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Director Nia DaCosta ’s “ Candyman ” is being sold as a “spiritual sequel” to the 1992 horror classic starring Virginia Madsen and Vanessa Williams . This iteration ignores the two actual sequels to writer/director Bernard Rose ’s adaptation of a Clive Barker short story, instead picking up in present day Chicago. The Cabrini Green where Madsen’s Helen Lyle character met her grisly fate is no more; the towers have been torn down and the area’s being gentrified within an inch of its life. Had Lyle survived, she’d probably be living in a place like that of artist Anthony McCoy ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ). “White people built the ghetto,” says his girlfriend, Brianna ( Teyonah Parris ) to her brother, Troy ( Nathan Stewart-Jarrett ), “and then erased it when they realized they built the ghetto.” This is not the last we’ll hear about gentrification.

It’s Troy who brings new viewers up to speed, spinning the first film’s tragic story for his captive audience after warning them that where they live is haunted. “This is too much, even for you,” says his husband, Grady ( Kyle Kaminsky ) about the part featuring the decapitated Rottweiler. This sequence is done with the same type of shadow puppets used for “Candyman”’s teaser trailer. That effective short highlighted one of the major themes DaCosta and her co-writers Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld put into their script: the endless cycle of violence perpetrated on Black bodies by White supremacy and the system it created. This idea was baked into the 1992 version’s tale of Daniel Robitaille ( Tony Todd ), the original Candyman, but the focus was primarily on the White protagonist’s fate.

With Abdul-Mateen and Parris as the leads, the filmmakers are free to dig deeper into the legend and its parallels to the here and now. Their proxy is William ( Colman Domingo ), an old-timer we first see as a child puppeteer in 1977. He meets Anthony just after the latter hilariously jumps into the shadows to avoid a passing cop car. “Are they keeping us safe,” William asks, “or keeping us in?” Alluding to the press Helen Lyle received while numerous Black victims of Candyman remain unknown, William says “one White woman dies and the story lives forever.” This dovetails nicely with the Candyman legend—here’s an entity whose immortality can only be realized by having his name (and by extension, the memory of his tragedy) spoken into existence. The mirror element, a holdover from the old Bloody Mary urban legend, is a nice touch rife with symbolism. What do the victims see of themselves reflected before they literally get the hook?

Despite his disbelief in Troy’s story, Anthony is inspired to look into the history of his neighborhood in the hopes it will inspire some new paintings he can show at a gallery run by Clive Privler ( Brian King ). William provides an additional Candyman story based on his childhood run-in with a strange local man with a hook for a hand. Like Daniel Robitaille, he was brutally murdered by a mob of what passes for the law, then posthumously “cleared” of the crimes he was accused of committing. “Candyman” proposes that its monster lives on, imprisoned in his agony because this particular history keeps repeating itself. I was reminded of Oprah’s line in “Beloved,” where she says of the spirit haunting her house that “it ain’t evil. Just sad.” “Candyman isn’t a he,” William tells Anthony before warning him to stay away, “he’s the whole damn hive.”

“Dare to say his name” is this film’s tagline, intentionally echoing the rallying cry of the current movement against undue and lethal law enforcement. Horror has always been a conduit for this type of allegory, tucking that which we’re not supposed to discuss underneath the viscera and the unreality. “Candyman” acknowledges that the real world can be even more dangerous and horrifying than the supernatural. So, every time a character utters “say his name,” it immediately conjures up the emotional pain of the intended coincidence.

A more physical pain, however, awaits anyone foolish enough to say a specific name five times in a mirror. There’s a running joke about people not wanting to tempt fate by testing the urban legend. Thankfully, there are plenty of folks who have no such restrictions. One unfortunate couple learns that testing out urban legends does not make for good foreplay. And it doesn’t go unnoticed that minority characters tend to bypass certain doom by not succumbing to certain horror tropes. Brianna’s response to the idea of going down a dark basement staircase provides the film’s biggest laugh.

“Candyman” caters to fans of the original without sacrificing its own vision and story. Virginia Madsen briefly cameos (though not onscreen), as does Vanessa Williams, both in their original roles. I wouldn’t dare spoil the reasons for the latter, but the revelation shows just how well this tale is constructed. The rest of the cast give fine performances, with Abdul-Mateen standing out in an often difficult role. The actors also convince us of their relationships in a short amount of time, and it’s not just the one between Anthony and Brianna. Kaminsky and Stewart-Jarrett create an equally strong connection between their characters in a few scenes. Troy’s bond with his sister feels comfortably lived-in with its playful ribbing and genuine concern.

Jordan Peele has become the master of balancing the hard truths of being Black and brown in this country with a devilish predilection for goosing the audience the way good horror movies do. You can almost imagine that it was his idea to begin the film with Sammy Davis, Jr.’s cover of “The Candy Man” playing over backwards versions of the Universal and MGM logos. DaCosta’s visual style is a willing accomplice, as is the absolutely disgusting sound mix. She stages the kill scenes with a mix of pitch-black humor, misdirection, and clever framing, fully acknowledging that what you don’t see—or think you saw—can be a lot worse than what you did see. One well-staged murder scene takes place in a very wide shot as the camera pulls away, giving us the view of someone escaping just as the carnage occurs. Toss in some profoundly gross body horror plus a satisfying ending that nicely closes out its thesis statement, and we have the makings of a fun, thought-provoking time at the movies.

Only in theaters on August 26th.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Candyman (2021)

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Anthony McCoy

Teyonah Parris as Brianna Cartwright

Tony Todd as Candyman / Daniel Robitaille

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Troy Cartwright

Colman Domingo as William Burke

Vanessa Williams as Anne-Marie McCoy

• Nia DaCosta
• Jordan Peele
• Win Rosenfeld

Cinematographer

• John Guleserian
• Catrin Hedström
• Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe

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Review: Nia DaCosta stakes her claim with the terrifying and artful ‘Candyman’

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Skyscrapers loom out of the fog, drifting by upside down as if from the point of view of someone on a gurney, or perhaps as spectral presences occupying land that’s been stolen, developed, appropriated, allocated, gentrified and re-developed again. This is the Chicago of Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman,” a reboot/sequel to the 1992 horror film directed by Bernard Rose . DaCosta’s film builds upon the horrors imagined by the original, which introduced the terrifying imagery of a man with a hook, surrounded by bees, a monster forged in racist violence, a mysterious figure and an urban legend that gives meaning to the horrors of a ghetto manufactured by white supremacy.

DaCosta, who made her directorial debut with the remarkable abortion drama “Little Woods,” firmly announces herself as an artist at work with “Candyman,” a genuinely terrifying and artful horror film that speaks with a bell-clear voice to the current moment, the product of centuries of racist power structures. While the original centered a white woman in a story of the horrors of the African American experience (and indeed, the white woman is often an incendiary and complicit figure in such tales), DaCosta’s film, which she wrote with producers Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld, centers a Black man, an artist named Anthony McCoy ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ). Here, a black man occupies the space of both the villain and the victim, sliding between persecuted and monstrous identities — horror tropes as social commentary.

This “Candyman” functions best as a sequel, with the story of the original film acting as the inciting myth, the urban legend of the grad student who went to the ‘hood to learn about Candyman (rendered spookily with puppet silhouettes, an ongoing motif). It’s relayed as all scary stories are, an oral tradition passed on by candlelight, as told by Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) to his sister Brianna (Teyonah Parris) and her boyfriend Anthony during a dinner party. The story takes hold of Anthony, a painter struggling to find new inspiration, and he heads to the old housing projects of Cabrini-Green searching for anything he can find about the myth of Candyman. In this version, art takes the place of academia as a space for processing the mythology of the ghetto.

