CANDYMAN
A review in the public domain
by The Phantom
(sbb@panix.com)
[A brief note: the somewhat crabby tone of the Phantom's latest review should be attributed more to the fact that it was written during the most recent Presidential debate than to the quality of the film itself; in retrospect, the debate apparently skewed the Phantom's ability to make reasoned -- and above all, brief -- arguments. CANDYMAN is worth about 2 1/2 stars out of 4, and depending on how quickly you read, may in fact take less time to get through than this review. As compensation for this, please feel free to smoke, keep crying babies in the room with you, and leave empty popcorn and soda containers wherever they may fall. Thank you, and enjoy the show.]
The Phantom has long held a theory about horror films, but it was only recently that he got to confirm it. Although he's not subjected this theory to rigorous testing, he nonetheless now feels confident enough to state that to his knowledge the word "thesis" has never appeared in the screenplay for a successful horror film. Actually, let's rephrase that: the word "thesis" has never appeared in the screenplay for a *good* horror film, as it remains to be seen whether or not CANDYMAN will be successful in this unpleasant season of sub-par horror.
It is with some trepidation that the Phantom has returned to the reviewing scene; having seen both HELLRAISER III and INNOCENT BLOOD, it occurred to the Phantom that modern horror has now gotten so far off-track; so misguided; and so poorly executed that his services were perhaps no longer necessary -- that at this point the best he can hope to do is to act as something of a morning traffic report for this fall's horrible horror films. Perhaps all he can be expected to do now is point out the apparently never ending series of cinematic traffic jams and roadside wrecks to phans who are more than likely already in their cars and pounding their dashboards in frustration. Like the morning rush, bad cinematic horror is with us always; yet somehow we're always aggrieved and surprised whenever we come face to face with it.
After all, it's one thing if we're treated to one good horror film out of every three or four; it's another if we find ourselves buried in cynical, misguided dreck, powerless to stop its production and release, and yet helpless in our fervent hopes that *this* time things will be different -- that *this* time John Landis or the vaunted Clive Barker won't let us down, even though he has now more often than his ubiquitous press clippings would have us believe.
In fact, although Barker has now lent his name and dubious executive producing talent to a half dozen different horror films, he has actually directed only one and a half. The half is of course HELLRAISER, the film that guaranteed him future directing offers even though the film itself was more or less taken away from him and given to Tony Randel to complete. (Randel also directed Barker's second film, HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II and showed the same sure touch there that he did in the first installment.) Barker's only complete effort, NIGHTBREED, had the look of a good horror film; its plot was taken from one of Barker's better stories, the novella "Cabal"; it even had the benefit of David Cronenberg's quite disturbing performance as the psychiatrist Decker, and his alter ego, The Mask. Yet the film itself was something of a mess -- something that pleased neither those who read the novella nor those who didn't, disappointing the former and leaving the latter in a DUNE-like dark. Here, as with the visually stunning HELLRAISER, Barker seemed much better introducing new ideas and creating visually compelling tableaus than he was at the nuts-and-bolts execution that any good horror film requires.
And HELLRAISER III? It's a movie that was quite obviously made just to rake in as much money as possible from gullible horror fans; beyond a few good special effects, there's virtually nothing of interest in this installment of the HELLRAISER series. (In fact, the high point of the film for the Phantom came early on, when he got a free package of Honey Gold Wheaties to try, just for buying a ticket. Sadly, the cereal in the package had a lot more snap crackle and pop than did the serial on the screen.) This is all quite an achievement, for Barker and friends have in just two sequels managed to do what the folks at New Line Cinema took four to do with the ELM STREET series: run it completely into the ground.
All of which brings us to CANDYMAN, yet another film based on a Clive Barker short story, and one for which Barker served only as executive producer (Hollywood-ese for "the man who gets paid or the film don't get made".) Although far from a successful horror film, CANDYMAN is at least technically very well made; competently acted and directed; at times visually compelling; and frequently quite scary. Yet for the Phantom, it just didn't seem very *good*.
Let's explore this for a moment, keeping in mind the Phantom's theory about the word "thesis", and going back to the short story on which CANDYMAN was based, "The Forbidden". Briefly, Barker's original story was based on the idea that an isolated community that exists outside the realm of "civilized" society might not only develop legends about a fearsome boogeyman -- a phantom killer who dispatches his victims in gruesome ways and is as capricious as he is vicious -- but that it would actively work to keep the legend alive -- and very real. Barker's execution of this idea is quite compelling, because he takes you quickly from outside this closed community into its heart, where you discover a secret that at first doesn't seem to make any sense. Why would a community live with this horror? Do they even have a choice? Do they *want* to? Interesting, and certainly the stuff of which great short stories are made.
