10/7: Candyman

I'm a day behind, camping'll do that to ya. Horror movie from yesterday:

Today's flick was 1992s Candyman. Based on a Clive Barker short story, Candyman looks at the nature of folklore in the form of a hook-handed, sauve-ly dressed stalker of a Chicago housing project. 

You so fly, Candyman.

Two students writing their thesis on folklore begin researching the Candyman, who legend says appears when you say his name into a mirror five times, Bloody Mary-style. This legend seems to be centered around the notoriously dangerous Cabrini-Green housing project where the mostly poor black residents fear the Candyman as a sort of boogeyman plaguing their lives. The students, of course, don't believe it, and test fate by speaking Candyman's name into a mirror. He is unleashed (or at least the argument could me made that he is), and people be getting murdered up in here. One of the students is conveniently always at the scene of the crime and is blamed for the murders, with the viewer wondering if she is indeed the killer of if Candyman and his hook hand are to blame. 

Honestly, this movie is a step above most of the slashers like it. It has something important to say about race, with a literal black bogeyman taking the white damsel in distress. When she is blamed for the murders, she experiences what it is like to live the life of the community she (fairly disrespectfully) was researching; always suspected, and blamed, of wrongdoing. It's interesting to see a horror movie about a man with a hook for a hand handle something so complex and actually relevant to our modern day world.

Unfortunately, this film suffers from the 90s syndrome: good ideas are drug into camp territory. A serious subject that could have been handled maturely falls to 90s pitfalls like an oppressive, ultimately irritating soundtrack, overacting, and not enough explanation for pretty much anything. I would absolutely love to see this movie remade today, with a more modern sensibility for movie making and thus be more successful in realizing its vision (I read somewhere that Jordan Peele has expressed interest in remaking it, which would be freaking sweet). Really,  I liken this movie to It. The original made for TV movie, despite featuring the unbelievable Tim Curry, was so schlocky that it doesn't hold up in the least.  The remake, however, fixes all the pitfalls of the era in which the original was made. It's made for the modern eye and thus ends up being a far more successful expression of the original concept. 

Candyman: a flawed collection of creative and original ideas. 

7/10