Single White Female (1992)

We've all had bad roommates. It's a part of growing up in the modern world – trying to find a place to live, coming up short on cash and having to move in with some psychopath who starts to imitate your every move.

Wait, what?

Director: Barbet Schroeder

Starring: Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Yes, this is one of those 1990s films which has since become a sort of punchline - “don't go Single White Female on me,” cries many a half-joking roommate, crossing their fingers and hoping they don't end up on the front page of the newspaper as the victim in a crime story. But back in 1992, it was just a movie. A weird, weird fucking movie.

The film begins with a woman named Allison (Bridget Fonda), in bed with her husband when her husband's ex-wife conveniently calls and leaves a message saying the two slept together. Wow. That's awfully contrived that she called RIGHT FUCKING NOW, like some silly stage play, isn't it? The husband feebly tries to save face, but really, it's all over. There is nothing to do anymore, and the relationship is dead in the water. Now, it's just time for crying alone on a bed:

"This is even worse than the time I was in Lake Placid!"

She goes through a bunch of potential roommates, most of whom are a little bit weird and say bizarre things, so they're all obviously terrible and not even worth considering. Like this girl:

Yes, it looks hopeless. Who will she ever find as a roommate? Who will spare her from these awful cretins who deserve to die?

But all is not lost – eventually, as she's sitting there crying in the kitchen, a random girl walks in without being invited, which doesn't raise any alarm bells for some reason. The girl, introducing herself as Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), offers to make her tea, but when they try to turn on the sink, it showers them with water.

I wonder how they'll bond when the toilet gets clogged.

Let's recap that: She was crying in the corner, Hedy broke in without even knocking or anything, and the sink exploded on them. Seems like a match made in heaven to me!

So they're pretty much instant BFFs, trying on clothes together and they even get a dog, which they take pictures with and even sleep in the same bed with. It's all pretty candy coated.

I can feel my teeth rotting just watching these scenes!

And hell, Allison even promises Hedy that she'll never get back together with her old husband. Weeeeeellllllllll....

She's basically a big liar!

Yup, they get back together almost instantly, without any scenes of them talking or anything. I guess that's a blessing though, as the film is already close to two fucking hours long. Which honestly begs the question – why did they break up at all? Why not just make a film about a younger couple who weren't living together and the girl got a new roommate? Why have the breakup/marriage plot at all? I guess they really needed the extra 10 minutes tacked onto this already overlong film.

Anyway, Hedra doesn't take their getting back together well – there are even a couple of scenes where she sits around eating and watching TV! The horror!

You would think after The Hitcher, she would be able to take this a little bit better. But I guess not.

At least she has the dog, though – oh, wait, no she doesn't. The dog starts ignoring her too.

I guess the dog is just able to tell which person it should pay attention to because the movie's plot needs to move forward.

Which doesn't make any sense, because Hedy's the one who has been actually paying attention to and feeding the dog! Allison has mostly been ignoring it or not there. But in this movie's world, it wants Allison only, even though she never seems to do anything with it, over Hedy who does everything for it and is always there. But Hedy doesn't take THIS injustice lying down... she retaliates by throwing the dog out a window.

Ha! Take THAT, you dumb dog!!!

If seeing a dog die makes you uncomfortable, just pretend the dog was an advocate for the anti-vaccine movement.

My favorite part of this is how Allison believes the bullshit story Hedy feeds her - the dog jumped out of the window of its own volition. Like yeah, that's something a dog would just do at random, because dogs have no sense or intelligence at all and are just helpless dumb animals who commit suicide at any given moment. Does this movie understand dogs at all? Well, a better question would be, does the movie understand anything? I don't think it really does.

Things get even stranger, though, when Hedy gets a makeover and dyes her hair to look exactly like Allison. This is all extremely weird, but does Allison take any action about it beyond being a little annoyed? Nope! It's just kinda weird, is all. I dunno, if my best friend showed up wearing the same clothes as me with the same hairstyle, I'd stop being friends with them.

