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Candyman (1992)

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In Clive Barker-based movies, the monster’s a tragic/haunted Morpheus who sometimes has to kill or haunt dreams or torture or whatever to get their point across to some Keanu. These Morpheus characters in Barker are glum, professional, and pleasureless, but love to feel seen and understood. Barker movie plots often bracket the story to just this: Keanu’s disbelief/fear/curiosity eventually giving way to Morpheus’s red pill.

How this works is super consistent on a staging level. Here’s a Keanu inside the Matrix, surrounded by regular people doing normal stuff, and dear god is it boring, drab, and filled with petty behavior. Wouldn’t it be great if there were some more vivid world hidden behind it, where a Keanu can have a true purpose? Keanus are always in luck, because the Matrix always has a sketchy hinterland (a cemetery in Nightbreed (The Cabal Cut) (1990); a locked attic room in Hellraiser (1987); an abandoned subway line in The Midnight Meat Train (2008); a graffiti-crushed housing project’s hidden room in Candyman), which is always inhabited by or leads to some kind of Morpheus (the Nightbreed; Pinhead; Mahogany; Candyman), who always eventually reveals a Keanu’s real place within the super-reality. Sometimes the super-reality is better, other times worse, but Keanu always ends up joining Morpheus in it, not defeating him; that’s never Keanu’s job.

Candyman is a pretty drunk rendition of all of this stuff. The super-reality its Keanu gets drawn into is one of cyclical fated reincarnation, that feeds on fear, sacrifice, and vengeance… or something. Candyman is a slave’s son, who invented a way to make shoes, and was a popular painter, but he got into an interracial marriage, and had his painting hand cut off by racists, who replaced it with a hook, and then covered him with honey, so he got stung to death by bees, and then the racists burned him, and because it was on the site of this housing project, he haunts it to this day… I guess. The editing and plotting are exactly this confusing too, and the middle “psychological thriller” portion where the Keanu is killing people (“but is it actually Candyman?”) is totally unconvincing; we know the Matrix is never “maybe just in Keanu’s head,” that it’s for sure definitely Candyman.

So what else do we get, other than some awkwardly-handled race stuff, a harsh 90s-exploitation rendition of “a housing project” and “poverty,” and some very arbitrary ghost rules around who gets comeuppance and when? A few great, bizarre images, and a gothic “obsessed love”/”burn the world” vibe not unlike Wuthering Heights (1992). Conceptually Candyman has nothing on Hellraiser – the mysterious alien presence of the cenobytes and the contours of an extra-dimensional realm of unknowable pleasure and pain are just way more fun to think about to me than the harsh, bleakly regular stuff here – but Candyman somehow manages to be more engrossing to actually watch. Maybe check back in on The Matrix (1999) first, and pair it with as many other Barker movies as you can handle – to me their effect is strongest and most interesting when they’re considered in aggregate, as instances of a platonic “Barker movie” form. Or for maximum flavor just check out Nightbreed (The Cabal Cut) and move on.

I don’t really believe in spoilers for a 27 year old film but this review goes well beyond vague plot points. If this is scary to you, the short review of Candyman is check it out, it’s great.  

Candyman is about a white grad student named Helen who summons a ghost by saying his name five times while looking in the mirror.  Candyman is the spirit she summons, a black man from 1890 who was killed by a white mob for fathering a child with a white woman. He’s full of bees and has a hook for a hand and lives in an abandoned room in the Cabrini-Green projects. This room can only be accessed by climbing through the bathroom mirror in a layout that mirrors Helens apartment that was a housing project that’s been turned into upscale condos.  Candyman steals a black baby, kill her middle class black friend, and gets her locked up in a mental asylum telling Helen that if she ‘believes in him’ that it’ll all end.  The movie ends with her crawling through a burning mound of garbage made by the residents of Cabrini Green with the stolen baby in her arms, saving the baby but dying in the process.  Horror movies from the late 80s early 90s tended to be unique if they had even a hint of intentional subtext but Candyman bucks the trend and has actual text out the wazoo.

Admittedly, this is pretty dicey territory for two white dudes from across the pond to take on.  The original Clive Barker story is set in Liverpool and is about class, a more quintessentially British preoccupation.  As much as I would have loved to see Candyman navigate a classic Upstairs Downstairs type of situation, moving it to the Chicago projects raises a lot of questions about who gets to tell these stories. While Candyman is told from a white perspective and would have benefited from an African American writer and director (something which we’ll get in the upcoming Jordan Peele produced remake/sequel) this movie by no means enters Dances With Wolves territory, and can be chalked up to people doing the best that they could with the resources they had at the time (i.e. a studio system that would balk at financing black films).

The movie can be read as a story about how we can make communities invisible or abstract  when the idea that they’re made of people becomes inconvenient. While Helen is wandering willy nilly through Cabrini-Green, something she is able to do because she pretends to be a cop, she doesn’t seem super interested in the conditions of the building or the people living in them.  That a woman was brutally murdered in the room she’s investigating is a distant concern compared to the idea that it maybe has a connection to an urban legend and would make good fodder for her grad school thesis. The baby Helen saves in the end? It was her fault Candyman stole it in the first place and when she dies it reads more as penance for her creating the problem than the heroic act of a white savior.  Honestly there’s a train of thought I could follow that the ending is arguing for reparations. If this seems a little wild for a film that also features a toilet full of bees, let’s just say there’s a lot here to chew on and many different ways the bite can break down. If you’re looking something cerebral that works on multiple levels that’s also a straight-up horror classic then check it out.

