Army of Darkness

31 Days of Horror: Day 3

All right, now we're talking.  After watching The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II on consecutive nights, now it is time for Army of Darkness, the third and possibly final entry in Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell's Ash trilogy.  This was the movie that I had some peripheral awareness of, even before I became a fan of horror movies, if only because this movie poster was on the back cover of every comic book I bought in 1992.  One of my fondest Army of Darkness memories involves a few of my moderately normal friends in college asking me to choose what we watched on a movie night; they wanted "strange" things they hadn't seen before, and I chose Army of Darkness and Labyrinth.  They were (obviously) excellent choices, but I don't recall receiving any standing ovations.  Anyway, Evil Dead II has made me like it more and more with each viewing.  Will the same go for Army of Darkness?

Last time we saw Ash (Bruce Campbell), he had been sucked into a void (along with his car) after he defeated the evil wood spirit/demon/thing that plagued the Evil Dead movies.  When he landed on the other side of the void, he was in Medieval times and he was once again faced with possessed monsters.  This time, though, they have a name: Deadites.  While it is possible for Ash to find his way home again, it requires him to go into a haunted cemetery and retrieve the Necronomicon, which is the book Ash burned in the first film.  All he has to do is brave the challenges ahead of him and say some magic words, and all will be right with the world.  Since not much has gone right for Ash in the last few days (Is that math correct?  Do the events of the first two movies take only about two days?), the Deadites rise up and mount a large-scale attack to retrieve the Necronomicon.  Who will lead the miserably primitive Medieval peons against the Deadite army (of darkness)?  The only man with balls big enough to carry a shotgun and a chainsaw hand, of course.

Pictured: General Ash and PFC Boom Stick

Army of Darkness stayed true to its acting roots, once again going out of its way to not try to impress audiences with the talent of its cast.  This time around, Bruce Campbell got to be even more of a cartoon character, both with his physical humor and with the special effects.

Following true cartoon logic, shaking his head fixes this disfigurement

What I like best about Campbell's performance his fantastically over-macho swagger.  This isn't something we've seen in the other Evil Dead movies, but it's a big part of what makes this one special.  Embeth Davidtz plays Ash's love interest, and she gives the best performance of any female in this series so far.  That's not saying much, and it's saying even less in AoD because Ash spends a hefty amount of time sharing the screen with evil versions of himself.  Still, she was perfectly acceptable with only a few lines.  Marcus Gilbert and Richard Grove were okay as the leaders of the non-Deadite forces, but neither really had much to do.  Ian Abercrombie sounded as wise as his role required.  Bridget Fonda has a brief cameo as Ash's dead girlfriend in a flashback, but she doesn't even get a line.  Ted Raimi did a little better, playing three brief bit parts.  There's not much to say about the acting outside of Campbell because the movie relies so heavily on him.

For the villain, they cast the only man who could hold his own against Bruce Campbell: Bruce Campbell

Sam Raimi returned as director and co-writer for a third round with Ash and the Deadites in Army of Darkness.  By this point, Raimi had just had his first mainstream hit, Darkman, and got a substantially larger budget for this film as a result.  With that in mind, a lot of his choices are curious.  Why go the Jason and the Argonauts route with the skeleton army?  Sure, I guess it looks cool, but it makes the inclusion of non-skeleton warriors --- who suddenly appear whenever there is a castle interior shot --- seem a little out of place.

None of these brave soldiers make it inside the castle gates

I would have thought the cost for the skeleton FX would be greater than costuming people (which he ended up doing, anyway).  This movie is kind of like Baron Munchausen in that it is pretty obvious where the budget went, and it's not always clear if the cost was worth it.  I'm not complaining, by any means, about Raimi's love of old-school special effects.