I guess Allison does start to get worried about her though, after she finds a box under Hedy's bed containing a bunch of letters and stuff that prove she was lying about her past. Allison confides in her best friend, a gay guy upstairs, who tells her they should definitely call a therapist and get her institutionalized. That seems like the obvious thing to do, but then, I live in real life, and not a strange fantasy land like these characters.

But Hedy takes care of him well enough, so whatever, you know?

If a scene where Hedy sleeps with Allison's husband while pretending to be her sounds like a fucking Dr. Phil episode, well, I wouldn't blame you for thinking so. But I'll give the movie one concession – most Dr. Phil episodes don't end with the woman killing the man with a high heel to the head. Though, that would give me more incentive to watch fucking Dr. Phil.

Not all deaths are equal. Some deaths are cool, like dying valiantly saving a friend from an assassin's bullet. Other deaths are not cool, and this is one of those.

So Allison finds out Hedy killed her husband, and that immediately flips Hedy's evil switch. Like, boom, it's fucking instant – she's suddenly just Saturday-morning-cartoon-character evil. Now, she holds Allison hostage at gunpoint, forcing her to buy plane tickets so they can escape. Hedy leaves for a while and Allison, tied to a chair, tries to escape by turning up the volume on the TV to try and get someone's attention to come save her. Which is exactly the way my father survived his own kidnapping in 1993, so I have an emotional attachment to this scene.

Hedy gets back and is about to finally kill Allison, when Allison decides to kiss her on the mouth, which stops Hedy from doing anything. The least they could have done at this point was add in some hot lesbian action, but no, all they do is kiss and then she rests her head on Allison's lap.

This is just her favorite kind of foreplay.

Well, that's one way to stop from getting killed. Though I doubt it would work in every situation...like, a fucking Mafia hitman probably wouldn't be swayed by that.

So let's run down a checklist of what this movie considers mentally ill people to be: they're super clingy and can turn into serial killers at the drop of a hat for almost no reason. Just remember, people with mental health problems: this could be you! Make sure to feel completely ashamed and feel awful about yourself. This movie's got you figured out.

Oh, and the gay best friend guy survived. How? Did he just hide out in his house pretending to be dead for several days? Why not go to the cops and tell them what's happening? Maybe he's just attracted to the fucking danger of all of it. He does give it his best shot at beating Hedy up, but he can't even do that right, as this isn't the real climax!

You get a B minus for effort though.

The real climax involves Allison escaping and running around in the basement air vents like a fucking Die Hard action scene – I'll give the movie a few points for that, as I honestly didn't think THAT would be in the movie. But mostly that's because it's a complete non-sequitur with where the movie was going.

She's like the John McClane of privileged white girls in NYC.

Eventually, though, all things must come to an end, via a stab in the back:

Et tu, roommate I kidnapped?

What did we learn from this movie? Mental health problems means you're crazy and have always been crazy. There's no hope for you, and you'll probably die by being stabbed in the back.

Seriously, this is a pretty silly flick. It's not that good, with little character or story development – it's all strictly shallow and surface-level stuff, existing only as an excuse for the cheap thrills. To be fair though, the thrills can be kinda fun in a dumb way, and the movie was never outright bad. Jennifer Jason Leigh's acting is actually really good, and the other actors aren't bad either.

Talking about it afterwards, Michelle and I both concluded that this was a product of its time, a relic that seems dated now, but also kind of innocent in a way. Like, they didn't know any better. This was made in a time when the world didn't have the Internet giving everyone a voice, including people with mental health problems who would have said 'hey, this is insensitive as fuck.' The people making the movie were living in a much simpler world, without the societal context to know what they were doing was inaccurate and silly. They just wanted to make a scary, fun movie.

It really is interesting in that way, to watch Single White Female in the context of today's super aware world. Social media did a wonderful thing by allowing minority voices to come out and express their feelings and make the complexities of life more visible – that way, they're not as confusing, and the average person can understand the plight of the mentally ill better now without, you know, having to go to school and learn that shit in books and stuff.