Tommy Tricker & The Stamp Traveller (1988)

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Tommy Tricker is a children’s film about a society ordered on the basis of stamp collecting.  This is a world where all ages can identify a rare stamp on sight, and where everyone is constantly grifting and wheedling to get ahead to improve their collection.  Tommy Tricker is a young scam artist who excels in ripping people off by using stamps. The movie spends a lot of time building up Tommy Tricker’s character, only to pull a real switcheroo and have the actual lead character be some kid named Ralph who gets into black stamp magic and is granted the power to get animated, shrink down, and travel on a stamp. This takes him to both China, and more notably Australia, which has funnier stereotypes.

Though there are plenty of wild, inexplicable moments, these are pretty well-balanced with a lot of grind, where you’re watching the movie manage its pieces in a fairly normal way while you’re waiting for the good stuff.  While there is a specific type of thrill when you realize for instance that Ralph’s parents don’t seem to know or care that he has been missing for weeks, followed by Ralph’s father’s blood-curdling scream when he suddenly appears in front of them, I found sadly that these moments were eclipsed by the grind getting to them.

I definitely don’t believe that good art necessarily has be connected to how well it achieves its intentions.  We have plenty of master classes in greatness achieved by creating a desired effect, but the rarer and potentially more powerful finds are the movies where you’re called on to create a “house effect” of your own, transforming a bunch of ill-considered choices into a meaningful and enjoyable experience.  Tommy Tricker toes the line into this kind of experience, but unfortunately the movie’s ability to coast by as a just-good-enough children’s film handicaps it. This innate understanding of a simple form keeps it from getting to the heights of a Roar, or The Room, or one of Neil Breen’s films, etc., movies where the allegiance of their intentions can have more in common with a reflex test at the doctor’s than a carefully-made plan.

There are some very inspired moments. The depth of attention Tommy Tricker pays to stamp collecting is bonkers, and everything in Australia is great, and the film operates on a different level – a highlight here is when a character “driven mad by having all of his zoo animals poisoned” chains Tommy Tricker to a didgeridoo in a pen with a bunch of “lying kangaroos.” On the whole though, I feel like this one is strictly for the curiosity heads. The movie’s director made another film called The Peanut Butter Solution, which while i think has some of the same problems as this one, I’d recommend more as it has a deeper, wilder undercurrent that comes from subbing out stamp collecting for prepubescent body horror. While there can be transcendence in ignorance of form and quality, this film as a whole reminded me of watching a meandering improv set, one that has moments of brilliance and a strangely singular tone, but is ultimately buried under a cloud of directionless noodling.

Rock Demers produced 22 movies in the “Tales for All” series between 1984 and 2004. I’ve seen “Tales for All” #2, Michael Rubbo’s The Peanut Butter Solution (1985), maybe ten times and I absolutely recommend it. It’s a character caper with seriously convoluted plotting, endless, strange non-sequiturs, and a visual humor that casually edges as readily into the slapstick as the nightmarish; its “fully-realized but completely mysterious world”-mode connects it to everything from The Room (2003), to Nightbreed (1990), to Peewee Herman, to Paper Rad. The most accurate description of the movie I have is: It’s fun to ask people to watch it, and then ask them to describe it to you. “Tales for All” #7, Tommy Tricker & the Stamp Traveller, is Michael Rubbo’s second contribution to the series (of four total), and I loved this one too.

Tommy Tricker takes place on a planet Earth similar to this one, except that all people are inordinately interested, each for their own reasons, in stamps or the mail. Many people collect stamps for their beauty, or to take pride in their rarity; others deal stamps as a speculative commodity; some have pen pals; one guy tries to commit mail fraud. There’s also a small hobo subculture of people who travel the earth by casting a spell that embeds them on a stamp for the duration of its mail-time, to be transformed back into a person on arrival.

The basic plot, unifying an episodic collection of on-location hijinks shot throughout suburban Canada, Australia, and China, is that a kid trades his hothead Dad’s coolest stamp to Tommy Tricker, and eventually figures out that he can use stamp travel to get to Australia, where he suspects he’ll be able to recover a book of extremely rare stamps, which he hopes to bring home to mollify Dad… got that? As in The Peanut Butter Solution, there’re so many unnecessary details, quirks, asides, and unanswered questions that I’m tempted to go ham and add a second post listing my favorite fifty, and possibly a third with a deep dive on the rules, physics, and various implications of stamp travel. (Me, on stage in a dark and silent auditorium, addressing no one: “And I will, if anyone is actually interested.”)

I found the movie notably more coherent on rewatch. I’m reminded that as a kid I’d view movies by “having them on,” and familiarity with the characters and “what happens” would become both assumed and total throughout all parts of a viewing, such that any given movie’s scenes could be watched in any order, partially, and so on. I appreciate that Tommy Tricker feels structured to anticipate this immersed, kid-style repetitive viewing mode, and I enjoy the particular kind of confusion it creates for me, as an adult viewer, who now sits down and watches things straight through, and usually just once.