellbeing. It was tumultuous to say the least but always movies were there for me.
My parents and I were never farther apart than this year. Things were bad heading into graduation as dating and grades were a constant source of tension and conflict. The brewing cult situation didn’t help any but it is fair to say that the situation with my parents made me ripe for recruitment. They look for the hole in you and fill it with themselves and in my case, that hole was acceptance of parental figures and a sense of belonging.
It is pretty weird that one tether to my life that helped keep me from going all the way in was an abuser who was grooming me. That makes this entire time of my life to be a real sticky wicket to emotionally process. I suppose I am lucky he was there even if it was being snatched from a fire only to be returned to a slowly boiling pot of water. It is difficult to figure out how to emotionally reckon with that. I have been trying for over 30 years and here we still are.
The mono thing was earlier in the year and it was harrowing. I had noticed that I had less energy while working in the lumber yard at Payless Cashways and then one day, while I was getting a toilet off of shelf above my head, I lost all of my strength entirely. I dropped the toilet and had to throw my body forward to pin it between myself an the shelf in front of me before I could drag myself to the manager’s office to tell them I needed to go home. I saw the doctor who thought it was mono. My mom poo pooed this and thought I was just being dramatic and lazy. When the test results came back, my doctor told me that it was indeed mono and such an extreme and advanced case, if I did ANY physical activity for the next month, I would die.
The devastation this did to my summer was improved somewhat by how smug I got to be toward my mom for doubting it. It sucked pretty bad to be just out of high school and stuck at home unable to move. I sat on the floor of my bedroom surrounded by snacks and just kind of watched movies, played video games, and listened to music. As I sit here now in the year of our lord 2026, this sounds awesome but it got really old really fast. The only time I left my room was to go to the bathroom and while my girlfriend at the time did come over a little bit, I was alone most of the time since my parents were at work all day and into the night.
Looking back, there isn’t much I really had a great time with this year but there were a lot of amazing movies that I loved. This is a difficult top five and while I agree that it sounds crazy for Pulp Fiction to be any number other than one, there are very personal reasons for the placement. So, let’s leave the bulk of my personal turmoil behind and crack on to the movies!
Runners up in roughly release order: The Chase, Greedy, Four Weddings and A Funeral, Hudsucker Proxy, the Ref, the Paper, D2: The Mighty Ducks, Serial Mom, No Escape, PCU, Wolf, True Lies, the Client, the Mask, Clear and Present Danger, Airheads, Killing Zoe, Natural Born Killers, Timecop, It Runs in the Family (My Summer Story), the Shawshank Redemption, Sleep With Me, Ed Wood, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Stargate, Interview with a Vampire, the Santa Clause, Heavenly Creatures, Disclosure, Dumb and Dumber, Street Fighter (mainly for one scene), and the Jungle Book.
If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 1994 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 32-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!
1.The Crow-Alex Proyas
Based on the comic book limited series of the same name by James O’Barr. The Crow is the story of Eric Draven, a rock musician who is murdered along with his fiancé on the eve of their wedding. A year later he comes back to life to take his revenge on the street gang who did it. With a killer soundtrack and a potentially star making performance by Brandon Lee, the Crow was poised to become iconic. Then tragedy struck near the end of production when Brandon Lee was killed on set due to a horrible gun malfunction that sent a slug through his abdomen and into his spine. The movie was finished with a body double after months of mourning and deliberation and has become a cult classic of the highest order. It stands as testament to how amazing Brandon Lee was and could have been and it is fairly bizarre how much real life was imitating the art they were making.
Brandon Lee, son of kung fu legend Bruce Lee, is absolutely amazing in this movie and it no doubt would have launched him out of the cheesy action movies and martial arts movies he had done prior. His past out put and included a Hong Kong martial arts/crime movie Legacy of Rage, a shitty direct to video Ernest Borgnine vehicle Laser Mission, a part in Kung Fu the movie for television, cheesy chop socky buddy cop movie Showdown in Little Tokyo with Dolph Lundgren in the lead, and rad martial arts crime movie Rapid Fire. He was a shining light in all of this but the Crow was going to be a bigger deal for him and there are all sorts of ‘what might have been’ stories about parts he was being offered for after the Crow and a fair number he turned down to play Eric.
Lee’s death in the Crow was an eerie coincidence given the movie’s storyline. Lee and his fiancé were set to be married after filming was completed, which he was two weeks away from when he died. That he died while filming his character’s death scene in the movie adds extra creepiness to the whole thing. That the comic was written by O’Barr as a way to deal with his trauma of losing his fiancé in a car accident the night before their wedding takes it a further step into creepiness.