But hey, at least we make great and insightful movies now, that only show mental illness in realistic ways!

... On second thought, I'll show myself out.

Images copyright of their original owners. We own none of them.

Children of the Corn 2 - The Final Sacrifice (1992)

The original Children of the Corn was already a stretch, being a whole feature length film based off a 30-page short story. But then they decided 'hey, we can one-up THAT in stupidity!' and decided to make a billion sequels to that original story. That's insane. That's pants-shittingly, madhouse, poop-flinging insane to levels that make the current 'shared universe' trend look positively conservative...I mean, at least the Harry Potter spinoffs are based on a multi-million dollar franchise, and at least the Marvel movies slated to come out for the rest of our natural lives are based on comics people already loved. What was there with Children of the fucking Corn? A 30-page short story by Stephen King. That's it. That was the extent of the inspiration for this franchise that ended up being like 11 movies long.

Sigh. Sometimes I just don't even know. But someone made the movies anyway, despite all logic, and so I am here to review it. This is just how it works. It's fate that everything is happening this way and I have no choice in the matter.

Director: David Price

Starring: Terence Knox, Paul Scherrer

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

We start off with a guy discovering a bunch of dead adults in a basement, killed by the children of the corn before the film started. This presumably didn't really make the smell in his basement any worse than it was.

"I can't tell if it's the week-old salami down here or the rotting decrepit bodies of people I used to know, but man, it reeks down here now."

It turns out all the adults in a small town called Gatlin are dead and the kids end up in homes in a neighboring town. Like any respectable professional doctor, he gives them all lollipops and sends them on their ways, which I'm sure is a decent pacifier for the fact that their families are all dead.

Yes, they actually killed their own families, but the doctor doesn't know that...

The main character is this jack-off journalist who is traveling to the town to do a story on the killings with his son, because all good writers bring along their annoying sons to work. The son swears a lot and his dad reprimands him, asking him if he learned to talk that way from his mom, and then in the same conversation his dad also swears a lot. Because why make any sense even at the beginning of your movie?

They get to the town and have dinner with this hot chick who owns a hotel and wears shirts that say “Come sleep with me” as an advertisement for it – which I guess is actually brilliant advertising, if the person wearing it is attractive. At dinner, the son constantly makes fun of his dad and undermines his credibility at every turn – which makes the son my new favorite character for making fun of his weenie of a father.

The dad takes him outside and shouts at him about how he was an accident and a mistake, which is heartwarming in its honesty. I'm just so glad to see this family finally coming together and revealing all their secrets.

But yeah, the son leaves angrily, and the dad looks back inside at the boy who I'm sure he sees as a totally legit replacement as a surrogate smaller person to annoy some more.

"Wait, I need someone to project my own insecurities onto!"

"Eh, you'll do from now on."

While waiting for a bus out of town, the son runs into a hot chick, who flirts with him for no reason and then tells him as an afterthought that the bus doesn't come until Tuesday. What amazing priorities. I guess because he is the only person in town who is her age as well as NOT enjoying standing around staring unblinking and creepy, she immediately is attracted to him, which is exemplified in a later scene where she's standing underneath a waterfall in a bikini top and invites him over by actually non-ironically uttering the line “What, have you never seen a girl before?”

It's like she speaks solely in overused 1960s family movie romance cliches, and to really go all the way, just acts out every teen boy's fantasy too.

Speaking of kids who enjoy staring unblinkingly and being creepy, that's what the children of the corn do for most of the movie. I just love how unsuspecting everyone is about this – oh yes, that group of creepy kids who stand in a perfect group formation at all times and stare and smile creepily at everyone passing by CAN'T be up to anything bad!

Subtlety is, shall we say, not their strong point...

When they're not doing that though, they like to stand around in the corn and shout incredibly poorly written dialogue about how they killed the adults to make their own world a paradise. Being an adult for these kids is apparently just the worst thing you can be. It's like Peter Pan if written by Charles Manson.

