Harefooted Halloween: Candyman

What I Liked: This is a unique horror tale of a demon ghost killing people but pinning it on a regular living person.  That’s kinda mean but hey, it’s an evil spirit after all.

Virginia Madsen (Sideways) as Helen Lyle gives a good performance as a driven post graduate student working on her thesis about urban legends.  Madsen feels very natural in the role.  She’s great at being serious and disciplined with her paper and then completely freaking out when the Candyman starts fucking with her.  It would’ve been easy to fall into the scream queen routine but instead she remains a strong character resisting the Candyman with all her power.  And it’s a shame the Candyman picks her as his long term victim (as opposed to the others he knocks off immediately) because she’s not a bad person or has a heinous past or anything.  So the hell she’s put through seems undeserved and extra terrible as a result.

Tony Todd (The Crow) is fantastically menacing yet suave as the titular character.  He has such presence to begin with but when you throw in a cumbersome fur trimmed coat, an ascot and a big ass hook for a hand he becomes elegantly creepy.  There’s a sense this guy enjoys being the Candyman too which is weird considering that wasn’t his goal before he died.  In 1890 he was going out with a white woman and got her pregnant which some other folks didn’t like so they sawed off his hand, smeared him with honey and let bees sting him to death.  He gets revenge on everyone now though, not just white people.

The opening music piece over the credits is cool.  Philip Glass did the score and made it sound huge by using gothic themes and adding a chorus.  I’m not a fan of the whole thing but I like that first song.

What I Didn’t Like: The story meanders.  We don’t move towards a goal or work on solving a problem exactly.  I mean the Candyman gives Helen an ultimatum to join him or he’ll kill a baby that he’s kidnapped but this conflict is more in the background.  The Candyman’s motives need to be clearer and the plot should be a little more focused.

Similarly, we don’t know the rules of the Candyman.  He’s a demon that only certain people can see sometimes but he can murder anyone indiscriminately.  Even the method of conjuring him up by saying his name in front of a mirror five times is janky.  Most of the time he shows but one time he doesn’t and other times he appears when nothing is said.  I don’t get it.

Overall Impressions: This one’s just ok.  I appreciate the attempt to take what would otherwise be a typical slasher character and picture and change it up to be more indistinct and psychological.  The Candyman is definitely committing the crimes here but I can see an argument that Helen has done it all and is completely insane.  If this aspect had been played more ambiguous you could’ve had a very interesting little movie.  That would’ve been much more difficult to pull off though.

When I found out this was based on a Clive Barker short story called “The Forbidden” (he also gets a producer credit) it suddenly made sense.  He likes to come up with offbeat horror stories which range in success.  This one involves a commentary on class and race.  One way to look at it is poor people are invisible.  A supernatural killer is wiping out the destitute and no one cares.  If you take the view that Helen is the real killer then you could say that wealthy white people are oppressing and murdering poor people of color.  Or the Candyman could represent racism itself where he’s an omnipresent force that literally tears communities apart.

Of course a few out there are gonna say it’s about black men terrorizing white women through the years.  I don’t buy this message though because the guy isn’t selective in who he kills in terms of race or gender.  Plus Barker’s original story was about a demon of uncertain race stalking victims in Liverpool.  In that version he was going for a class angle and not a race one.

Personally I like to think of the Candyman as an iconic slasher villain, one who aims for poise but is also a monster lashing out at the world because he was an innocent man who was mutilated and tortured to death.  I’m sure there’s symbolism and everything there but that’s strong enough for me.