He finds it in William Burke ( Colman Domingo ), who tells him the tales he grew up with of an old man with a hook for a hand doling out candy, about the police violence he witnessed, the warning that if you say his name five times in the mirror, Candyman will appear. Armed with these tales, Anthony is inspired to create a mirrored piece titled “Say My Name,” though the white bourgeois art world isn’t so receptive. That world is soon rocked by a series of grisly, bloody murders as Anthony’s life begins to spin out of control, his reality a constant waking nightmare.

DaCosta crafts an eerie cinematic world that is anchored by a deeply harrowing and sorrowful performance by Abdul-Mateen, who begins to occupy a space like that of Frankenstein’s monster, of this world and a monster within it, as he delves deeper and deeper into the Candyman legend. A cool and creepy score by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe underlines the disquieting cinematography by John Guleserian, off-kilter angles that show Chicago from a strange and scary point of view, and seemingly normal interactions made menacing. Within this world, DaCosta weaves a tale of a mythical monster that is a product of racist violence, including police brutality. There’s power in a name, as seen in the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. As “Candyman” reminds us, say his name and incur the consequences, or, invoke his protection.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Rated: R, for bloody horror violence, and language including some sexual references Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes Playing: Starts Aug. 27 in general release

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Candyman review – knowing horror sequel

Nia DaCosta’s visually impressive take on the cult 1992 film gives it a meta art-world twist

I n Bernard Rose’s original 1992 horror film , a white female graduate student investigated the Candyman myth and the site of his haunting – Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project – as part of her research. Director Nia DaCosta’s smart, stylish “spiritual sequel”, co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, reimagines its protagonist as a Black artist. In this version, Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) mines creative inspiration from the tale of a killer ghost who appears when his name is uttered five times in the mirror.

DaCosta’s visual flair is apparent, from the way she details flesh turning to rotten honeycomb, to the visceral squelch of pressing open a wound. Candyman’s attacks are inventively mounted too, playing out in the reflections of floor-to-ceiling windows and a teenage girl’s compact mirror. Anthony says his paintings “focus on the body”, a self-conscious allusion to the way the director leans into body horror too.

The overall tone is one of wry knowingness, which is DaCosta’s achilles heel. A snotty white art critic (Rebecca Spence) coolly remarks that Anthony’s work takes “a pretty literal approach”. “OK, but how is it hitting you?” he responds, voicing an anxiety on behalf of the film-maker. Meanwhile Anthony’s girlfriend, a gallery owner named Brianna (Teyonah Parris), is praised for her “eye for new talent”, a nod to Peele’s patronage of DaCosta. This constant meta-commentary, and the tendency to anticipate criticism, eventually begins to grate.

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Candyman (2021) Review

27 Aug 2021

Candyman (2021)

The latest in a number of horror franchises that have received the ‘legacy-quel’ treatment — soft reboots that sweep aside what is viewed as messy and disposable canon (think David Gordon Green’s Halloween ) — Nia DaCosta ’s new take on Candyman directly continues the story of the original and most beloved entry in the series. The film revives Bernard Rose ’s 1992 cult horror, continuing its mythologising of buried, collective historical trauma in the form of its eponymous vengeful spirit, but also attempts to self-reflexively engage with the missteps of its predecessor. And where the original used gentrification and academia as a route into discussions of government-enforced social barriers, DaCosta builds upon how this has continued into the present day.

The film returns to a now-gentrified Cabrini Green, the location of the first film. Through a new art project, Anthony ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ) unwittingly unleashes the Candyman, who kills anyone who summons him by saying his name five times in a mirror. With her 2018 debut feature Little Woods , DaCosta has experience in navigating socio-economic boundaries and broken governmental systems with nuance. Candyman would seem a perfect continuation of her interests. It’s an interesting expansion on the character’s mythos, taking the stronger elements from its derided sequels — though anyone looking forward to seeing Tony Todd back in the role again might be disappointed. Where the first film used the spectre as a commentary on the demonisation of projects and council housing, DaCosta’s film is recalibrated as a response to the aftermath of such negligence, a reminder of who lived here before the fancy glass flats appeared. Further still, DaCosta, Get Out director Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld’s screenplay is also interesting in the ways in which it acts as a corrective to the messier parts of the ’92 Candyman that muddied its overall thesis, working to point the spirit’s vengeance and violence back towards his original oppressors. The original Candyman protagonist Helen’s role in the story is intentionally told through unreliable narrators, itself an urban legend in the context of this new film.

Nia DaCosta visually places the horror amongst the invasive architecture of gentrification.

This attempt to neaten up the meaning of its predecessor for a new audience is solid, but it then overcorrects, as every subsequent scene seems as though it contains a conversation detailing the revisionism. DaCosta’s film seems to pre-empt such critiques (amusingly, an obnoxious white art critic demeans Anthony’s work as didactic), but it doesn’t prevent the transformation of subtext into big, bold text that feels like a studio demanding some hand-holding. It feels like a similarly pre-emptive shield against misinterpretation, and it becomes stifling, not letting its performances do the work. Abdul-Mateen II and Colman Domingo , as a Cabrini Green resident still preaching the Candyman urban legend, are particularly magnetic, channelling deep sadness and rage like a spiritual possession, one that quite literally eats away at Anthony as his art and his engagement with historical traumas becomes an obsession. Teyonah Parris’ Brianna adds an intimate and personal connection to the film’s collective grieving, and its transformation into anger. Despite its lack of subtlety the scripting is frequently funny too, one highlight being a character wondering who would be fool enough to enact the catoptromancy that summons Candyman, before cutting to a group of white mean girls in a school bathroom.

It’s also visually compelling when it becomes less concerned with explaining itself. Cinematographer John Guleserian conjures discomfort from the sight of the shiny luxury apartments that have papered over the grime of the first film — the opening an unsettling mirror to the original Candyman ’s ominous overhead shots of high rises, turning them into otherworldly presences by shooting them from below and inverting the image. One of DaCosta’s finest touches is the intermittent shadow-plays recounting various urban myths, a nod to an oral tradition of storytelling that preserves the repeatedly decimated history of African Americans. While doing this, it reaches the existentially terrifying fatalism of its predecessor, in how it emphasises inevitable, continuing cycles of white supremacy and continuing inter-generational pain. Most presciently, for every story about Candyman, there’s one equally violent one about the Chicago PD that shortly follows it, their actions more unambiguously evil.

DaCosta visually places the horror amongst the invasive architecture of gentrification, the looming glass towers feeling as much of a threat as anything else in the film. One of the more memorable kills is portrayed in a long zoom out, dwarfing the victim in the window of their expensive apartment in a mixed-budget complex, the kind that Cabrini Green was replaced with. If the early stages of the film are too concerned with explaining the meaning of the Candyman himself, at least the consequences of his summoning are appropriately messy, both in the wince-inducing bloodshed and whom specifically it’s targeting, a collective vengeful anger unleashed on anyone who dares mention it in jest. It’s fun to see the spirit change from something stumbled upon to something summoned with purpose, in the genuinely pointed and provocative moments that conclude the film. It’s a shame, then, that just as it establishes a new identity, it’s done, its time cut short by its various stolid lectures.

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The Candyman Lives On

Nia DaCosta’s take on the 1992 horror classic finds new depths in an urban legend but drowns in its own innovation.