My question though, is what happens when these kids grow up? Do they just get exiled or killed as soon as their voices drop and they start thinking about why exactly they're wasting their time with a cult of fucking moronic little children? If so, this is the worst cult since End of the Line.

The father, meanwhile, is just kind of wandering around doing nothing in a school, where he finds pictures of kids murdering their parents. He also runs into a stereotypical Native American man who does nothing but make insulting statements about how awful every white person is. While a Native American would have just cause to be suspicious of white people trying to take their land and shit, here it just comes off as out of place for a dumb Children of the Corn movie.

"I wanted a part in Poltergeist II, but instead I got shoved into this piece of shit. I've been drinking hard whiskey ever since."

Oh, and they find out there's actually some kind of conspiracy involving corn with mold growing on it, which they think released toxins into the air to make the kids go crazy and kill their parents. Somehow it's also some sort of conspiracy involving the sheriff, who goes insane and ties them up, trying to run them over with a corn harvester.

If you can figure out how this makes any sense in the film, well, you're better than I am at this sleuth work.

The wild eyes, the crazy evil grin, the completely over the top violent overreactions to everything - yes, elect him sheriff, he is perfect.

I dunno – he's just insane because GMOs, or money, or because sheriffs in small towns rarely have shit to do so they just like killing people with corn harvesters randomly. Either way I am sure the population of your local farmer's market will have an opinion about the purity of corn in some manner.

The whole movie is just confused as hell – we get scenes of the children of the corn murdering people mixed in with the random moldy corn investigation as well as scenes like these, which look like they came out of a cheap Harlequin romance novel adaptation:

"I thought I felt you getting frisky back there, but THIS is just ridiculous!"

To be fair though, most of those cheap romances don't end with finding disembodied hands on the ground while trying to have sex. If they did, I'd watch them more often.

The death scenes are even more over the top – witness the glory of a kill scene in a church where the main Child of the Corn stabs a voodoo doll thing and a guy bleeds to death from his nose.

This was the worst day at church since that day Millie had a hemorrhage from the bloody knife fight she had been in down at the retirement home last month.

Who was that guy? Why kill him specifically? I dunno. The movie never explains it. Hell, I'm also still trying to figure out how he managed to make that voodoo doll work, and why it's never used again for anyone else.

In another kill scene, they manage to rig an old lady's wheelchair so she gets hit by a truck and sent flying through a window of a nearby bingo hall.

To add to the super wacky comedy of the old lady in a wheelchair dying, some idiot then stands up in the rubble and goes “Bingo?”

This right here - this is the moment this franchise dies a cold death. There can be nothing else of worth spawned from this series at all after a scene this horribly cliched and hackneyed. It burns thine eyes even to gaze upon it for a second! AAAAHHHHH! 

As for how they managed to control that lady's wheelchair to begin with, eh, fuck it, I have no idea. Let's just get the rest of the review over quickly.

The finale is based around the son joining the children of the corn and going with them to their crazy ritual thing. They ask him to kill that girl he's been spending time with to prove himself, and the real indicator of what a great relationship they have is, HE ACTUALLY HESITATES AND CONSIDERS KILLING HER.

"It was fun having sex with you, but it was also fun having sex with the corn!"

Yes, really – he has to think about it for a few minutes. I guess it really was a hard choice between a kind and caring girl who seems to really like him, and a cult of weird Addams Family rejects whose only plan is to live out in the corn, cackling cartoonishly every hour or two, with no other ways of sustaining themselves until another town stupidly takes mercy on them. You know, I changed my mind; I can see why his dad hates him now.

They escape, and then get captured again, which really does great at padding out the bloated run time of this movie more than a fat kid eating a box of marshmallows all in one sitting! It's only 92 minutes, but don't worry; it feels like twice that.

There's a really lame scene where the leader of the children, about to die, pleads for the son to come save him because they're supposedly really great friends and stuff – I guess the movie forgot to show us those scenes – anyway, he turns into a demon for a few seconds, which does very little to influence the good guys' opinions.

