REVIEW: Candyman [2021]

He found me. Despite its earned cult classic status, Bernard Rose‘s Candyman isn’t without fault. His decision to move Clive Barker‘s short story “The Forbidden” from a British neighborhood to Chicago’s Cabrini–Green projects to deal with the racial divide as well as the economical one in the text was as inspired as casting Tony Todd for his titular bee-infested boogeyman running on the fuel of a hive mind’s fear. Yet he still centered it all on a white savior’s shoulders in Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen). Rose flirts with the complexity…

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REVIEW: Candyman [1992]

Sweets to the sweet. An urban legend ghost such as Candyman (Tony Todd) doesn’t care about anyone besides those willing to keep his memory alive. His purpose in death is to be remembered through blood—turning his heinous fate from the late nineteenth century into a curse that haunts others into being too scared to naively follow in his own footsteps where it comes to the belief that someone who looks like him can escape the prejudice that targets the color of his skin. So when Chicago grad students Helen Lyle…

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