The 1992 original Candyman film, my favorite piece of horror cinema from that decade, is about an interloper. Helen Lyle (played by Virginia Madsen), a plucky, white graduate student researching urban legends in Chicago, is drawn to the city’s dilapidated Cabrini-Green projects , where she learns of a monster named the Candyman: a vengeful Black ghost who appears if you say his name five times while looking in a mirror. The movie becomes a tale of seduction and fascination. Helen’s academic interest evolves into something more personal and obsessive, until her need to understand a world that’s not her own eventually destroys her.

A slasher movie rife with gore but rich with metaphor, the original is also about the storytelling that goes into the horror genre. The Candyman, played by Tony Todd, is an imposing figure—a grandiose, hook-handed Dracula whose ribcage is filled with bees. But the legend around him, and his tragic history, is what gives him his power, and the director Nia DaCosta zeroes in on this notion for her sequel, also titled Candyman . The new film, out Friday, functions as a follow-up but also as an attempt to refresh the first movie’s mythos and expand its perspective.

DaCosta’s bold, stylish work overflows with ideas. It attempts to pay homage to Bernard Rose’s original, approach it from different angles, and critique it, all in the span of 91 minutes. DaCosta, who co-wrote the film with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld, had an exciting debut with her thriller Little Woods and is already working on a Marvel movie . Her talent is evident: She packs Candyman ’s running time with artfully staged set pieces and is admirably uninterested in making a straightforward retread. But as it reaches its bloody conclusion, this film drowns in its own innovation, losing sight of its most intriguing concepts in favor of more-familiar gory shocks.

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The protagonist of DaCosta’s Candyman is also an interloper of sorts: Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a visual artist who grows equally obsessed with the myth of Cabrini-Green’s hook-handed killer. He lives in the gentrifying neighborhood built atop the now-demolished projects with his girlfriend, Brianna (Teyonah Parris), an art-gallery director who encourages him to find new sources of inspiration for his work. Like Helen Lyle before him, he is pulled toward the Candyman, but this time the film’s tension doesn’t arise from a clash between academia and grim reality.

Instead, Anthony’s fascination develops into a sort of appropriation, as he turns the Candyman stories into a series of frightening artworks that evoke the trauma visited on Black men for generations. One of the pieces is a hinged mirror that opens to reveal a cavernous room filled with detritus, graffiti, and nightmarish imagery. It’s a nod to one of the most foreboding scenes in the original film, in which Helen discovers a makeshift shrine built in an abandoned Cabrini-Green home. DaCosta gives the reference a slick, artistic sheen, turning it into a clever bit of commentary on the way stories get remade and burnished as time passes.

Unlike Helen, Anthony is Black, but he also feels out of place in the neighborhood, and his discomfort at his perceived inauthenticity is apparent. He’s not from Cabrini-Green, he admits—he only lives in a fancy modern high-rise built on its ashes. He flinches when an art critic points out to him that artists are the original gentrifying force, encouraged by cities to move into “bad” neighborhoods and make them cool and alluring. DaCosta emphasizes Chicago’s changing landscape as much as she can—the original film’s opening credits show the city from the point of view of a camera flying overhead, but DaCosta depicts Chicago from below, gliding through its streets and gazing up at the skyscrapers.

Read: Who wants to watch Black pain?

Anthony’s growing artistic success based on the Candyman legend, of course, eventually summons the Candyman himself, and plenty of inventive murder sequences involving mirrors are sprinkled throughout the film. But narratively, I was most drawn to Anthony’s guilt over telling a story that isn’t his own, and the unsettling way in which the (mostly white) artistic community embraces him as the buzzy flavor of the month. In the original Candyman , the vengeful spirit reappears because Helen is discrediting his existence with her research; Anthony’s glib art feels like an echo of the same idea.

But then Candyman starts plumbing many other big concepts, chiefly the notion that many Candymen exist, each representing a Black man wronged by society at some point in history. Anthony’s pieces are titled “Say His Name,” a reference to the Candyman’s summoning ritual, but also a loaded invocation of the contemporary meaning of that phrase. The film simply doesn’t have enough time to offer more than glancing commentary on police brutality and institutional neglect while also trying to focus on the original movie’s thorny allegory and Anthony’s artistic troubles.

In the final, tragic act of the first Candyman , Todd plays the character as a Phantom of the Opera –esque villain, both horrifying and lovelorn. But in DaCosta’s movie, Anthony starts to transform into the creature himself, a script choice that serves only to sideline the film’s protagonist as he grows more zombified. By the end of this new Candyman , little personal investment remains for the audience, just a miasma of provocative thoughts failing to cohere into something greater. The film has enough visual panache to make it an involving watch, but it struggles to live up to the audaciousness of its deeper ideas.

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‘Candyman’: Yes, This Remake Is Brutal and Timely. But It Also Overreaches for Relevance

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

Be my victim. For the many who’ve seen it over the years, 1992’s Candyman remains an unforgettable, almost unforgivably effective grievance: a film whose terrors are sticky, dense, pleasurably warying, and uncomfortable; whose politics feel knowing and rife with intention, just this side of didactic, yet poisoned at the root by a premise that seemed, always, at risk of slipping somewhat beyond the film’s grasp. And yet that uncertainty remains one of its primary thrills, like watching a train careen toward a fork in the tracks with too much speed, too much force for cataclysm not to feel imminent. 

The story, you may remember. A curious white graduate student (Virginia Madsen) with an interest in urban legends (pun inescapably intended) wends her way into a corridor of Black American despair by way of Chicago’s ill-fated Cabrini-Green projects, which were once home to 15,000 residents and were, over the years, immortalized in popular culture by the giddy, hard-won vibes of the sitcom Good Times and, more urgently, by Cabrini’s firm foothold, in the public imagination, as a totem of everything wrong with public housing — a conversation that might have morphed into real public concern for the lives at stake in that place, in a city whose yawning history of errors toward race and housing have long been documented, but which instead became the terrain of political jockeying, the kind of bandying-about of blame (toward public-housing efforts, toward working-class Black people) that often left those lives forgotten. In wanders this young, book-smart blonde, with her intentions to understand (she is not a student of anthropology; nevertheless, she bears the stench of one) and her vulnerability to her own curiosity, her compulsion to dig where perhaps she oughtn’t. 

What does she find? The Candyman, of course: the American stain manifest. A villain played so memorably, so daringly, by the actor Tony Todd that this hook-handed villain, a monster lurking, literally, within the walls of those Cabrini-Green towers, would emerge more memorable for the things he said, the ways he was , than for the particulars of the murders committed. The movie sets him up, first, like an old-fashioned urban legend, a Bloody Mary-esque dare — S ay his name — that would bear the fruit of murder. But there’s that other subtext, too — S weets for the sweet . The man who above, candies in tow, seemed prone to luring children; that other kind of predator, the kind whose crimes a community reduces to whispers, silently making its way around the unspeakable as if he were a rock in the stream of their lives, better avoided than acknowledged. The terror of the man was that he was so many things at once — and that they all leant themselves to damning silence.

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Probably the least surprising thing about Nia DaCosta’s new Candyman is that it avails itself, not only of the legacy of its cinematic predecessor, but of the fate of Cabrini-Green in the interim , the efforts at so-called renewal that instead fell prey to de rigeur urban gentrification. The new Candyman is aware of that failure. It’s also aware that the upwardly mobile Black professional class is not blameless in sustaining it — and that the artists among that class are in a peculiar, double-edged position, trapped in the crosshairs of a predominately white art world that exploits the raw material of their lives while subject, for mobility’s sake, to participating in their own exploitation. 