Somehow the Native American guy died during all of this, and so they do the natural thing and burn his body right there in the corn fields before getting in a car and driving away like nothing ever happened.

Clearly he didn't have any relatives or loved ones who would have cared to know about this. Just burn his rotting corpse right now.

A faint voice from afar: "WAIT! I'M STILL ALIVE IN HERE! OH GOD I'M BURNING ALIVE IN THIS CORNFIELD! AHHHHH!"

So this was pretty much complete nonsense. It seemed that way when we watched it, and afterward as I did this review, it seemed absolutely removed from reality in how crazy it really was. Plot threads were brought up and forgotten about just as quickly, the characters had no personality and the movie couldn't really seem to decide what it wanted to be. Is it a comedy, a horror film or some sort of weird message about food safety? Or is it just a piece of shit?

I think I'm going with that last one.

What was their plan when that town adopted them all after they killed their parents, anyway? I just can't imagine the complexities going on in their peanut brains. Really if they were so badass and ready to kill, they could have just slaughtered all the adults immediately and not even tried to pretend they were regular good kids - hell, they never tried very hard in the actual movie anyway, and instantly seemed evil without any provocation.

But whoops, if that actual logic had been applied, we wouldn't have been graced by the perfection that was Children of the Corn 2, or its gajillion sequels. Here's a picture of moldy corn to sum up what I really thought of this movie:

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

REVIEW: Candyman (1992)

I apologize in advance for the excessively gory images that you are about to see. But if they stop even one person from watching this horrible movie, then I've done my job well.

Urban legends are like the modern oral folklore. One could say they are simply a passing-down of the traditions from times before man had the written word to convey expressions and stories. If that’s the case, then Candyman is the modern equivalent of stories back then told by dumbass 15 year olds trying to scare their little siblings with tons of tasteless gore.

Director: Bernard Rose

Starring: Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd

IMDb

I really don’t know where to begin with this. It’s not like the movie has absolutely nothing going for it…they have a cool setting and they start off with a decent build up. But after that? Nothing. Even worse than movies that are all-out bad from the start are the ones that have something going but then do nothing with it, like a cool looking car that peters out on you after twenty minutes on the freeway without even hitting 80 mph. And to top it all off, this is another tale “inspired” by the “brilliance” of that lovable Clive Barker…my heart can barely contain its joy…

Well we start off with some idiot telling a story about a girl who cheated on her boyfriend while babysitting with…Joseph Gordon-Levitt from Looper?

Well, as long as Bruce Willis didn't come back trying to kill a bunch of little kids, I think it's OK that he's in this house where his girlfriend is babysitting.

And they have a rather bizarre method of foreplay…telling stories about a supernatural serial killer called Candyman who appears when you say his name five times in a mirror and then guts and disembowels you with a bloody meat hook. They even start groping one another and the girl even takes off her shirt while they’re talking about this! How perfectly insane!

"Oh baby, talking about people getting murdered with a rusty hook and disemboweled really turns me on! Almost as much as picking each others' noses or talking about our embarrassing bowel movements after eating Chipotle!"

Anyway, they get killed and we get introduced to the real main characters – Highlander 2 survivor Virginia Madsen and her best friend, Token Intelligent Sophisticated Black Woman. They’re doing a study on urban legends for a graduate school class, and throughout the first half hour we get a lot of different people telling stories to them, sometimes when they don’t even plan it, about various urban legends they hear of, including the Candyman story. It’s kind of hokey, but it actually does create some suspense…suspense that the rest of the movie will fail to live up to.

Madsen’s husband is a dorky looking professor at the same school, because that happens so much! And their marriage is so good that she immediately gets jealous whenever a young girl even looks at him the wrong way…yeah, I’m sure she’s a great catch…pfft.

