Candyman:
A young woman, Helen Lyle, a Chicago college graduate student is researching urban myths, and comes across the legend of "Candyman". A young black artist in the late 1800s who was mutilated and burned for sleeping with the beautiful daughter of his employeer. He was then smeared with honey and stung to death by bees. She finds many people have been brutally murdered when saying Candyman's name five times in the mirror (similar to Bloody Mary). She begins to find that this Candyman character may be more than legend, and begins to fall under his strange, psychic spell. The cast are brilliant. Virginia Mardsen gives a fantastic performance as Helen. As with most of Barker's work, he doesn't write the typical horror girl. She's very intelligent, cunning, and skeptical. She is not bubbly in the slightest. She plays her role cold and straight, so ti makes it more shocking when she becomes terrified of Candyman. Tony Todd (a man smoother than silk) gives a truly strange and haunting performance as Candyman. His appearance is grotesque, with a rotten chest ful of live bees, a hook lodged in a stub that used to be his hand, and charred coat. He looks like a pimp from hell, which may sound funny, but he's definitely not. He has this hypnotic feel around him, as his scenes play out slow and tedious, and Helen falls into a strange, psychadelic trance when around him. The things he does, and thins he is rumored to do are truly heinous and nasty, from murdering a babysitter and a young infant, to brutally mutilating a young boy in a bathroom, to slaughtering a dog via decapitation, Candyman is a brutal killer. As with Barker's other work, you don't watch Candyman like Freddy, where you watch to laugh, you watch to be disgusted and mind-fucked. His presence is terrifying and truly complex, like a Rubik's Cube, he's not impossible, but very dificult to figure out. Xander Berkely plays Trevor, Helen's teacher and boyfriend, who dumps her when she becomes obsessed with Candyman. He's an asshole, and you want Candyman to cut his ass up. Vanessa Williams plays Anne-Marie McCoy, a single mother, ex-drug addict, living in the slum project of Cabrini-Green (a real place). Cabrini-Green also happens to be the home of Candyman's creepy lair. DeJuan Guy plays Jake, a poor, local boy of Chicago who knows about Candyman, and assists Helen in her investigation fo Candyman, telling her the story of a possibly retarded child being brutally assaulted by Candyman in a bathroom. The special effects are great. Candyman's appearance took hours of prosthetic make-up. My favorite moment is at the end, when Candyman lets bees swarm in his mouth and into Helen's. Today, it would be done using CG, but they actually stuck bees into Todd's mouth, and into Mardsens'. Unforuntally, Ms. Mardsen was allergic, luckily, Mr. Todd was not. The horror elements make the film terrifying, and like Hellraiser,
the atmosphere and world in which the characters exist is truly strange and alien. We barely see the outside world, and when we do, it has this oura of surrealism about it that makes the film even scarier. The music by Philip Glass is truly creepy and strange, and Bernard Rose's direction is brilliant. The camerawork is impressive. Barker's short story "The Forbidden" is adapted well by Rose, who wrote the film as well. Candyman is not a fun horror film, it is a dark, disturbing, surreal, and haunting film that should not be taken as a popcorn horror film like Scream or Friday the 13th, and should be taken very seriously. 4/5 stars,
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