Candyman
IT MAY be 30-years-old, but Candyman has lost little of its power to chill in the passing decades.
Writer and director Bernard Rose's 1992 film version of esteemed fantasy author Clive Barker's short story The Forbidden is a dark and nasty slice of modern horror that taps into the world of urban legends to make something creepy, claustrophobic and genuinely unnerving.
Watching the new Blu-ray release from Shout Factory confirms both how smart Rose's inventive spin on the story actually was and how malevolently strange and other worldly Barker's source material really is.
In a brave but successful move, Rose shifts the setting from London to Chicago – but the simple tale of two young friends who are doing their university thesis on urban legends remains much the same.
While digging deep into local legend, Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) and Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons) uncover the tale of Candyman, a murderous figure who appears when you say his name five times into a mirror.
Locals say Candyman (Tony Todd) appeared to commit a couple of gruesome murders on the north side of the city a few years back and the two women are keen to see if they can summon his evil presence once again.
Making their way to the housing project where the murders took place, they track down a young single mother called Anne-Marie McCoy (Vanessa Williams) who tells them all she knows. Soon, Helen is having gruesome and terrifying nightmares where she wakes up with a pool of blood and corpses lying at her feet. She swiftly comes to the conclusion that her investigations may have unleashed the evil doer to murder freely once again.
As unsettling as Barker's fairly slim original concept was, Rose's film opens out the possibilities of the story to include contemporary issues such as race relations and urban poverty and explores how fear and evil grows in places left to rot by affluent society. The grim and grey setting adds considerably to the mood of menace that hangs over just about every film frame here.
The big screen Candyman also gives a back story to the bogeyman at the core of the horror, which means we get to go deeper and darker here than the pages of a short story could ever hope to take us – though Clive Barker was executive producer, which ensures the eerie spirit of the original lives on in the oppressive vibe that seeps through every sequence.
Madsen is excellent as the intelligent and independent woman at the centre of the tale and Todd is terrific as the deep voiced urban legend who might just put you off mirrors for life. Rose paces the whole thing perfectly and the quasi-religious score from Philip Glass is sinister throughout.
This new release presents the film in both its UK and USA cuts and adds all manner of bonus features to the mix, including a brace of commentary tracks and some impressive featurettes on the Candyman mythology.
Such attention to detail makes this edition the definitive repackaging of a fine film that still delivers the ghoulish goods despite the passing years.