So it goes in — and perhaps in the making of — DaCosta’s film, which stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Teyonah Parris as Anthony and Brianna, a gorgeous, well-off, art-world couple living in a condo built on the ashes of what used to be Cabrini-Green. He’s an ambitious artist in a creative rut; she’s a promising gallery director. And they were doing just fine until her brother (played Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) tried to scare them with the story of the Candyman — who isn’t real, of course, who’s just a rumor. Until he isn’t. From there begin terrors, which, in this iteration, co-written by DaCosta with producer Jordan Peele , takes the seed of one of the original movie’s social provocations — the Candyman as communal myth, an explanation for why Cabrini’s residents are so terrorized by the everyday that can also, when the cops show up, become the invisible scapegoat that leaves the actual residents blameless — and embeds it in a set of new, contemporary questions, about Black artists and the economy of white interest, about the egotism of class mobility, about police violence as we, especially over the past year and change, are prone to understanding it today.

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Which is to say: The movie’s got a lot going on. Too much, maybe, not least because its 1992 predecessor — which was based on a story by Clive Barker — was already tangled and overstuffed, attractive and repulsive, with ideas ricocheting from scene to scene that can, to this day, lure you in even as you want to hold the film at arm’s length. That movie, it’s worth remembering, used the power of Tony Todd’s singular, cutting figure, towering within the frame, delectably daring, to render the Candyman into not only an effective movie monster — for my money, one of the most disconcertingly charismatic and tempting since Bela Lugosi’s Dracula — but a symbol. Here was the afterlife of an aggravated racial history, a relic of the era of slavery, so uncanny that his mere presence in the present seemed to rip the stitches of a smoothed over, Franken-skinned history. Here was a racialized villain more terrifying for traversing the boundaries of his supposed place in the projects, popping up in white enclaves — outright summoned — as if to say that the problem of Black poverty could hardly be contained to the projects; here he was, luring a white woman into his coven of fear, tapping into that violent history, forcing us all to recognize how cogent and uncomfortable those optics were in the present. The question of whether that movie fully knew what to make of those optics is key to its discomfort.

Also key was its signature visual device, again the stuff of urban legend, but also, obviously, a ready-made social symbol: a mirror. Where do you go from there? What’s initially interesting about DaCosta’s movie is that its hero, Anthony, is a little hard to like, and that the franchise’s signature mirror, for this particular man, is both an opportunity — take a good, hard look at yourself, guy — and a curse. Anthony is complicated: a little full of himself, a little too willing to cop to the wrong demands. He’s an artist whose output has stalled somewhat, who isn’t making good on what white gallery owners see as his potential, until he effectively sells out and gives them what they want: a tour of Black pain, art about “race” — a taste of Cabrini-Green. At base, the film focuses on what begins to happen to Anthony after a visit to the old grounds Cabrini-Green results, partially, in some discoveries, but most notably in a bee sting which — Spiderman-style — begins to morph him into something he would rather not be. Or, perhaps, to expose what he doesn’t yet know that he already is. 

The new Candyman is absolutely aware of the ironies tucked into the linen of its premise, but it doesn’t quite make good on the full satirical potential of what’s at stake, even as it nudges its way there in its deliberately sterile, nearly goofy portrait of the white art world, white critics, white consumption, and Anthony’s willingness to play along. Anthony, having gone digging into the history of Cabrini after hearing about the Candyman, makes an installation called “Say His Name,” in which he dares his audience to do precisely this, into a panel of mirrors, behind which lies a cavern of haunts and images and, well, the promise of a bloody payoff. Anthony doesn’t know, at first, about that last part — it’s just a story, he’s trying to highlight the history of injustice, yadda-yadda. Suffice it to say, he grows hip to the consequences. And DaCosta’s Candyman , at its most conceptually (if not dramatically) intriguing, finds ways to tie those consequences to Anthony’s identity as an artist. There is a price to be paid for the ease with which Anthony exploits Black trauma in his art, and it plays out in so many ways, but most garishly in the transformations that begin to overtake Anthony himself. 

The most memorable scenes of DaCosta’s Candyman are the moments of actual, graphic, repulsive horror — the skin-peeling, rotting, dead-yet-alive uncanniness, the gross-out gore, the willingness to mix a conceptual vision with a powerful reliance on the basics: mirrors, negative space in the frame, the essentials of run-of-the-mill human dread. Unfortunately for many of us, the bees — those goddamned bees — are back, and their body horror theatrics are further heightened here, mostly to promising effect. As if taking its cues from The Fly , Anthony’s bite becomes a more vibrant, viscous, tortured sort of wound, and begins to spread, a change to the body that’s reflected in the changes in Anthony’s mind.

What’s scary in Candyman is the stuff that makes any good horror movie scary: simply put, the basics. But Candyman is too aware of the legacy of its predecessor’s premise. In trying to wrestle with that premise, the movie falls right into its own traps where the original toed a curious line; it overreaches, most prominently for relevance, to the point of raising questions about whether the movie understands its own, initially provocative, questions. It sets up quite a rabbit hole for Anthony to leap into, one that leads to flickers of insight — among them, the idea that violence against Black people, such as that which created the Candyman in the first place, can hardly be limited to one man, one spectacular incident of violence. 

But the movie persists to get in its own way with each new layer of fabricated revelation. Rough backstories, by way of flashbacks and strained connections, crop up without much satisfaction. Historical echoes grow dimmer with each reverberation. Candyman wants to update its predecessor by moving us back into the realm of Black lives contra the original film’s dependence on white fear. But that wisdom keeps meeting its match in hamfisted plays for relevance, immediacy — flaws that have a ring of familiarity, not to DaCosta’s work, in light of which Candyman plays like a promising step forward, a new bag of tricks from a filmmaker whose talent is well worth keeping an eye on. The movie’s most mitigating flaws instead feel in line with the work of its producer, Jordan Peele, whose Get Out has led to a veritable subgenre of Black-centered horror which, as epitomized by Peele’s own productions, particularly Twilight Zone and Lovecraft Country , has reached a point of diminishing returns, whittling the basic, satisfying schtick of his work down to the bone. Get Out was cleverly marketed as a “social thriller,” knowingly putting itself in conversation with horror movies of the 1992 Candyman ’s stripe, movies like Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs , which tempered the usual jumpy thrills with a dose of satire. Those influences weren’t unique for mixing horror with the social dilemmas of their time — horror’s entire bag has, for quite some time, been in its ability to move what society relegates to the shadow’s right into the spotlight, making the dreadful, the unspeakable, unignorable. 

To capitalize on this tradition with a sense of novelty is already somewhat suspect. But it’s also what has made Peele’s canon the phenomenon that it is. Get Out ’s success guaranteed reiteration. And DaCosta’s Candyman , which feels strongest when it feels most hers , is a movie at odds with itself, accordingly, a clash between a solid horror spectacle with some social-dilemma strings attached, on the one hand, and a try-hard grab for too much, on the other. If your response to the phrase  “Say my name” is to notice how uncomfortably close it is to the activist slogans of recent memory, the public outcries over police violence against Black people, you’re not alone: The movie is — damningly, to purposes that ultimately undo the movie with a muddle of symbols and an abandonment of coherence — one step ahead of you. 