Many people mistakenly think that he died during the big scene in which Eric is shot 80 times in Top Dollar’s (Michael Wincott) boardroom but they had filmed that scene the day before which led somewhat to the lax attitude everyone had when filming a scene with a single gunshot. A lot of things had to go wrong for this to happen and it was a perfect storm of happenstance and negligence.
The filming happened late at night and it was not the full crew. Because it was a quick shot, Lee did not wear any kind of protective vest under his costume. It was a quick set up and everyone was tired so they didn’t block the shot in order to keep the gun from being pointed at him. Dummy slugs to make the revolver look loaded had been made by dumping the gunpowder out of a real bullet and then put back together. On a previous shoot, one of the dummies had a small amount of gunpowder had been left in side so when it was fired it partially discharged the slug which got stuck in the barrel of the gun. The night of the incident, that gun was not properly checked and when a blank round was fired with a full load of gunpowder, it dislodged the slug as if it was a real bullet and killed Lee.
There was a lot of reworking that had to be done to finish the movie. They had filmed most of the movie already but there were still scenes that had to be shot using a body double, often Lee’s training partner Jeff Imada, and using digital replacement for his face. At a time when that kind of tech wasn’t the best, it looks pretty seamless for the most part. There were also some elements that had to be removed because the production didn’t feel like they especially worked now that Brandon had died. The Skeleton Cowboy was one such casualty of these changes and the shape of the movie and its resolution were altered.
As an adaptation of the source material, the movie nails the tone and feeling while making a fair number of changes. The bird in the comic that acts as Eric’s guide talks throughout and is a figment of his imagination while in the movie, it is a crow that can be seen and interacted with by the other characters and it does not talk. The bird’s mortality being tied to Eric’s invulnerability was a late addition to account for why Eric loses his ability to heal after they removed the story element that it was Eric meddling in Sarah’s (Rochelle Davis) life is what originally lost his powers as his reunion with Shelly (Sofia Shinas) was predicated in his taking revenge only. This was removed because the Skeleton Cowboy warns him that if he meddles, he will be damned and no longer reunite with his fiancé. They thought this would be in poor taste given what happened to Brandon so it was changed.
None of that shit was in the book either. In the comic, he doesn’t heal, he just can’t be killed. He wraps bleeding wounds in electrical tape and he meddles all he wants, really. It isn’t much though and Sarah (Sherrie in the book) is less central to the overall story. Likewise, Ernie Hudson’s Officer Albrecht is a minor character in the book but here is expanded to a major character. Same goes for Top Dollar who gets shot in the head fairly early in the comic and his sister Myca (Bai Ling) does not exist.
I don’t point out the differences to discredit the movie or say it is bad, it is just different. There are some scenes that are 1 to 1 to the comic which is cool. It is what an adaptation should be and it works very well. Given everything they had to sort out to finish the movie it is a small miracle that it works at all.
The performances here are all pretty great. What could have felt over wrought and campy is instead taken seriously and works tonally. It has become a bit of a gothic mainstay and it exemplifies how this should be done and stands in stark contrast to pretty much all of the sequels and other movies that tried to recapture the look, feel, and soundtrack of this film.
I got super into Brandon Lee as an actor when I saw Rapid Fire. I liked Showdown in Little Tokyo and he was a standout but my fandom really kicked off during Rapid Fire. I was a kid deeply into martial arts, not really training yet but thinking that I knew what I was doing. I really wanted to train Wing Chun and the way Lee fought and moved in Rapid Fire gave me something to aspire to. I was very excited to hear about him getting the lead in the Crow and I dove headlong into the comics.
I picked up the graphic novel at Dimension X comics in Tucson and devoured it. For my angsty teenage sensibilities, it really hit the spot. It should be mentioned that I did not know the level of trauma and despair that Eric goes through in that book but the trauma that I had, having been bullied and ostracized, was fed nicely by this book I had vengeance I would have liked to have taken and the catharsis of this was important to me. So, my excitement for the Crow grew even more, no longer being just a Brandon Lee movie but now being an adaptation of something I had grown to love. When I got the news about Lee’s death, I was devastated. Probably more so that one should be upon learning of a celebrity’s death but he had become something of a hero for me and I took it hard.
I became know at school for my Crow fandom and it was probably riding a line between being sad and creepy. Regardless of perception, I spent a lot of time drawing characters from the Crow and interacting with other fans who were eagerly awaiting the movie’s release in May that year. A local Tucson band, Machines of Loving Grace had a song on the soundtrack so I got to go to a signing they put on at a comic store. I had a poster signed by them that I continued to have until all of my shit burned in a barn fire four years ago.