We've seen hints of this on the screen before: consider, say, the beginning of John Landis' classic AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, where you stumble into a community that's hiding some strange secret, something that outsiders don't understand. The community is afraid of the werewolves all right; yet they don't actively seek them out and hunt them down. Instead, they live with the terror of knowing that whoever may stray onto the moors late at night might well become the next victim (or perhaps become himself another werewolf). One of the things that makes tales of werewolves so compelling is the fact that by definition werewolves are part of a community, at least for 29 days out of every month -- it's just during the full moon that they find themselves preying on their neighbors. In much the same way, Candyman has been part of the community on which he preys for so long that to kill him would be to change the very nature of the community itself. Isn't it worth living with a little horror if it means we can remain comfortably in the realm of the known? If it means that we can keep alive something that makes our isolated and shunned community special? For such a slippery and tricky topic, Barker managed a tour de force, both frightening and thought-provoking; it's no accident that tales like "The Forbidden" made his well-deserved reputation as a master story-teller.
Of course, like many great short stories, this one is good partly because it's *short*. That is, the idea is sufficient to hold us spellbound for thirty or forty pages, but if it were padded out beyond that, things would start to break down and the story would start straying to less compelling or original ideas. Hence, Landis gave us a taste of what it means for a werewolf to be part of a community but then quickly moved on to the main focus of the film. Barker kept "The Forbidden" very brief -- you're plunged into the community very quickly; you discover Candyman's secret alter and why "Sweets for the sweet" is written all over the place; finally, you meet Candyman and die with the heroine and the baby she finds left for him as a sacrifice. End of story.
Could something like this translate well to the screen? The Phantom thinks that only a genius of the form could have carried it off; perhaps John Carpenter in his better days, or Frank Henenlotter if someone could convince him to stay away from that ever-tempting latex. But none of the people responsible for CANDYMAN -- either singly or together -- have the talent to do this successfully, which means that right from the start a lot of compromises have to be made. Now, compromises in and of themselves are not necessarily bad, as long as everyone agrees that they're no longer going to be filming a strict adaptation of original story. Carpenter's version of THE THING is a testament to what a little creative re-writing can do for a film; CANDYMAN, alas, is not.
What does all this have to do with having the word "thesis" in a horror film? Simply that from the very beginning, the screenplay for CANDYMAN wanders wide afield of what should be its primary focus and spends most of two hours going this way and that, never quite sure of its intentions even until the very end. (Or perhaps especially at the very end, which must be one of the most blatant cop-out endings in the history of the horror film -- worse even in some ways than the ever-reincarnating Freddy and Jason, since it's difficult to get upset with films that we hold in so little esteem to begin with.)
Instead of putting us right in the community and letting us experience Candyman first hand with the people who are living their lives with him, the filmmakers focus on a doctoral candidate working on her thesis: that the people in a housing project on Chicago's South Side would start to blame a mythical boogeyman for some of the gruesome murders that occur there with alarming frequency. (In the short story, Barker uses a similar device to get the protagonist into the community, but there she goes to study graffiti as a form of youthful expression and only stumbles onto the legend by accident.) But this doesn't really make any sense, does it? The people living in urban ghettos live with unspeakable violence and murder every day, and they know exactly who is responsible -- for people who must take care leaving their homes not just during a full moon but at any time of any day, a boogeyman who kills some poor soul with a meat hook once in a blue moon would be the very least of their worries.
Too, the legend is distorted to fit HELLRAISER-like sensibilities: instead of being an unknowable and capricious god, Candyman becomes a lot like Pinhead -- look into a mirror and say his name five times and he'll appear. But given that all Candyman will do is kill you, why on earth would anyone do this? At least Pinhead promised you a lifetime of pleasure/pain if you solved his puzzle box and thereby called him forth from the depths of hell (though this idea was all but discarded by the time HELLRAISER III was cranked out). Wasn't the idea supposed to be that Candyman was a horrible monster, perhaps real, perhaps legend, who killed the poor folks in the ghetto whenever the spirit moved him?
As if this weren't confusing enough, apparently someone saw and enjoyed THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and thought that having a spunky investigator go after a mysterious serial killer would be just the ticket, especially if both investigator and serial killer form some sort of relationship.
But how on earth does any of this fit with the original story's driving idea? As it happens, not very well at all, and the result is a well-filmed, competently made mish-mash of excessive exposition, senseless "spring-loaded cat" stunners for an audience growing restless with the essential rootlessness of the screenplay, and the sense that the rewriting continued long after the cameras started rolling.