Candyman is more of a mixed bag than a failure, but what’s disappointing isn’t the fact of its ambition: It’s the outcome. Scenes overstuffed with ideas compete for screen time with the moments in which it seems to remember, all of a sudden, that it’s a horror movie. A standout example is a school-bathroom slaughter late in the movie, involving utter non-characters, that amounts to a whole bunch of nothing, just a bit of gore on the way to the next thing. By this point it’s already clear that the film could not possibly resolve itself in a way that makes its ideas as forceful as they’re straining to be. Yet nor can it be denied that the movie goes for broke in its final scenes, anyway, rightly aware that making sense scene by scene may matter less, when you’re already in too deep, than driving home the prevailing point. 

But the point becomes something of an unfortunate movie target. And the movie falls apart when the questions on its mind come into dire conflict with its own methods of representation — a police shootout late in the film being a case in point. The Candyman of 2021 — which has an extended cast that includes new faces to the franchise, like the great Colman Domingo, as well as a few returning faces, like Vanessa E. Williams — takes its jumble of ideas, from the art world agita to the Pet Semetary vibe of its gentrification themes, to the pure and simple fact of Anthony’s ego, and pulls at the thread… and keeps pulling… until what emerges largely amounts to something of a mess. What the movie’s effortful attempts at symbolism and meaning do most effectively are undercut what’s smart about the questions it raises — and DaCosta’s fine hand at creeping us out. The movie wants to be more than it is. The result is that it winds up amounting to less than it could have been.

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‘Candyman’ Review: Nia DaCosta Crafts a Wry, Ambitious, Occasionally Frustrating Reimagining of the Horror Icon

DaCosta’s legacyquel takes some big swings and makes for a largely chilling and thoughtful new vision.

1992’s Candyman has its opening credits looking down on the city of Chicago. It glides over the streets, separate, implying a malevolent force floating over the landscape, looking for its next victim, which it will find in protagonist Helen Lyle ( Virginia Madsen ). Nia DaCosta ’s legacyquel of the same name chooses to have its opening credits take a similar route but instead of floating above, it floats below, looking up at the looming landscape, which provides not only a dreamlike quality, but also implies that the malevolent force is already here, among us, and part of these surroundings.

Turning the original Candyman on its head is one of the best things DaCosta’s version does, recognizing the shortcomings and strengths of the original and repositioning them into a story about racial violence and a desire for Black power. As Candyman moves towards its climax, you can see that the film is perhaps so overloaded with ideas that it starts to collapse under their weight, and yet you can’t help but admire the ambition that DaCosta and co-writers Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld have brought to this new telling of the supernatural slasher.

After a brief prologue in 1977 where we see the police murder a Black man in the Chicago projects of Cabrini-Green, we fast-forward to 2019 and meet Anthony McCoy ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ), a struggling artist who was branded as a wunderkind, but now is seen as washed-up and largely mooching off his curator girlfriend Brianna ( Teyonah Parris ). When gallery owner Clive ( Brian King ) pushes Anthony to develop some new pieces, Anthony reluctantly suggests something based off an urban legend he heard surrounding the projects and a figure known as “Candyman”. An excited Clive, looking for work that will profit off Black pain, gives Anthony the greenlight and early in Anthony’s research he meets William ( Colman Domingo ), who witnessed the 1977 murder as a young boy. As Anthony gets sucked further into the urban legend of Candyman—a specter who comes with a swarm of bees, a hook for a hand, and who will kill you if you say his name in the mirror five times—a series of bizarre killings start springing up and Anthony realizes that Candyman may not only be real, but also his destiny.

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For all its strengths ( Tony Todd ’s performance, Philip Glass ’ score, introducing a Black supernatural slasher), 1992’s Candyman can be an uneven film, and nowhere is that clearer in how it wants to paint both Lyle as white savior interloper bringing death and destruction wherever she goes, yet also as innocent object of purity, thus playing into the racist trope that Black men seek to prey on white women. Writer-director Bernard Rose ’s adaptation of Clive Barker ’s short story “The Forbidden” seems more concerned with how urban legend can subsume you into them, whereas in DaCosta’s version, that’s only one thread of many that she and her fellow writers are attempting to tie together.

DaCosta’s Candyman is a big bundle of bold ideas ranging from Black artistry to the legacy of lynching to racial justice (or lack thereof) to the nature of legacyquels. It can make for a lot, and some may be a bit irked that Candyman spends a large portion of its runtime with characters explaining mythology to each other and discussing ideas rather than getting to grisly kills. Candyman isn’t particularly scary, but it is unnerving because the horrors it seeks to addresses are far more real than a ghost who is full of bees and has a hook for a hand. And yet there’s also some darkly comic bits here, particularly with how those discussions lead to an inquiry into how Black art is perceived, especially from white audiences.

“They love our work,” William says to Anthony at one point, “but they don’t love us.” It’s hard to see Candyman as just another cash-grab legacyquel when you have Black artists like DaCosta and Peele who have made acclaimed works like Little Woods and Get Out , respectively, and you see them diving headfirst into an artistic debate about how they can tell Black stories to a white audience that, like Clive, is only interested in the Black narrative if it revolves around pain and suffering. That then becomes a problem that Candyman is trying to solve—how do you make this a tale of empowerment when the mythos, a mythos you’re purposefully tying to the 1992 movie, is one of Black pain? How do you make Candyman not a villain, but perhaps an anti-hero, a necessary evil of a world that has committed countless and endless atrocities against the Black community?

Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that DaCosta’s Candyman isn’t entirely successful at solving this riddle by trying to have it both ways where the figure of Candyman is both one of terrible consequence and also avenging power. And yet the richness that DaCosta has brought here makes that only one thread you could pull on with this movie. Candyman works more often than not because it’s a film with a lot on its mind and DaCosta’s direction is so astoundingly confident that it’s able to glide through a wealth of ideas without ever playing as pretentious. For a movie where every discussion feels like it’s about the origins of Candyman, it’s also a film with both a sense of humor and even heart thanks to the strong performances Mateen and Parris.

The biggest problem with Candyman is that every thread seems to come up a little short. You look at the film as a legacyquel, and while it’s neat to see how they find a way to link back to the story of Helen Lyle and even work in the original Candyman, who was so memorably played by Todd, you still get the stumbles of showing how Anthony is related to that story, which feels a bit contrived, pat, and frankly unnecessary beyond the legacyquel’s implicit demands that everything tie together. Or you try to follow what the film is saying about Black pain being exploited for artistic gain, and you have the awkward backstory involving Brianna’s father, which feels far too briefly introduced to really land an impact. Even the art world jibs may strike some as off and more fitting with a film like Velvet Buzzsaw than the examination of white and Black art Candyman attempts.

And yet when the film hits a target, you can feel it in your bones. Candyman is never more on point than when it’s repositioning the Candyman urban legend as one not of urban fears, but of white arrogance. What DaCosta and her co-writers see in Candyman is not a story about white people in 2019 being “afraid” of Black people, but rather that their pain should serve as amusements. As a white critic, I’ll leave it to others to say whether Candyman is engaging in what it seeks to critique, but personally I felt it a fairly effective criticism. The white characters seek to be titillated by Candyman, so they don’t respect it as an entity, and their white privilege is treated as a cloak of immunity that then the Candyman figure gleefully slashes apart along with all their major organs. It’s the most direct criticism the film is making, but it’s also the most fun.