A rubber suit, water, a fog machine, with fake moss and rocks still make for fun scenes

He just made some unusual choices.  Chief among those was making Army of Darkness skew heavily toward its comedic elements.  It is strange to think of a sequel that purposely strays from the tone of its predecessor --- I can't imagine that happening today --- but I guess Raimi & co. had already gotten the ball rolling with Evil Dead II, so why not go all-out in the final chapter?  Raimi's direction did a good job emphasizing the one-liners in the script, and he made the special effects look good.  Beyond that, this movie just feels like he was having fun.

...or possibly on drugs

While I would probably categorize Army of Darkness as more of a comedy than a horror movie, it does have enough gross imagery to stay in the horror genre.  One of the odder things about this movie, though, is its rating.  Army of Darkness is rated "R."  For a movie with relatively little gore (aside from some ridiculous over-use of fake blood in the beginning), no sex, and little profanity, that seems a bit harsh.  If you just look at the stills, then sure, I can see Evil Ash looking a bit gross and scary.

But his grosses moment just had him trying to kiss a girl.  That is a pretty soft "R."  If I was making the movie and received that rating, I would have gone back and gored things up a bit to make the rating worthwhile.

In my "R" cutting, Bat-Deadite is touching her boobies

With its toned-down feel, how does Army of Darkness stack up?  As far as horror-comedy blends go, it's one of the better ones.  The lines are often corny, but they are classics worth memorizing.  That doesn't make it a good horror movie, though.  I find myself entertained by this movie every time I watch it, but I'm laughing at the same parts every time, with dwindling results.

"It's not THAT bad.  Throw us a *bad pun*"

Maybe I need to watch this with a first-time viewer, to remember what it was like when "Groovy" and "Boom stick" were brand new to me.  Will I watch Army of Darkness again?  Absolutely.  When I have kids, this will be one of the first "horror" movies they will see.  Is it my favorite Evil Dead movie?  Not anymore.  That distinction now belongs to Evil Dead II.

Evil Dead 2

31 Days of Horror: Day 2

Legend has it that director/co-writer Sam Raimi always had a plan to make a sequel to his surprise cult hit, The Evil Dead.  I've seen it reported in a few places that he wanted to tell a story where Ash is transported to Medieval times, an idea that later became the story to Army of Darkness.  So, if the third movie in the series used the idea that the director had for the second movie...what did he do with the actual sequel?

Evil Dead II picks up right where...well, where the other movie began.  This time around, though, only Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend, Linda (Denise Bixler), make the poor choice to spend the weekend in a cabin in the woods.  This isn't a creepy, ramshackle cabin, though; it is well-furnished --- it even has a piano! --- and looks more like a vacation home than anything else.  Not that Ash and Linda are renting it or anything; Ash is taking her there because it is "deserted."  Essentially, Ash is an aspiring squatter.  He then makes the mistake of playing an audio tape he finds on a desk in the cabin, where a professor of some sorts reads off his phonetic translation of the passages in the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, or the "Book of the Dead."  Soon enough, an evil spirit possesses Linda, she get decapitated by Ash's shovel, and Ash is the last person standing, alone in the woods with some sort of woods demon out to get him.  To this point, the story has been pretty much a highly edited (about six minutes long!) remake of the original movie.  But then things start to get a little weird.

That's right: hillbilly-in-overalls weird

It turns out that the voice on the audio tape belonged to an archaeology professor who was working on a project to explain the Book of the Dead.  His daughter, Annie (Sarah Berry), and her research partner, Ed (Richard Domeier), were on their way back from an excavation, where they had found the last pages of the book.  Those pages contain spells that can ultimately destroy the evil spirit.  Now, all we need is for Annie and her partner to get to the cabin, team up with Ash, and figure out how to stay alive long enough to do what needs to be done.  The only problems are (in order):

• the only bridge leading to or from the cabin has been wrecked by the demon spirit thing
• Ash is a stranger, covered in blood and Annie's parents are missing
• All they have to do is decode a dead language and apply that knowledge to the problem at hand

Oh, and Ash's hand has become possessed and is trying to kill him.

