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CANDYMAN
CANDYMAN ... CANDYMAN ... CANDYMAN ... CANDYMAN .... Come on, ... one more time .... ??? Scared? Dare you say his name the 5th time? What happened to those who did call out to the Candyman five times by name? Legend has it that those who called him would summon the spirit of Daniel Robitaille, a gifted artist who fell in love with the daughter of a wealthy landowner in 1890 and then impregnated her. His lover's father vowed revenge and hired a group of thugs to track down Robitaille, cut off his right hand with a rusty blade and then smeared him with honey and let loose a hive of bees which stung him to death and his body was burned, his ashes scattered. The soul of Robitaille returned as as a man with a hooked hand and sought revenge against those who murdered him.
In modern day Chicago a series of grisly unsolved murders of young African American women, whose mutilated bodies were found in a seedy area of a condemned government co-op apartment complex known as the Cabrini-Green, have led to a media frenzy and have kept the police on their toes. Victims had been killed with a hook, their bodies cut open from the stomach up. The modus operandi fit that of the legend of the Candyman. Residents of the housing project live in fear. No one wants to help track down the killer. Except for University of Illinois (Chicago) graduate student Helen Lyle, whose doctoral thesis is the focus on the Chicago killings. When she hears of the Candyman, she and her research assistant Bernadette Walsh interview undergrads and neighbourhood residents as part of her field investigations. But Helen is skeptical. She doesn't believe in the legend and she sets this as her null hypothesis even after visiting a murder site of the latest victim, Ruthie Jean, and talking to the victim's neighbour, Anne-Marie, who claimed to have heard the deadly screams from her apartment that fateful evening while she was caring for her infant son.
Helen's independent research into the legend turns into the beginning of a never-ending nightmare which eventually leads to her death. The Candyman tracks her down and sets her up as the notorious murderer. In each instance, he approaches her while she's situated close to a mirror. He's able to put her into a trance, and when she wakes up, she finds herself at the murder scene, holding the murder weapon. And, of course, the dead body of the chosen victim, one in which Helen is the known acquaintaince, is lying next to her, and then, the police arrive.
Candyman is bent on proving his legend. His ultimate plan is to lure Helen into a pile of garbage where he has hidden Anne-Marie's missing son and where Helen will be discovered and set up as the baby's killer. Up to this point, Helen had been acccused as the kidnapper but the police were unable to find the baby. Helen runs to find the baby when she hears his cries from a distance. She crawls into the garbage pile and in a frenzy, she finds the baby but before she can crawl back out, the lynch mob has arrived and have decided that Helen has been the modern day Candyman and the baby's kidnapper. They pour gasoline on the pile of garbage and set her ablaze. Helen miraculously saves the baby and holds him out to his mother just seconds before she burns to death. At her funeral, she is buried with Candyman's hook.
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Candyman is the screen adaptation the Clive Barker story "The Forbidden". The setting is the Windy City rather than Liverpool, England. Columbia Tri-Star released the film onto DVD format in both wide-screen and full screen presentation and leterboxed at 1.85:1. DVD extras are few and include interactive menus, a theatrical trailer, and a French language track and French-English subtitles. Overall, the image quality is good, but not perfect. There is some fuzziness in the opening sequence but the colours are strong. The soundtrack by Phillip Glass has always been rated very well, and on the DVD, it would have benefitted from an upgrade from its chosen two-channel Dolby Digital to a remix at Dolby Digital 5.1 |