Serious, straightforward cinematic terror is hard to come by these days, but this literate shocker is the scariest film since THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and joins BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA as one of the best supernatural movies in years.
A Chicago-based doctoral student named Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), is working on a paper about urban legends. One of the myths she's focusing on concerns a spirit called "Candyman," who supposedly appears before anyone who says his name five times into a mirror--then slaughters them with a hook.
When Helen learns that a murder in the nearby Cabrini Green housing projects has been attributed by the residents to Candyman, she investigates. Local legend has it that Candyman was originally the son of a slave who had won fame as a painter in the 1800s, before an affair with a white woman lead
to his gruesome murder by a white mob. Helen is skeptical, and comes to believe that he's just a bogeyman used by local drug dealers to cover their crimes and keep the residents in line. That is until Candyman himself (Tony Todd) appears before her, angrily intoning that he now must shed innocent
blood to prove his existence.
It's one of the many strengths of CANDYMAN that its story is actually about something. Derived from Clive Barker's short story "The Forbidden," writer-director Bernard Rose turns his gruesome material into a dark meditation on the nature of urban legends. The way the Cabrini Green residents cling
to the myth as a way to rationalize the violence of their daily lives is intriguing, and the film is notable for the way in which it manages to utilize ghetto realities without condescending to its black characters. The acting here is first-rate, with Madsen turning in a forceful performance as
the confused but resilient heroine. And special mention must be made of Philip Glass's superlative score, which combines synthesizers, piano, and chorus to haunting effect. leave a comment