The acting in Evil Dead II is certainly not impressive at first glance, but Bruce Campbell's improvement is more noticeable if you compare it to his work in the previous film.  This is less of a straight horror movie, as it has added a lot of broad slapstick comedy to the mix, and that plays to Campbell's strengths.  Specifically, he does well with exaggerated expressions and hammy dialogue, so the cartoony sequences in the movie (especially Ash vs. his hand) are a lot of fun to watch.

"What's up, Doc?" would have fit this scene like a glove

Of the rest of the cast, I suppose longtime soap actress Kassie Wesley DePaiva is probably the most noteworthy; she didn't do a whole lot, but she was inoffensive.  This was the only featured role Sarah Berry ever had --- her only other credit is as an extra in C.H.U.D. II - Bud the Chud ---but I thought she was pretty decent.  There aren't a lot of good female roles in horror movies, especially in the 80s, but she was convincingly stubborn and strong.  Ted Raimi, as is his usual schtick, played a small part in his brother's movie.  This time, he played Henrietta, Annie's possessed mother.  Ted doesn't really "act" in this movie, so much as he "lumbers around under a lot of makeup and costuming," but Henrietta is one of the more memorable monsters in the movie, so I guess all that thankless work was worthwhile.

Why is this not Ted Raimi's IMDb image?

Only one film bridges the gap between the Sam Raimi that made The Evil Dead and the one that made Evil Dead II, but it makes all the difference.  Raimi is much more confident as a director and the overall feel of the film is less "amateurish" and more "professional with a low budget."  The most obvious difference between the two films is the conscious choice to add a lot more comedy to Evil Dead II, and that was probably the right choice.  Raimi has a talent for capturing comedy on camera, especially slightly awkward comedy, and this was his first true platform to show off that talent.  I don't know if I would say that Raimi was any better at directing the cast in this film, but he and Bruce Campbell seemed to be working on the same comedic wavelength, if nothing else.  The cinematography, while not spectacular, wasn't bad.  The iconic POV shot of the evil woods demon thingie tearing through the woods made a return, and that was probably the most memorable bit of cinematography in the film.  Raimi also did a good job capturing some truly weird and gross moments on film.

...sometimes bordering on cold-medicine-induced-nightmare moments

Evil Dead II may be going for laughs, but there are still enough horror tropes to satisfy most fans of the genre.  If you're looking for fake blood, this has some of the more ridiculously over-the-top spurts of the 80s.  I was a little surprised to notice that there is very little gore captured on-camera, though; the most gruesome scenes simply show blood spattering on something else, like the wall of the shed.

Remember those Gatorade "sweat" ads?  Raimi missed an advertising tie-in.

If you're looking for special effects, the makeup and costumes for the possessed are pretty good.  Some of the FX are simply claymation and are showing their age, but I'm pretty sure those FX were cheesy when the film was released, too.  Still, they add to the goofy/surreal tone of the movie and I like them a hell of a lot more than late 80s CGI.

Can you imagine this with 80s CGI?  Ugh.  Now THAT'S gross.

Even though the gore was off-camera (or just goofy) and the special effects were more gross-looking than scary, Evil Dead II earned an "X" rating in America when it was released, for reasons I cannot understand.  If they had recreated the rape tree scene from the first movie, that would make sense, but Kassie Wesley DePaiva's scene doesn't get sexual at all. 

"NO RAPE TREE?  NO X RATING!  IT'S PRACTICALLY A RULE!"

In fact, Evil Dead II is generally less horrific than the original movie, despite the cast and director having more experience and money to work with.  And yet, Evil Dead II is a much, much more entertaining movie on every other level.  The characters are a lot less irritating, the story makes a little bit more sense, and the comic weirdness and goofiness that comes from a hero with a chainsaw hand all add up to something odd and unique.  Ash may have been the main character in The Evil Dead, but the character that has become a cult icon doesn't appear until he grabs a chainsaw and shotgun.

Behold: Ash is born!