There was a lawsuit filed against the studio and filmmakers in Brandon Lee’s wrongful death that was spearheaded by his family and the results of that lawsuit was that a portion of the proceeds from the movie would go to on set safety and to set up an acting scholarship in Bruce and Brandon Lee’s names. So, when the movie came out, I went a lot. And I bought a lot of Crow merch. Now, sure, I wanted the stuff and I was happy to see the movie 18 times in the theater but a lot of my motivation was that lawsuit.
I love this movie a lot. I also kind of hate it. I have seen it so many times that I could recite the whole thing to you now. I think it is very well directed, very well acted, and the writing is also excellent. There is a part of me that would have liked a more direct adaptation but honestly, I love what this movie is and how it achieves the things that the book did in different ways. But, man, it took away Brandon.
In the years since the movie came out, I have met James O’Barr several times and had several conversations with him. I have several signed prints, and a piece of original art from him. He has shown me make up tests for Jason Mamoa from when he was going to be Eric in a remake and he has told me his feelings on the remake that actually did get made. It is an interesting thing because while I doubt the man could pick me out of a line up, I now have first hand experience with him and it has deepened my appreciation for the Crow overall.
It is impossible to know what might have happened to the Crow had Brandon Lee not died while making it. It might not have gotten the same attention and fizzled. It might have still been a big deal. No one can really know. But I know that Brandon Lee was amazing and I wish we all could have seen what his career would have been after this. Obviously, I would just have rather he got to live his life but as a fan, what he would have done next will forever be an unanswered question mark and punctuates a life cut short too soon and a world deprived of a great talent. The Crow is a great movie based on an amazing comic and I love it and hate it.
2.Pulp Fiction
An absolute masterpiece of crime filmmaking, Pulp Fiction hardly needs any introduction. The second of Quentin Tarantino’s films, Pulp Fiction resurrected John Travolta’s career, launched Samuel L Jackson to the stratosphere and solidified Uma Thurman as a major star. It also provided decades worth of pop culture references based itself on the pop culture references of previous decades.
A collection of stories told out of order that intersect in different ways, Pulp Fiction revels in a pastiche of Elmore Leonard style crime stories and grimy 70s movies. The dialogue is ultra snappy and the characters pop off the screen with full-fledged life. The movie is vibrant, funny, violent, and horrifying all in equal measure and is truly a wonder to behold. Even decades in to an exceptional career, Pulp Fiction remains one of Tarantino’s best.
I saw this with a friend at the theater and it had been out for awhile so there was a fair amount of hype surrounding it. I had not seen Reservoir Dogs yet and I had no idea what I was in for. This was years before I fell in love with Elmore Leonard novels and so Pulp Fiction was my intro to this kind of story and these sorts of characters. I had seen plenty of crime movies but I hadn’t dipped much into the world of 70’s crime or blacksploitation so this was like a breath of fresh air to me and I just ate this up. It was all the way up my alley before I really even knew what that alley was. This opened the door to an entire genre of films that I have since devoured and I will forever be grateful.
The theater experience was interesting. It was a packed house and it seemed sort of divided by the content. If the crowed was made up of a pair of movie goers, it seemed that they were divided down the middle. Never was this more apparent than when Marvin gets shot in the head in the car. Half of the audience laughed and the other half was horrified. My now former friend was horrified and I cackled like a demon. This was the beginning of a crack that was starting to form that would tear through our situation over following years. Groomers don’t care for when your opinion diverges and this was the first of many. I was forming contrary opinions and he did not care for that. I didn’t really recognize what was going on at the time but looking back now, I realize I could have saved myself from years of self-loathing had I just recognized this for what it was.
As it is, I loved Pulp Fiction and defended it whenever anyone suggested that it was representing some kind of horrendous moral decay in media. It continues the questionable Tarantino tradition of writing the N-word like it is punctuation and that is worthy of reassessment but it remains a fantastic independent film that spurred on a generation of indy filmmakers to make their Pulp Fiction. It is fair that these efforts were rarely successful and did impose a sort of weird ‘house style’ for the 90’s but there is no denying the profound influence this film had and continues to have on film in general and indy film in particular.
3.Clerks-Kevin Smith
Another Miramax acquired indy breakout film, Clerks did for slacker buddy comedies what Pulp Fiction did for crime movies. Clerks is a simple movie, a day in the life of Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randall (Jeff Anderson) as they work at Quick Stop and RST Video respectively and the trials and tribulations they encounter throughout that day with drug dealers Jay and Silent Bob ever present outside the store. From attending a funeral, playing hockey on the roof, Dante’s ex Caitlin( Lisa Spoonauer) fucking a dead guy in the bathroom (by accident), and Dante’s current girlfriend Veronica (Marilyn Ghigliotti) revealing she has sucked 37 dicks, this is an eventful and hilarious day. It is also really relatable despite not going through any of that stuff.
