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Candyman [1992] While preparing a thesis on urban legends, Helen [Virginia Madsen] is drawn to a run-down housing project in the nastier side of Chicago, fascinated both by the bizarre graffiti of the area and the proliferation of folktales that emanate from the place. In her researches, she keeps coming across stories about Candyman, an archetypal hook-handed mass murderer who can apparently be summoned from the beyond if a foolish woman looks into a mirror and repeats his name five times. Digging deeper into other people's misery gets Helen bashed about the face by a gang-leader in a malodorous public toilet, and horrors of a more supernatural nature pile up as a baby is kidnapped, a dog is beheaded and a bystander gutted. Candyman's misdeeds somehow get attributed to the increasingly crazed academic and the monster [Tony Todd] attempts to seduce the woman into joining him in a limbo afterlife. An adaptation of the Books of Blood story 'The Forbidden' [which was set in Liverpool], Candyman is the best film to date made from the fiction of Clive Barker. Rose atones for Chicago Joe and the Showgirl as he returns, with added buckets of blood and a swarm of sinister bees, to the intensely weird mood of his debut, Paperhouse. With its unsettling mood shifts, this does an even better job of twisting Barker's peculiar vision into an actual movie plot than the author himself did in Hellraiser and Nightbreed. Uniquely for a modern horror film, this has grown-up characters with
complicated relationships, an acute grasp of the interface between social
despair and supernatural horror, enough heart-stopping shocks to keep
you battered, and a strong central performance from a non-bimbo heroine.
Madsen, hitherto a regulation glamorous blonde, is a revelation as the
frightened, and finally frightening, protagonist, and her scenes with
the dignified but eerie Todd skirt perversity in a truly haunting manner.
With its odd little asides to fill in the various Candyman stories and
the ambiguous scary-romantic relationship between heroine and monster,
this cuts with a bloody hook through the superficiality of most recent
horror movies and demonstrates that you don't have to be stupid to be
scary. First Published In: The Good Times [issue unknown] Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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