The first time I sat down to watch this film, I was eighteen.  I hadn't gotten into horror yet, and didn't really understand the value of campiness or low-budget charm.  However, when the movie finished, I turned to my friend and said, "I can't believe that I have to see the sequel now."  Even though I didn't care for Evil Dead II at first glance, it still reeled me in and left me wanting to know more.  Since then, it improves with every viewing.  It's not quite up there with my absolute personal favorites, but I give it...

Oh, and I have come to a realization with the "is it a remake or a sequel" question that surrounds this movie.  We don't actually see the Necronomicon after the six-minute recap at the beginning of the film, just the additional pages.  It is entirely possible that the events of the first film could have happened (minus, I guess, the other two friends).  So, aside from the recap --- which was necessary to explain what the hell was going on --- there is little to no remaking going on.  Why did they film the recap instead of showing clips from the original film?  Since it was made by a different production company, I will assume there was some sort of ownership issue.

The Grudge (Unrated Extended Director's Cut)

31 Days of Horror: Day 4

"It never forgives.  It never forgets."  Is that tagline supposed to frighten me, or make me think that this is just a movie about an asshole?  Or perhaps it is a subtle ploy to get some sympathy cards?  Well, it's not working.  As part of my month of horror reviews, I wanted to contrast and compare a Japanese horror flick with its American remake.  I chose The Grudge because: A) I haven't seen Ju-On: The Grudge yet and B) I couldn't remember anything but Cat Boy from the American version.  I watched this movie when it came out on DVD with Danny O'D; I remembered him hateHATEhating the film, but couldn't remember why.  All I remembered was the general feeling of it being a crap movie.  But, unlike The Grudge, I both forget and forgive (all movies except The Doom Generation), so I gave this film another shot.

 

The Grudge begins with a foreword: "When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born. The curse gathers in that place of death. Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury."  So...it's a "curse," not a "grudge?"  We're not off to a great start, are we?

What if I told you there was ramen-sniffing later?  Is that better?

The film opens in Japan with Peter (Bill Pullman) committing suicide without saying a word of dialogue, which was both unexpected and hilarious. 

Above: America's greatest President, contemplating comedy gold

The story then cuts to Yoko (Yôko Maki), an in-home caretaker, stopping by the Williams family house to take care of an elderly patient.  When she arrives, neither Mr. or Mrs. Williams is home, which is odd, but creepy ol' Grannie Williams is, so Yoko gets to work.  Until, that is, she hears a noise upstairs.  Since this is an American horror movie and her name is Yoko, you know something bad is going to happen to her.  And it does.  She opens a closet door and is pulled into an attic, where bad things presumably happen.

At least she won't sing on the next Plastic Ono Band album

The next day, Yoko's boss (Ted Raimi) can't get her on the phone (not that she could talk, anyway) and decides to send in a substitute caretaker to make sure Yoko's patient is still alive and not rolling around in her own filth.  He chooses Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) for the job.  Karen arrives at the same house and finds the same creepy old lady, only this time the house is a bit of a mess.  Attic murder will do that to a place, I guess. After doing some preliminary cleaning up, Karen finds a little boy in the house.  He's not just any boy, though; this boy appears to be the local champion of Aggressive Staring.

This is the furthest thing I can imagine from the Care Bear Stare

Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) doesn't speak English, and of course Karen doesn't speak Japanese while living in Japan (stupid American!).  But remember that thing that yanked Yoko into the attic?  It's still in the house.  And that creepy kid?  Yeah, he only gets creepier.

This film was brought to you by the Commission to Never Adopt Asian Children

From this point forward, we follow Karen as she tries to understand the complex web of death surrounding the house.  Well, maybe it's not all that complex.  It seems like everyone who's ever been inside is vanishing.  But why?  And...Karen went inside!  Oh gosh, oh me, oh my!