I find it hard to seriously fault a film like Candyman when its greatest sin of one of ambition. It could have been another simple slasher sprinkled with some simplistic social commentary. Instead, DaCosta’s movie reaches for much more than that, and if the commentary is sometimes beyond the film’s grasp, I admire that it at least made the swing rather than settle for the safety of cheap thrills and jump scares. 1992’s Candyman is a film that feels like a good start but lacking a full handle on the themes it’s attempting to explore. The new Candyman is far more clearheaded on its goals, and with DaCosta’s surehanded filmmaking, it makes for an enriching, spooky, and powerful experience. Candyman shows a respect for the character that gives him new life and new possibilities, so maybe it would be wise to take his name out of your mouth if you’re standing in front of a mirror.

Candyman opens in theaters on August 27th.

KEEP READING: ‘Candyman’ Featurette Looks at the Art Created for the Film and the Artists Behind Them

‘Candyman’ Review: A Slasher Movie with a Sharper Social Edge Than the Original

Director Nia DaCosta deepens the 1992 cult slasher film by updating it to our own days of rage.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ Candyman ,” the 1992 slasher movie starring Tony Todd as a vengeful specter in a floor-length fur-lined coat, with a hook for a left hand and a devoted swarm of killer bees, was an urban-legend horror film that was ahead of its time but also, just maybe, a little too much of its time. Todd’s scowling ripper started off as an enslaved person’s son, Daniel Robitaille, who in the late 1800s was a successful artist. But then he had a relationship (and fathered a child) with a wealthy white ingenue whose portrait he’d been commissioned to paint. Her father hired a lynch mob to go after him. The mob tore off his hand and covered him in honey, and a swarm of bees stung him to death. Candyman is the violent ghost he became.

That’s a potentially incendiary premise, but in 1992, amid a swarm of boilerplate sequels featuring Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees, each of whom came with his own sadomasochistic backstory, “Candyman,” directed by the English filmmaker Bernard Rose (and adapted from a Clive Barker short story), adhered a little too closely to the stylized tropes of the slasher film. The fact that Candyman would be summoned if you said his name five times played as the kind of storybook megaplex device (“One two, Freddy’s coming for you…” ) designed to prime the audience for shock cuts. The movie worked, but like too many slasher films of the time it was more sensational than haunting.

But now “Candyman” has been remade, by the director Nia DaCosta (I’m pleased to report that Tony Todd is back — he looks a little bit older, and a lot more venerable in his grin of unspeakable pain), and what she has done is to make a horror movie that has its share of enthralling shocks, but one that’s rooted in a richer meditation on the social terror of the Candyman fable. The new “Candyman” references the plot of the original as a sinister fanfare of shadow puppets, as if to say, “That was mythology. This is reality.” It’s less a “slasher film” than a drama with a slasher in the middle of it.

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It stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II , the actor who just about seared a hole in the screen as Bobby Seale in “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” and Abdul-Mateen gives as searching a performance as you’re likely to see in a movie that’s a voluptuous pageant of fear and gore. He plays Anthony McCoy, an aspiring artist who grew up in the Cabrini-Green housing projects of Chicago, which is where much of the original “Candyman” took place. He hasn’t just heard the legend; he was taken by Candyman as a child. And now, as he prepares a new set of work for a group show that’s being organized by his girlfriend, Brianna (Teyonah Parris), who works for Clive (Brian King), a hipster gallery owner who’s the person in the movie you most want to see die in a fancy way (the film does not disappoint), Anthony looks to the Candyman as an inspiration to leave aesthetic safety behind and create a work that’s daring enough to be true.

The art-world setting allows DaCosta, who co-wrote the film with Win Rosenfeld and Jordan Peele (who is one of the producers), to offer a deft satire of gentrification, with the Cabrini-Green projects paved over — and the knowledge of American economic apartheid they represent buried right along with them. At the gallery show, Anthony’s featured piece is a mirrored installation that, if you look closely enough, contains images of horror from the past; but if you don’t look closely, you’ll just see yourself. (That’s a great metaphor for liberal myopia.) The name of the piece is “Say My Name,” and that’s a disquieting joke — because, of course, it’s a Candyman reference that plays off the rhetorical fire of our own time, in a way that suggests that confronting racial demons isn’t as simple as “acknowledging” the crimes against Black people that have happened on a daily basis. The movie says: You can acknowledge the injustice — but what happens to the rage? “Candyman” presents the return of the repressed for an era that wants to pretend it’s no longer repressing things.

One reason this “Candyman” never feels like a formula slasher film, even during the murders, is that DaCosta stages them with a spurting operatic dread that evokes the grandiloquent sadism of mid-period De Palma. When four young women prepsters stand before the school bathroom mirror and say “Candyman” five times, it’s as if they’re acting out what they think is their privilege; their deaths come at us in a way that’s just oblique enough to get you to imagine the worst. And when a know-it-all art critic (Rebecca Spence) receives her own ghastly comeuppance, DaCosta shoots it from an elegant distance that heightens the horror.

Mad slashers in movies are technically villains, and then, if they hang around long enough (i.e., for enough sequels), they turn into ironic franchise heroes; they’re the icons you want to see. But the whole premise of “Candyman” is that Candyman, from the start, is a supremely un -mad slasher. He’s a walking historical corrective, throwing the violence of white America back in its face. It’s Anthony, the film’s hero, who turns into its most haunting figure. He gets stung by a bee, creating a wound on his hand that starts to grow and rot, spreading over his body, until by the end he’s become a shattering image of what racial violence looks like when it begins to eat you up from the inside. In “Candyman,” there’s plenty of horror, but none of it is as disturbing as the true-life horror that can make people feel like they’re ghosts of the past.

Reviewed at Bryant Park Screening Room, New York, August 18, 2021. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 91 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures, Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures release, in association with BRON Creative, of a Monkeypaw production. Producers: Ian Cooper, Win Rosenfeld, Jordan Peele. Executive producers: David Kern, Aaron Gilbert, Jason Cloth.
• Crew: Director: Nia DaCosta. Screenplay: Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, Nia DaCosta. Camera: John Gulerserian. Editor: Catrin Hedström. Music: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe.
• With: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Tayonah Parris, Tony Todd, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Colman Domingo, Brian King, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Rebecca Spence, Kyle Kaminsky, Vanessa Estelle Williams.

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Candyman review: An uneven horror sequel with a few new hooks

Who can take a reboot, sprinkle it with something new, cover it with blood and bumblebees and a pointed social commentary or two? Candyman can, at least for a little while, even if the movie doesn't really find its more-than-body-horror groove in the end.

The long-delayed sequel to the cult 1992 original certainly comes with a shiny updated pedigree: a script co-penned by Jordan Peele ; a smart young cast that includes Teyonah Parris ( WandaVision ) and Yahya Abdul Mateen II ( Watchmen , The Trial of the Chicago 7 ); a whiz-kid director, Nia DaCosta (following her 2018 indie debut, Little Woods , she's set to helm next year's MCU tentpole The Marvels ). There's even a moment midway through where Parris' Brianna, frantic to escape a booby-trapped room, finds a stairway to a dank unlit basement and simply says, "No." There may be death waiting for her up there on the ground floor, but at least she won't go down like a midnight-movie cliché.

It's hard not to wish for more of that kind of prickly self-awareness in a film (in theaters this Friday), which otherwise rests most of its premise on characters acting exactly like the kind of well-trod archetypes that scene references: The Ones Who Fail to Realize They're In a Scary Movie. If only they could hear Sammy Davis Jr. singing the titular song over the opening credits until his voice melts and distorts like a Dali clock, at least a few of them might have had a clue what they're in for: the man, the myth, the hook.

