DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
Bernard
Rose
based
on the story "The Forbidden" by
Clive
Barker
PRODUCERS
Steve Golin
Alan Poul
Sigurjon Sighvatsson
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Anthony B. Richmond
MUSIC
Philip Glass
EDITOR
Dan Rae
CAST
Virginia Madsen (Helen Lyle)
Tony Todd (The Candyman)
Xander Berkeley (Trevor Lyle)
Kasi Lemmons (Bernadette Walsh)
Vanessa Williams (Anne-Marie McCoy)
Ted Raimi (Billy)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 99m
U.S. release: October 16, 1992
Video availability: VHS - DVD
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Candyman, which has gotten applause from some
members of the horror press, may become the next Nightmare
on Elm Street (I saw it with a loud, very appreciative audience).
Based loosely on one of Clive Barker's weaker stories ("The
Forbidden," in his In the Flesh collection), Candyman
has an alluring premise: Urban myths, such as the old tale about
alligators in the sewers, may be true. Not only that, they may
be religions -- paranoid belief systems in which malevolent,
godlike creatures punish those who dare to doubt the legend.
Yet, as intriguing as this may sound, it's still just
standard slasher-movie stuff at heart. We all know from a hundred
bad films that the guy who jokes about the axe murderer "who
was never caught" will be the first to get chopped. Same
thing here. Candyman reheats old material and serves it
as if it were bold and original, and people will probably eat
it up.
Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), a grad student at the University
of Illinois, is working on a doctoral thesis about urban folklore.
Conducting interviews in the barren Cabrini Green projects in
Chicago, Helen keeps hearing about Candyman (Tony Todd, from
the 1990 Night of the Living Dead remake), a mysterious
figure with a hook for a right hand. Whenever someone looks into
a mirror and says "Candyman" five times, Candyman appears,
butchers everyone within reach, and vanishes. Helen, of course,
doesn't take the myth seriously and goes right ahead and says
"Candyman" five times into a mirror. Soon, the killer
comes knockin'. And he's definitely coming in.*
As conceived by Barker, Candyman is an urban spin-off of "The
Hook," a rural horror story told around campfires (Bill
Murray used it to scare campers in Meatballs, and Stephen
King refers to it often in his work on horror Danse Macabre).
Barker set his original story in a London slum and described
Candyman as having "waxy yellow skin." In the movie,
both Candyman and the project dwellers he terrorizes are black.
In his past life, in 1890, Candyman was an artist who had an
affair with his white model, and was mutilated and killed for
it. Now he's a shadowy ghoul, a tale told to frighten children.
When Helen starts investigating a series of murders in the projects
(which the locals attribute to Candyman whether he committed
them or not), Candyman becomes obsessed with her. He wants to
make her his eternal partner in pain.
Presumably, writer-director Bernard Rose decided to relocate
Barker's story and include the racial angle because he wanted
to make the plot more socially relevant. (A more cynical reading
might be that he wanted to make a horror movie that would cross
over to the mostly untapped, potentially lucrative black audience,
since the horror genre tends to be lily-white.) The film, however,
comes uncomfortably close to presenting Candyman as a figure
of dangerous black sexuality. A hulking black man menacing a
blond white woman: is there a more primitive racist image? Rose
seems to sense this, and he backs off, concentrating instead
on metaphysics. Candyman, it turns out, is a vengeful patriarchal
god who wants what was taken from him in life (hence his preoccupation
with Helen) and wants to eliminate all doubters so that his "congregation"
of followers won't reject him (hence his vicious treatment of
Helen). Still, the hot-button imagery at Candyman's center
evokes mixed feelings that Rose doesn't quite know what to do
with.
Rose, who has directed two little-seen features (Paperhouse,
Chicago Joe and the Showgirl) and a few videos (UB40's
"Red Red Wine," Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax"),
gives Candyman a brooding dreaminess and some striking
visuals. (Unfortunately, he glazes those visuals with a droning
score by Philip Glass, Mr. Repetition himself, who would seem
to be above a multiplex horror movie for teenagers.) From the
interviews he's given, I gather that Rose thinks Candyman
transcends the horror genre. If so, why does he throw in so many
clichés? (Maybe he hasn't seen many movies from the genre
he thinks he's transcending, and so he isn't aware he's doing
a lot of stuff that's been done to death.) At night, in Helen's
bedroom, a figure pounces on her for no reason except to make
the audience jump -- the time-honored False Boo. Helen keeps
wandering into dark, claustrophobic spaces, and that's good for
some more audience squirming (get the hell out of there, you
asshole!). Candyman murders people and leaves Helen to take
the blame, a cause she helps by unfailingly picking up the murder
instrument every time, so that the police can burst in and catch
her with (A) a bloody corpse and (B) a bloody knife. Helen must
be the stupidest grad student who ever walked. And I disliked
the way Rose keeps us edgy by placing an infant in danger for
half the movie -- the device is so shameless that even the lowest
hacks don't stoop to it any more. (Wasn't it bad enough that
William Friedkin, in The Guardian, gave us an evil Druid
nanny who wanted to sacrifice a baby to a tree?)
Candyman himself, a stolid villain with almost no emotional shading,
is the film's biggest problem. He's supposed to be in love with
Helen, but why her? (It's convenient that the grad student
who goes poking around his turf happens to reflect his lost love.)
And are we expected to sympathize with his plight? The man
rips open innocent people. The background on this killer
could be a lot clearer: If you blink, you miss the reason he's
called Candyman. Bernard Rose isn't the usual Friday the 13th/Child's
Play bozo; he has talent. But he mistakes murky characterization
and plotting for artistic ambiguity, and however much he wants
to tell himself he hasn't made a mere slasher movie, that is
pretty much what he's made -- and at least the old slasher movies
were honestly cheesy and didn't hide behind metaphysical guff
and Philip Glass. Rose might have been better off making a movie
about alligators in the sewers.
* The readership of a campus paper in
1992 would have been likely to get this reference, which is to
Denis Leary's MTV spots ("I think you hear me knockin' and
I'm definitely coming in"). Present-day or, dare I say it,
future readers might not get it; hence the footnote. Gee, I always
wanted to be annotated...
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