Let's talk about the acting in The Grudge for a few moments.  As far as the creepy Asian grudgelings go, they were all fine.  You might recognize Takako Fuji and Yuya Ozeki as the creepy lady and Cat Boy from the original film, Ju-On: The Grudge.  They were respectably weird and unsettling, even if screen captures from their scariest scenes sometimes look like the opening to some disgusting fetish porn.

"It's so...how you say...BIG!"

Neither actor had a lot to do.  They had some weird sounds dubbed in and exaggerated facial expressions.  Fuji does a mean crab walk and Ozeki can open his mouth wide enough to make that weird cat siren noise unsettling instead of silly.  The script treats them more like walking avatars of death than actual characters, though.  Most of the actors were forced to play "normal" people that wandered cluelessly toward their death.  William Mapother and Clea DuVall, who both normally play one-note characters, were restricted to zero notes; by the time they showed up on-screen, it was obvious that they were there to be bland and increase the victim total, which they did.  I always like seeing Ted Raimi in movies, more because I know his brother is producing than thanks to any talent on Ted's part.  I was largely indifferent to KaDee Strickland's performance; her character did stupid things (what adult hides under her blanket?), but that's not Strickland's fault.

Why does the elevator have windows if they're just looking at hallways?

Jason Behr plays a theoretically important part in The Grudge, but he's hard to take seriously.  It's not just the fact that he has all the charm of a zombie squirrel, but he somehow finds a way to leave his mouth open whenever he is supposed to be conveying emotion.

Is that "abject despair" or "I forgot my keys"?

The lead in this film is, of course, Sarah Michelle Gellar.  I have nothing against Gellar usually --- she can deliver clever lines well, when they're given to her --- but she is a terrible horror actress.  Yes, she can scream, but there's more to the genre than that.  When Gellar is asked to play vulnerable characters, that requires her to show things like fear, concern, and uncertainty.  Apparently, those emotions are outside her range.

All she would need to look scared is glance at the old lady

What audiences get is a blend of "I don't get it" and "I have a concussion."

The Grudge was directed by Takashi Shimizu.  He also wrote and directed all four of the Japanese Ju-On movies before this one.  In other words, Shimizu knows his creepy Asian kids.

With all that practice, it astounds me at how boring The Grudge is.   It has possibly the worst pacing I have ever seen in a horror movie.  I can enjoy a slow-building horror flick, but it needs payoff.  All we get in this movie is a series of short stories about people looking worried, a boy with a meow instead of a voice, and somebody dies or disappears.  But the audience doesn't know or care about any of the victims and the killer has the personality of a shadow...so who are we supposed to be rooting for or against?  I also wasn't crazy for the cinematography.  In a movie that could have had some interesting camera angles providing hints or visual cues, it was shot in a very straightforward way.

Except for the rap video, of course

Before I ramble on about the many faults of The Grudge, I should point out that there are a few very good visual moments.  Both Toshio and the lady with all the hair were visually stunning.  Toshio's cat noises were definitely unique and unsettling.  The lady being under the covers, while really stupid, was definitely one of the highlights of the film, visually.  My favorite moment, though, was the fingers in Gellar's hair.

Unfortunately, not a result of punching through her face

That was a great moment, even if Gellar's acting didn't capitalize on that moment of confused terror.

I can see why some people might be frightened by The Grudge.  It's a supernatural threat that attacks you without any clear cause and it can come after you anywhere at any time.  But there are a lot better scary movies out there.  Let's look at the story.  It is told in a nonlinear fashion, so there isn't a logical build to a clear threat or showdown.  Instead, there is sequence after sequence of people entering a house and dying.  Except when they don't, in which case the weird killer ghost things follow you home or (if you're Sarah Michelle Gellar) let you live for presumably several months in fear.  Where's the scares or suspense in that?  And then there is an inexplicable time-travel/mind-reading/flashback scene where past events are shown in not-cliche-at-all grainy black-and-white.  This is the scene where the dastardly secret of this film is supposed to be explained, and the best way to do that is by having Sarah Michelle Gellar warp time and space?  I would have been fine with that (maybe) if the reveal was interesting at all.  But it's not.  No shit, some people got murdered in the house --- we've known that for a damn hour!