As it is they're mostly just upwardly mobile Chicagoans living their best young-bourgeoisie lives — like gallery director Brianna (Parris), and her artist boyfriend Anthony (Mateen II) who've recently moved into a spacious loft on the city's once-shabby industrial side, despite tart lectures from her brother (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) on the long history of gentrification. Suffering from painter's block, Anthony wanders into the shuttered Cabrini-Green housing projects nearby and finds inspiration in the stories of an improbably friendly resident ( Zola 's Colman Domingo ): campfire tales steeped in lore of a local eccentric with a hook for a hand and a habit of trailing honeybees behind him as he passes out candy to children. Summon him by saying his name five times in a mirror and he'll wreak 10 times what was done to him, once upon a time.

The Candyman-inspired work that an increasingly obsessive Anthony installs at Briana's latest opening provides the mirror and the means to resurrect him; several doomed meatbags almost immediately comply. There's some satisfying schadenfreude in watching gallery snobs and mean-girl high schoolers get disemboweled for being dumb enough to court death so breezily, but there's nothing new or shocking about their pulpy ends either. And as much care as Peele and Co. take to underscore the role of Blackness and justice and the basic struggle just be seen and acknowledged as a human being — Say His Name, pointedly, is the movie's tagline — those ideas are never fully explored or integrated into the standard slash-and-burn march of the plot.

That leaves roughly 90 minutes to watch these incongruous aims bob and weave into each other's lanes: the squishy bits of jump-scare butchery bumping up against the sharper edges of sociopolitical currency. (There are echoes too of another recent experiment in zeitgeist-y art-world horror, 2019's Velvet Buzzsaw ). Which is more than enough time to fill a bucket with bees and gore, but too brief to play out the intriguing tease of what the movie's deeper, truer terrors might have been. Grade: B -

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Candyman Is a Soulless, Didactic Reimagining

It’s a familiar scenario rippling through history: White people turned on, revved up, and outright libidinal in the face of Black suffering and Black death. In this case, the scenario involves a curator and the nominally alternative assistant he’s sleeping with, who speaks in Joy Division lyrics and clichés. They’re in a slick but tinny art gallery, after hours, somewhere in Chicago’s West Loop, although there is nothing here that would cue you to the midwestern location. She buckles him to her belt. They kiss and grind against each other with sloppy hunger in front of a small mirror as the hushed lighting of the gallery flicks between cherry red, icy blue, and the cool gray of projected images. But it isn’t just any mirror. It’s an art piece by Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) that, when opened, reveals paintings representing in blunt terms police violence and lynchings, in which Black people turn into Black bodies to be filed away.

The mirror is an invitation for horror and transformation, potential all mirrors carry. “Candyman,” she says between kisses, speaking the name of an urban legend, bringing it into reality. She repeats the name, the invocation, this spell, a total of five times. It’s then that a figure can be glimpsed in the corner of the mirror. A hulking Black man with a hook for a hand and features that remain in shadow. With a single stroke, seen only in the glass and not in the flesh, this supernatural figure slits the woman’s throat. “Is this real?” her confused partner heaves as he holds onto her body, blood springing from her jugular in a swift arc. He tries to escape the same fate, at the hand of a killer whose visage ripples across reflective surfaces. There’s slit throats, concussed heads, ripped tendons, and copious amounts of blood in the scene, yet it fails to pierce the skin of the viewer. The timing is off. The gore is too deliberately placed to carry the fury necessary. There is no tension, no artistry, no silken grace nor grimy texture to be found. It’s glossy to the point of being featureless. Like the film it’s housed in, this scene glides over intriguing ideas — the white desire born from witnessing Black suffering — but never grapples with the full weight of them.

It’s hard to parse exactly what went so wrong without knowing details about the production of Candyman, the Nia DaCosta–helmed and Jordan Peele–co-written continuance/reimagining of the 1992 film of the same name. The trailers and marketing held so much promise, the tagline “Say His Name” evoking history and communal fury. (We said “Say her name” about Breonna Taylor before her image appeared on glossy magazine covers, fuel for a capitalist system that betrayed her and her memory.) But as the art-gallery scene demonstrates, this Candyman misunderstands the allure of the original and has nothing meaningful to say about the contemporary ideas it observes with all the scrutiny of someone rushing through a Starbucks order on their way to work. Candyman is the most disappointing film of the year so far, limning not only the artistic failures of the individuals who ushered it to life, but the artistic failures of an entire industry that seeks to commodify Blackness to embolden its bottom line.

The ’92 Candyman, written and directed by Bernard Rose, is an unnerving, sometimes outright frightening masterwork. Based on a story by Clive Barker, who also is responsible for the source material of the Hellraiser films, the film effortlessly blends eroticism with the macabre. While Virginia Madsen plays the lead, an ingratiating, ambitious graduate student Helen Lyle, it’s Tony Todd as the titular villain that proves to be a crucial reason for why the film endures. Yes, its interrogation of Chicago’s history with gentrification remains vital and fascinating. Yes, the kills are well-paced and evocative. Yes, the production design is dense and sensual. But Todd’s magnetic performance beckons and beguiles. His Candyman, while brutal, is also seductive. He doesn’t so much say Helen’s name but purrs it, drawing out vowels and consonants until they have a music of their own. He glides as he walks. His gaze is direct. He isn’t a simple slasher or wisecracking murderer — he’s an emblem of all that America loves to forget: the blood and bodies necessary to keep the lie of the American dream alive.

But there’s also a contradiction to this Candyman. He gets his power from the perpetuation of his legend, which requires fresh kills. Yet why would the vengeful spirit of a Black man — Daniel Robitaille, a painter and son of a slave, who fell in love and got a white woman pregnant, and who was then beaten and tortured, his hand sawn off, slathered in honey, stung by bees, and set on fire, all on the land that would become Chicago’s infamous Cabrini–Green projects — choose to terrorize Black people so viciously? Maybe he’s an equal-opportunity killer, but there’s something about this logic that’s always snagged me. DaCosta, Peele, and their collaborators seemingly sought to iron out this contradiction. 2021’s Candyman is not just the spirit of Todd’s Daniel Robitaille but of an entire legion of Black men killed viciously by white, state violence, who act as vengeful spirits more keen to harm white folks than the Black folks whose land their spirits are now tied to. (The film contradicts its own logic, though, when one of the Candymen kills a dark-skinned Black girl in flashback.) Instead of a suave yet brutalizing sole figure haunting your every moment, these Candymen are nowhere to be seen in the flesh, only in the mirrors used to summon them, perhaps a spiritual echo to Ralph Ellison’s work. Something is lost without a figure like Todd, but the ideas here have merit, if only the artists involved had an inkling for what to do with them.

Anthony McCoy (a surprisingly deadened Abdul-Mateen) is the picture of what has been largely marketed as Black excellence. He lives in the slick high-rises that have replaced Cabrini–Green’s projects with his assimilationist art-curator girlfriend, Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris). He’s hungry and desperate for new material. He was once considered the “great Black hope of the Chicago art scene,” which he’d like to remain. When he’s told the legend of Helen Lyle — rendered here in cutouts and shadow play that feel more inventive than anything else in the film, but too haphazardly deployed to fully capture the viewer — by Brianna’s brother, Troy (a grating Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), Anthony finds himself tumbling down a dark path. He may be an artist, but his story is clearly mapped onto Helen’s. He moves like her — an interloper and anthropologist picking over the remains of other people’s lives. Although the only actual poor character you hear from in this story rooted in the Cabrini–Green community is William (a jittery, arch Colman Domingo), whose younger self appears in flashbacks at different points of the film.