Madsen and her friend discover an interesting fact about their apartment building; that it was actually built the same way as another building called Cabrini Green where everyone apparently lives in fear of the Candyman who was mentioned before. So they hatch a plot to go break into Cabrini Green while dressing like they’re going to experience a winter in Russia.

Off for a Siberian winter in ghettoville...

Inside, they find some pictures and graffiti on the wall that all points toward the larger-than-life Candyman myth that has taken hold of Cabrini Green – I really like the setting here, and more movies should utilize this kind of ghetto urbanized city setting for a horror movie plot. Again though, the movie will eventually even throw this out the window and replace it with overwrought hokey nonsense masquerading as something “deep.” Doesn’t that sound fun?

We also get the story of Candyman told by a fat guy who looks like Ben Franklin’s loser cousin…apparently he was a slave who fell in love with a white noblewoman and got her pregnant, so a bunch of villagers killed him with bees.

Trouble strikes, however, when Madsen talks to a little boy who tells her to go look in the public bathroom where some other little kid allegedly got his balls cut off by the Candyman. She goes inside, finds some bugs using the toilet, and gives them some privacy:

After that, she’s confronted by some gang members who give her a black eye for using their favorite bathroom…because a black eye is always the WORST thing a whole group of violent thugs can do to a vulnerable white woman who they have cornered! I’m totally convinced!

But seriously, THIS is what I mean when I say the movie had potential! We could have had a very interesting take on urban legends by having the whole thing end up a hoax perpetuated by gang members who want to rule the neighborhood. Maybe some slight supernatural leanings would have been OK if they were really vague, but if I was re-doing this story, I sure wouldn’t have gone full-out Nightmare on Elm Street mode after this. Ugh. What could have been a great commentary on poverty and believing in myths reduced to a third-rate slasher horror movie with as much imagination as a pet rock. That’s great, guys. Just great.

OK, back to the review, back to the review…so after telling on the gang members, Madsen is confronted again in the parking lot by the real Candyman! He talks in a cool voice and…that’s really about it. If you thought Pinhead was too white, or the guy from Lord of Illusions was too lame, well Candyman is for you!

The Lord of Disappointingly Boring Scenes cometh!

I’m not going to lie…after this scene, the movie just gives up. It doesn’t even bother to try anymore. The movie just turns into a really bloody slasher movie with nothing good about it. Disappointment, thy name is Candyman…I’ve seriously rarely ever seen a movie just up and stop dead in its tracks like this, just cease to be relevant or meaningful on any level beyond hey, look at our cool special effects! Well, not since The Dark Knight Rises, anyway.

But I digress again…do you like severed dogs’ heads and screaming, crying women and lots of blood all over the place? Is that your idea of what constitutes real fear? Well then you’ll love this scene.

OOH, A DOG'S HEAD! LOOK AT ALL THIS GORE!!!

And there's some BLOOD and KNIVES and SCREAMING and oooh, just so creepy, right?! WE ARE THE EDGY ONES! LOOK AT US AS WE BREAK SOCIAL TABOOS! So violent and gross!

Apparently Madsen has been framed for the murder of a dog, the kidnapping of a baby and the smearing of a ton of red paint all over the walls…amazing…and the cops who were previously very understanding to her plight are now total jackasses without even one inch of any kind of humanity towards her!

After another scene in which the Candyman brutally murders her best friend for no reason...

This just pisses me off. I know characters die in horror movies, it's just part of the territory, but this was just SO BADLY DONE of a scene! There's a difference between adding kills to scare the audience and just being straight up cruel, which is what this is. Needlessly, relentlessly cruel. Why did this character deserve to be murdered in such a brutal, undignified way? What was her crime outside of being dumb enough to take a minor role in a Clive Barker film? Fuck you, Candyman.

...Madsen is institutionalized and kept there on drugs for a whole month. The doctor calls her into his office one day seemingly at random, and to prove that the Candyman is real, she decides to look into the randomly placed mirror on the wall and say his name five times. Even though she KNOWS HE’S GOING TO POP UP AND KILL THE GUY…she just does it anyway! What, did the drugs addle her brain so much that she forgot he was a killing machine? Did she think he was just going to sit down with them for a polite discussion about how he framed her for all the murders so far? Oh well, who cares…GORE!