So instead of using the heroine as a way to keep the focus of the film squarely on Candyman himself -- a technique used to perfection in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS -- we get involved in her marital difficulties and in her quest for a thesis topic; then the film shifts still further away from Candyman as more and more of the plot concerns itself with her, even though the Phantom doesn't remember seeing her name above the shadowy figure in the film's print ads. Meanwhile, what happened to those people in the projects? Candyman is at least ostensibly part of their community, but that's true only for the first half of the film; by the time the terribly contrived ending finally rolls around, they've been reduced to stoic-looking bystanders.
As if to help keep the film on track, the filmmakers load it with scene after scene of exposition. We're even plunked into the middle of a lecture on "modern oral history", presumably just in case we don't know what a legend is. Does anyone remember a lecture on the clinical definition of "sociopath" in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS? Were we the poorer for its lack? Or was Demme able to *show* us what a sociopath is, to put us right in a cell with one and let us feel a little of what Clarice Starling must have been feeling during her interviews with Lector. This is, after all, what people go to the movies for -- if we wanted a narrative, we'd read Barker's short story. (Not that this is an either/or situation, but movies are a primarily visual medium -- filmmakers ignore this at their peril.)
By its end, the filmmakers have turned CANDYMAN nearly into an ELM STREET sequel, except without the playful sense of fun. Why does Candyman *talk* to this poor woman -- and by extension, to us -- so much? The result is that we're always once-removed from the horror; we're always watching him kill someone else. That's scary, sure, just like have a cat jump straight at the screen is scary. (The Phantom coined the term "spring-loaded cat" after seeing ALIEN and noting one of Ridley Scott's favorite scare tactics.) Yet for all the false scares in ALIEN, it remains a consummate horror film because Scott lets us experience the horror *first hand*. The alien comes right at us throughout the last half the film -- we're not just sitting around waiting for it to show up, kill someone else, and put a knife in our hand in an attempt to add yet one more twist to an already over-complicated plot.
Get the sense that the Phantom was somewhat disappointed with CANDYMAN? Well, yes, but let's qualify that a little. First, the film is anything but the usual run-of-the-mill dreck that these days passes for modern horror. It's also head and shoulders above both of its immediate predecessors, INNOCENT BLOOD and HELLRAISER III, each of which was so misguided and poorly made as to be nearly unwatchable. Instead, CANDYMAN is a good, solid horror film that just didn't click as often as the Phantom wished it had; because it was, in a strictly technical sense, so good, the Phantom's disappointment that it didn't deliver on its promise was all the greater.
In fact, one of its greatest flaws is that it introduces and then neglects more good ideas than we're likely to see in the next dozen horror films. Among them, the way the filmmakers flirted with some of our most primal fears about mirrors and walls was both exciting and disturbing, at least as far as it went. Mirrors have always featured prominently in tales of horror, but rarely are they featured as plot elements in horror films (with the notable exception of THE BOOGEYMAN, a HALLOWEEN clone that was nearly as good as the film to which it paid homage). And the notion that the very walls which provide us with a feeling of invulnerability and safety might harbor terrors of their own is a very compelling one; alas, it is dispensed with almost as soon as it's introduced.
Ah well. On balance, you won't go too far wrong in seeing CANDYMAN; but don't expect either a faithful rendition of Barker's remarkable short story or even a film that operates on a level higher than the easy scare -- to the Phantom, CANDYMAN seemed a ghost story without a payoff. (Need to know if a horror film is overly complicated or lacks focus? Here's a good test: try to relate the film's plot -- that is, explain the film -- to someone, campfire optional. If you find it the least bit difficult, chances are the screenplay either got worked on too little or much too much.) In the Phantom's opinion, we need more filmmakers willing to at least attempt to create a subjective and personal horror experience for their audience, rather than bombard them with shocks, gore and excessive exposition in an attempt to cover over the flaws in their screenplays.
(Or perhaps this means that good writing is just as important in the cinema as it is on the page, that special effects and spring-loaded cats can't substitute for intelligent, well-considered terror. If nothing else, CANDYMAN is an example of a horror film that is far better directed than it was written.)
To close, it is the Phantom's fervent hope that this review has given you something to think about as we approach the season of ghosts and witches, even if it has left you no better informed or prepared to make a decision than did those brief glimpses of nationally televised hell, the Presidential debates. Where oh where was Pinhead, Candyman, Freddy and Jason when we really needed them?
: The Phantom : sbb@panix.com : cmcl2!panix!sbb
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