This movie announced Kevin Smith as the newest voice in indy film delivering a slice of life experience with characters that talked about Star Wars and movies and generally felt real if much more well spoken than your average slackers. Smith’s success became a blueprint for other filmmakers and he really showed that you could just make a movie if you felt like you had one in you. Even if you didn’t have a budget, you could use credit cards and use black and white film to save money and shoot at the place you work. It was the true indy spirit that Robert Rodgriguez has written books about.
I saw Clerks later on, after I had seen his follow up effort Mallrats. I will get into the specific circumstance in a later entry, but when I rented Clerks I was blown away by it. I laughed so hard I fell off the couch and I realized, like millions of other viewers, that this is something I wanted to do. Smith’s dialogue is amazing and became the platonic ideal of dialogue for me. I eventually learned that he learned dialogue from the Fletch novels so I went and read all of them to learn dialogue writing from there. In fairly short order, I became absolutely obsessed with Kevin Smith and his movies.
I have to kind of pace myself here because there is a lot of Kevin Smith coming up in future entries but I will just say for now, broadly, that my fandom has not diminished and he is one of the most influential filmmaker’s and writers in my life. I have met him and the majority of the cast of Clerks more than once and just last night attended a live performance of one of his podcasts. Earlier this year I went on my second cruise themed around Jay and Silent Bob. I have a group of friends I consider family who I met over 20 years ago on a Kevin Smith fan message board, and I have another set of friends from the cruise based around Kevin Smith fandom. I also had to explain what snowballing was to my mom when she came in while I was watching Clerks. I refused several times until she started asking people at work so I realized I needed to tell her. I mentioned this to Kevin once and there was much laughter and the crowd at the show.
I love Clerks and probably wouldn’t make movies without it. It is amazing that he made this and it has expanded to the degree it has. It is further amazing that it has launched so many careers ever since. And it will continue, and you will continue to read about it for the remainder of this project.
4.Fear of a Black Hat-Rusty Cundieff
A This is Spinal Tap style mockumentary about hip-ho, Fear of a Black Hat is the lesser known counterpart to similar film CB4 and for my money is vastly superior. Another indy movie on the list that comes from writer, director, and actor Rusty Cundieff, Fear of a Black Hat is full on satire of both the music documentary and hip-hop rap writ large. It is very specific and pointed and it works with a sharpness that should make Chris Rock blush for his less successful effort (I mean in terms of quality, CB4 made WAY more money).
I am not really a fan of rap or hip-hop and I was not a part of the hip-hop rap fandom in the 90s but I was conversant enough in it to understand what they were doing with Fear of a Black Hat and I think it is brilliant. The song parodies in this movie are on par with the best in the business and the performances are spot on.
There is one scene that I absolutely hate in this movie, however, and it is a blemish on an otherwise fantastic film. It is very much a product of the 90s and the inherent gay panic that was going on at the time (don’t get me started on Ace Ventura), but it still sticks out pretty badly. A charitable read is that it is making fun of the rappers’ homophobia but that requires a damn site more generosity than it really deserves. The broad gay stereotype character that is the dance choreographer is so blatant in and of himself that it is nearly impossible to give the charitable read. I have hated this scene since the first time I saw it and subsequent viewings have not improved my position at all. So, when I say I love this movie, understand that I am excluding that scene and wish it wasn’t in there.
I saw this on VHS, rented from the video store and I latched onto it immediately. I have been very vocal about my love of parody and satire and this is those things done at a high level. It has always bothered me that Cundieff has not been recognized as much as he should but Tales from the Hood was well liked and he has written for a lot of TV shows including the Daily Show so he has done pretty well anyway. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it bearing in mind my one caveat.
5.Speed- Jan Debont
Speed is a fairly legendary action movie starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Daniels, and Dennis Hopper and follows a SWAT officer trying to figure out how to disarm a bomb on a bus that will explode if it goes under 55mph. That is it, that is the pitch and once it gets started it never really stops.
Speed was obviously very successful and kicked off a new subgenre of ‘Speed on a____’ all of which varied in quality some good and some terrible, like Speed 2 Cruise Control in which it was Speed on a cruise liner. WFT?
I saw this in the theater with my cousin Chris who was in town from Kansas and it just blew me away. I saw it a few more times in the theater and it has become a rewatchable movie for me over the years. I feel lame because there is not a ton to say about Speed beyond that it rocks as hard as possible and set a new standard for action movies. It is fucking badass.