But did you know it caused GHOST CRAWLING?!?

Maybe the filmmakers thought that the Bill Pullman subplot was the thing to truly hook audiences: "Remember that guy we killed in the opening scene and have barely referenced since?  Let's tie him into an unemotional climax!"  The Grudge is a film that wants to make you afraid to be alone (which apparently happens all the time in urban Japan), but all it has to offer is a bogeyman.  There is very little gore, zero suspense, and a nonsensical plot that ensures that you don't give a crap about the fate of anyone in the movie.

That is the expression I had on my face for this whole movie

The Grudge is a bad, dull movie.  It only narrowly avoided actively pissing me off, and that was simply because I just can't gather up enough hate to overcome my indifference.  Watching this is really making me dread watching the Japanese version.

Wishmaster

When a movie is best known for its cameo roles, you know you're in for a "treat."  A big, steaming pile of "treat."  Do you know anything about djinn or genies?  If you answered "no," then you are qualified to be this movie's screenwriter.  If you answered "yes," then take a deep breath and exhale slowly.  It's going to get worse before it gets better.

Back in the 1100s, Zoroaster (for whom Zoroastrianism is named) is a court sorcerer whose king has a wish-granting djinn (Andrew Divoff).  The king's not very bright, though, so all his wishes turn out disastrously.  Zoroaster captures the djinn within a gem, somehow (I'm guessing cutting-edge science), and reveals that the djinn wants to grant three wishes; after the third wish, the djinn will open the door between dimensions and the evil race of djinn will rule the earth.  First off, my understanding of Zoroastrianism is that their djinn were disease-spreading lady genies, not evil world-ending bad guys.  I'm not a Zoroastrian, though, so I might have misunderstood and there's some grey area that I'm missing.  Or maybe my casual knowledge of an ancient religion is greater than that of a paid screenwriter.  Secondly, how does anyone know about this end of the world plan?  Do djinn have loose lips?  And how hard is it to give someone three wishes?  You know what would work better, instead of having their first two wishes go terribly wrong?  Having them go right, so they aren't afraid to wish.  Djinn: the stupidest of all God's creatures.

That scene takes up maybe five minutes, but it's fairly representational of the movie as a whole: confusion, frustration, and pain.  Flash-forward to the late 90s, where an ancient statue is being lifted off a boat by a crane.  The crane operator is drunk, so the statue falls and breaks.  Oh, and it squishes someone.  One of the dock workers notices a gem in the statue's wreckage.  Why...could that be the djinn's gem?  Sure, why not?  The dude pawns it, and the pawn shop guy takes it to an auction house.  The auction house gives it to Alexandra (Tammy Lauren) to estimate its value.  While examining the gem, she thinks she sees something, but can't get a handle on what.  Alexandra takes the gem to her friend/love-interest Josh (Tony Crane), who can use lasers and whatnot to get more detailed information on the gem.  Josh plans to work on the gem in the morning, but Alexandra convinces him to do it that night.  He does.  The gem explodes, releasing the djinn and wrecking the lab.  Writhing in pain on the ground, Josh is approached by the djinn, who asks if Josh wished that the pain would stop.  He does.  The djinn grants his wish.  That's basically how all the djinn's encounters go from this point on:

Innocent Person: I am apparently a small nuisance to the djinn.
Djinn: Do you wish _____?
Innocent Person: Well, yeah.  That's an inane, only half-serious wish that everyone shares.
Djinn: MWA HA HA!  (Wish is granted in a fatal way for the innocent)

Alexandra learns about the explosion and says, "I think the thing I gave him might have killed him.  Do you know how crazy that sounds?"  Actually, no.  You gave him something and asked him to work on it in the lab that night, and he died in the lab that night.  I'd say that the odds are in your favor.  Oh, and do you realize what you said implies that you gave him a nasty STD?  Gross!  Eventually, the djinn steals the face of a corpse and assumes a human appearance.  Okay, fine.  But the face he steals is heavily pockmarked.  I get that it's the face of the actor that has been heavily made up to this point, but who steals a pockmarked face?  It's like if I really, really needed some pants so people don't stare at the guy with no pants, and I choose assless chaps.  Yes, it's a choice, but it's probably not the best one available.