Killing off a random doctor who was just trying to help? Great job, Virginia Madsen...great job...you deserve a Darwin Award at this point. If she had just SHUT HER DAMN MOUTH and NOT summoned him from the mirror, this whole thing could have been avoided. 

Then she finds out her husband is shacked up with one of his much younger students, but really Madsen herself was already a student to begin with…so really, he just moved from one nubile young woman to another. What a pedophile. I bet he and that weird priest from Pinocchio’s Revenge would get along fine.

"I actually listen to his confessions every week..."

So she runs off to look at the ocean while Candyman intones some more pseudo-intellectual poetry over the scene, because that’s really all he’s got besides framing random young women for murder. He should look into other hobbies, like doing movie trailer voice-overs, since that one deep-voiced guy who used to do them has sadly passed away – I think Candyman would be a great substitute personally. He has just the right amount of dramatic deep-toned grittiness in his voice...hey, wait, what was I talking about again? The movie is so dull that I actually completely went off topic.

How is a film with this much admittedly decent gore effects so BORING anyway? It's practically the eighth wonder of the world. By all human logic, there should at least be some kind of enjoyment out of how ridiculous and tasteless the gore is, but the tone of the movie is so suffocatingly serious and somber that I can't even enjoy the gore! It just comes off as mean spirited, ugly and unpleasant.

But what the hell is Candyman's plan, anyway? Kill everyone who can help Virginia Madsen until she goes so crazy that she has to love him? That’s stupid. Almost as stupid as this scene:

Yeah, maybe a better dental plan is in order.

He forces her to come die with him in a big bonfire conveniently happening that night, only she stabs him with a big burning stake and saves herself and the kidnapped child. After that, we get a scene of her husband and his new fuck-buddy hanging out in his apartment as he cries in his room about how Madsen is dead…how are we supposed to feel bad for the scumbag who just ditched the woman he married in a time of need to start dating someone probably not even 21 yet?

"I'm looking in a mirror while wearing a sad expression...aren't I so deep and tormented?"

The movie doesn’t know either, because after that, he says Madsen’s name five times and she somehow appears to him in ghost-form and kills him with a hook! The film then ends on a “shocking” gore sequence, which maybe would have been shocking if we hadn't seen the same effects like 12 times by this point...

Aw, man, now she'll have to clean the bathroom and everything!

Are you surprised? I’m not! Why would anyone be at this point? I can think of painful surgical procedures more enjoyable than this movie. How did anyone ever find redeeming qualities in this? All the decent ideas in the beginning are just thrown in the garbage in favor of tastelessly done gore that adds nothing to the atmosphere or overall story. The Candyman himself is dull as hell and doesn't do anything half the time besides just intone boring monologues at a snail's pace, and the whole thing is just a drag to watch, too, as it tries so hard to be all deep and profound, with all its deep-voiced narrations over wide-panned shots of the city, when really all it is is a stupid slasher movie huffing and puffing to try and make itself look cooler and more serious.

Candyman is a very nasty, stupid, unpleasant movie with nothing at all to say and no real value to anyone who wants more out of a film than gore effects Tom Savini could do better on one of his off days. It doesn't even work as a gore flick because the whole thing tries so hard like I mentioned – the people who want some over the top gore will be bored by the attempts at being all artsy and atmospheric, which are as clumsy and hamfisted as I've ever seen. It pleases neither audience.

This is one of the worst movies I've ever reviewed on this site, and I feel very confident in saying I cannot see what anyone finds appealing about it. As a straightforward horror flick it’s a boring plod-along, but as an attempt at being anything else – anything with more atmosphere or cerebral satisfaction to its scares – it's just sad and a total waste of brain cells from everyone involved. Candyman can go right to hell and I am glad I will never have to sit through this crap again!

Images copyright of their original owners.