Featuring: Tony Todd, Virginia Madsen
Directed by: Bernard RoseCandyman began its life as one of the many excellent short stories in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series. The film adaptation makes all the right alterations to expand a short piece into a full-length feature film.
Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen, Hot to Trot) is writing a college level paper about urban legends in modern (1992) America. She learns about the Candyman(Tony Todd), who is a male-re-telling of the classic Bloody Mary legend. Any person who speaks “Candyman” five times into a mirror will be murdered by the ghost of Daniel Robitaille, the Candyman. The more Helen learns about the Candyman, the more the people she counts on are taken away from her.
Candyman very subtly turns the rules of tasteful, high-brow horror and pure shock upside down. The result is success where other films start to coagulate into trite pandering. Small children in peril is among the most disgusting horror movie tropes I can name; Candyman succeeds by cleverly depicting events that are grizzly even by slasher movie standards. There is not a bad performance in the film, from the named stars to Gilbert Lewis(perhaps better known as the King of Cartoons in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse).
Only a few troubles arose from bringing a short story to a full feature film. The worst offense is the shared apartment wall through which a grizzly murder was heard. Other, similar noises were apparently muffled by this same structure for weeks on end.
Three movies scared the living hell out of me in the 1990s: four if you count one that was made only a little too soon to count. All of them will be reviewed if this project is completed. Candyman was one of those three.
Weighted score: 9/10.
Go on. Watch it. I dare you. Netflix users can stream it as of this writing.