Because this is a horror movie, the dumb girl (Alexandra) needs to be chased by the monster (the djinn), right?  Right.  But why?  That's where the genius of this screenwriter comes in.  You see, the djinn is granting wishes in exchange for the person's soul, which is why you have to read the fine print on anything you agree to.  Why does a djinn need souls?  To power up his gem.  Yeah, I thought it exploded in the lab, too.  Guess not.  Once the gem is powered up, the djinn needs to grant three wishes to the person who woke him up, which is somehow Alexandra and not the late Josh.  Once the three wishes are granted, he can unleash the djinn into this world.  Why does he want to do that?  Well, according to an expert, "djinn are the face of fear itself."  Oh.  Right.

In a movie like this, it is probably better to not focus on the acting and directing.  Robert Kurtzman is not a good director, Peter Atkins is not a good writer, and Andrew Divoff, Tammy Lauren, and Tony Crane are not good actors.  The special effects are unimpressive, too.  This movie does, however, have a lot of cameos from horror movie icons.  Angus Scrimm (from Phantasm) reads the opening monologue.  Robert Englund plays a small supporting role and, shockingly, is not evil.  Ted Raimi is the guy who gets squished into meat jelly by the falling statue.  Kane Hodder and Tony Todd both get killed by the djinn.  Whenever one of these guys made an appearance, I cheered up.  They might not be major characters in this movie, but their presence signifies that something cool is about to happen.  Well, at least something that should have been cool is going to happen, anyway.

Wishmaster is the sort of movie that simultaneously bores, underwhelms, and confuses viewers.  It's boring because the script is wretched, the pace is slow, and the characters are unsympathetic.  It's underwhelming because the deaths, while fairly creative, aren't very cool and are often just odd.  It's confusing because the explanations given for djinns are don't jive with common knowledge.  It's like they made Saint Peter into a brain-eating zombie gargoyle; while it's possible that there are some texts that support such an interpretation, it's not the general consensus.  I know next to nothing about djinn (I did take a quarter of World Religion at the College of DuPage), and that was still enough to realize how arbitrary this movie's take on them was.  Still, this movie did bring Freddy Kreuger, Jason Voorhies, and the Candyman into the same movie, so it's not all bad.  It is just almost entirely bad.

Candyman

I enjoy horror movies, but I am more than willing to admit that most of them are pretty bad.  The horror genre usually doesn't have much more to offer than some unique ways to kill teenagers, but every so often, I get surprised.  Candyman was one of those times.  This film distances itself from its horror brethren in some very basic ways.  There are no teen-aged main characters, for starters.  Instead of creating a fictional city or town, this movie takes place in Chicago, primarily in the Cabrini-Green housing projects, which are scary enough on their own.  The main character in this movie is played by an Oscar nominee (not for this role), which is one of the few, if not the only, time that has happened in a horror movie.  Oh, and it doesn't completely suck.

Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) is a graduate student researching urban legends for her thesis.  She polls freshmen for any legends they know and notes that most legends have many versions.  While researching, she comes across the Candyman legend.  Like Bloody Mary, if you say his name five times in front of the mirror, he allegedly appears and murders you.  Helen doesn't think much about the legend at first, and she and her friend Bernadette jokingly say his name in the mirror five times.  Nothing happens.  Big surprise.  Later, she meets a maid at the university who claims that the Candyman story is true.  This intrigues Helen, because being able to trace a legend back to its real-world counterpart would be a scoop for her thesis.  The maid claims that the Candyman murdered someone in the Cabrini-Green projects, which leads to Helen finding some newspaper articles about a hook-related murder.  She has some theories on the crime that would help explain some of the more supernatural elements of the story, like Candyman appearing near the mirror, she just needs some hard evidence.  Helen researches the story on location in the projects, but she does not come much closer to the truth.

That's when he appears.  While Candyman (Tony Todd) doesn't look like a nice guy, he doesn't have the gross disfigurement that most iconic horror villains possess.  He does have a hook in the disgusting stump where his hand should be, which I suppose makes up for his otherwise normal appearance.  Candyman is upset by Helen's research, as she is helping convince others that he does not exist.  Candyman urges her to become his victim (which is a little awkward), but she resists, so he decides to prove himself to her.  Helen blacks out and awakens in the Cabrini-Green apartment of the nicest resident she interviewed during her research; Helen is covered in blood, notices that the apartment's dog has been decapitated, and the resident's infant is missing.  Beside herself with grief, the resident attacks Helen, who is forced to protect herself with a butcher knife.  Not surprisingly, this escapade lands her in jail, but her husband (Xander Berkeley) bails her out.

Bad move.  Candyman begins appearing more and more frequently, but only to Helen.  He has the baby hidden somewhere and will kill it if Helen does not give herself to him, to join him and strengthen his legend.  As the movie continues, Candyman keeps killing and Helen keeps getting blamed for those crimes.  Despite being wanted for murder, Helen realizes that she is the baby's only hope of survival and decides to do whatever it takes to save it.

That might not sound too good, but there's a lot to like in this move and there are some aspects that I genuinely appreciate.  I like Candyman's desire to seduce Helen into becoming his victim.  He could have killed her at any time, but he wanted to make her, the urban legend debunker, part of his urban legend.  That's actually a pretty cool motivation.  I like Candyman's voice; the production team treated his dialogue as voice over, so when he spoke, it felt like an omnipotent narrator was speaking.  That was a nice touch that definitely added to the creepiness of the character.  I also liked the scenes where Candyman handled/was made of bees.  I'm not a huge fan of bugs crawling all over characters, but bugs that sting are definitely scary.  I don't usually squirm while watching movies, but that made me wiggle a bit.

I think this was a pretty smart slasher flick, too.  It went out of its way to avoid a lot of slasher cliches; all the people that died were truly innocent, not promiscuous, drunken teens on a drug binge.  If this film had been edited just a little bit better, there would even be a question as to whether Candyman existed or not.  He's only on screen without Helen for about fifteen seconds; everything else happens with Helen present.  If those fifteen seconds had been cut, then there we could make a valid point that Helen could be responsible for everything and Candyman was either her going crazy or something that possessed her.  That angle would have improved this movie's IQ enough to be a classic.

Unfortunately, that is not this film's only shoulda-coulda-woulda.  Despite all the unique and smart things in this movie, a lot of careless mistakes are made:

• Ted Raimi has a cameo as a "bad boy"
• Helen walks into a public men's restroom outside Cabrini-Green.  That's a whole horror premise by itself.
• Trevor, Helen's husband, is a professor married to a graduate student in his own department.  He cheats on her with one of his students.  And he's paid enough to have a gigantic apartment on Chicago's North side with a view of downtown?  How does that happen?
• Helen's Chicago apartment does not have a deadbolt or latch.  Now that's fiction.

A lot of horror movies get people to overlook the overall crappiness of the film by going all-out for the climax.  Not so much here.  I thought the climax was pretty ineffective, but it did set up a pretty good ending.  That's a trade-off I'm willing to make, and just one of the many choices that director Bernard Rose makes that work well.  Most of the budget went toward special effects instead of actors and script, so the casting choices are pretty solid (Tony Todd is a creepy man), even if their acting isn't great (Xander Berkeley, I'm looking at you).  Is this a masterpiece?  No, it's too stupid for that.  It is a good horror movie that is also a pretty decent movie in its own rights.