After getting a bee sting at the site of the Cabrini–Green projects, it isn’t just Anthony’s mind that unravels as he descends further and further into the folklore of Candyman, but his body too. The sting becomes a wound that oozes and crackles, traveling up his arm until he’s covered in stings. If you know the original, it becomes clear long before any “twist” that this film isn’t a reimagining so much as a remixed continuation. Sometimes the film dips into Brianna’s point of view as she grapples with the discovery of bodies at the art gallery, reminding her of the trauma of witnessing her schizophrenic father’s death by suicide (a detail that feels copy-and-pasted from an earlier version of the script rather than fully integrated into this story). But such a scattered approach is hemmed in by Parris herself — a stunning woman but a middling actress that DaCosta fails to shape well. (Parris will be directed by DaCosta again in the behemoth Captain Marvel sequel, The Marvels , which is only the director’s third film.)

Candyman lacks energy and inventiveness. Its screenplay is remarkably didactic, showing that it was intended neither for an audience of diehard horror fans nor Black people. Every intriguing plot point — the Candy men , the Invisible Man ethos — is squandered by pedestrian direction, facile thought, and a craven commodification of Blackness. In trying to reckon with the contradictions of the ’92 film, as well as carve out their own work, DaCosta and her collaborators have created a misfire that can’t make its tangle of politics — about gentrification, the Black body (horror), racism, white desire — feel either relevant or provocative. When Blackness is whittled down, this is the kind of poor cultural product we are sold.

Candyman tells you loudly from the jump what it thinks you should hear. “White people built the ghetto then erased it when they realized they built the ghetto,” Brianna says, with all the finesse of a first rehearsal. At another point, William tells Anthony, “They love what we make but not us.” Such lines aren’t only dry as hell, they’re a tell. The film can’t run from the fact that it was created with a white audience in mind, full of explanations and blunt language for things Black people already understand on a molecular level.

There’s another strange line, uttered by a white art critic cruelly and stereotypically judging Anthony’s work at the gallery. “It speaks in didactic media clichés about the ambient violence of the gentrification cycle,” she says. “Your kind are the real pioneers of that cycle.” When Anthony asks who the hell she’s referring to, she counters, “Artists.” It’d be one thing if DaCosta left that commentary there, but it becomes a through-line where Black gentrifiers are equated with white ones, as if they hold the same sort of power to alter their surroundings and flatten the culture of a place and community. In making Anthony’s story so much like Helen’s — to the point that he almost retraces her journey, even listening to her old recordings about the communal need for folklore to explain the violence of their lives in Cabrini–Green — the film treads queasy territory. Helen was a tourist and Anthony is positioned as one too, even though by the end of the film it is evident he isn’t that so much as an unaware prodigal son returning home. This is the molten core of the film — confused politics intertwined with juvenile artistry in which a meaningful conversation about gentrification is imagined without the prominent voices of those harmed by it.

Horror has always been political, best when it lets images and characters and sonic dimensions speak to a certain work’s integral concerns. But Candyman moves in a way that speaks to this moment in both Black filmmaking in Hollywood and the so-called “prestige” horror boom, in which its creators can’t find a political message they won’t hit you over the head with until you’re as bloody and begging for release as the characters onscreen. If the original heaves and breathes with ripe contradictions and precise aesthetic compositions, DaCosta’s sputters and fizzles.

And how in the hell do you make Yahya Abdul-Mateen II uncharismatic? I’ve complained about the lack of potent talent in the younger crop of actors on the come up in Hollywood before, most of whom have graduated from the Go Girl Give Us Nothing School of Acting. Abdul-Mateen isn’t one of them. He’s a force, and not just because he is traffic-stopping fine as hell — a fact the filmmakers realize, granting us a multitude of shots of Yahya rocking little beyond a pair of boxers. On paper, casting Abdul-Mateen makes a lot of sense. His booming voice, physical presence, and training make him a worthy heir to Todd. But the script and direction fail him repeatedly, leading to a remarkably thinly drawn performance showcasing no interior life, which further hobbles the unearned closing of the film. The film postures as if it wants to critique the ways Black trauma is commodified and made successful in the realm of art, then does the very same thing. When it needs to demonstrate Anthony’s mental unraveling, the film calls upon clichés about mad geniuses. Black people are continuously vexed by inner and outer forces, which makes the braiding together of Black madness and horror written upon a Black man’s body so apt. But in Candyman, madness is prosaic. It’s a spectacle — all tongues lolling, eyes wild — not a lived experience. In Candyman , the filmmakers are interested in the Black body but not the soul and mind that animates it.

Specificity, particularly in a film such as this, isn’t just about a people, but a place. And Chicago is essential to the Candyman story. The image of its downtown skyline juxtaposed with the rot of remaining slums is a visual tic the film relies on but doesn’t rightfully build upon. At one point, a haughty Truman Capote–looking art purveyor dubs the city “provincial,” which wouldn’t be so annoying if it were clear the filmmakers disagreed. Candyman ’s Chicago is wiped of the down-home rhythms, vernacular, and stylings that make it distinct. The city is rendered here as nowhere, New York lite — all primarily anonymous skyscrapers and interiors. Like so much in the film, geography is hampered by poor framing, pacing, tension, narrative evolution, and color-palette choices by DaCosta, cinematographer John Guleserian, and editor Catrin Hedström. A film such as this should grab hold of your heart, make your skin prickle, cause you to sit at the edge of your seat in panicked fascination. Instead, it glides over you like water rushing over a passing pebble, leaving little mark at all, save for when the didacticism sets in again.

At this point, we need to have a conversation about Jordan Peele’s creative efforts outside of his direction, which I’m admittedly cool on. Between producing the abominable Twilight Zone refashioning and the sloppy and at times offensive Lovecraft Country , and having a hand in writing Candyman , it’s clear that Peele knows a lot about the genres he’s moving through but lacks the ability to bring them to life with the vigor and talent necessary. For her part, DaCosta did indeed demonstrate a steadiness and emotional curiosity in her 2018 debut film Little Woods . It made me eager to see where she would go. But in Candyman, there’s not a trace of DaCosta’s voice, let alone that of any vibrant artist with a sure perspective. It’s perhaps a result of studios catapulting fresh talent from small independent pictures to bigger IP-related projects, skipping the now-nonexistent mid-budget work where stars were traditionally made and directors honed their vision. Candyman augurs Hollywood’s bleak future and what works it will green-light, especially from Black artists. There’s an added edge to how studios seek to commodify Blackness and, in a marked change from previous decades, how Black directors are hired to do it. Here, our feverish desire for change, encouraged by the uprisings of last year, is sanded off and resold as progress for the price of a movie ticket.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Update on classic horror tale is both scary and important.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

It may take more than one viewing to grasp all the

Some characters have achieved success, but no one

Positive representation of Black characters, showi

Lots of blood and gore. Characters sliced up with

A couple kiss and cuddle affectionately. Shirtless

Frequent strong language includes "f--k," "s--t,"

Mentions of Zillow, Whole Foods.

Adults drink wine socially, at dinner. Drinking be

Parents need to know that Candyman is a follow-up (but not a reboot or a direct sequel) to the 1992 movie, which was based on Clive Barker's short story. Directed by Nia DaCosta and co-written and co-produced by Jordan Peele, the movie takes a progressive approach to themes raised in the original -- including…

Positive Messages

It may take more than one viewing to grasp all themes raised, from gentrification to artistic appropriation, as well as concept of continuing to tell stories to keep discourse alive. Art (and movies) are extremely powerful, can be easily corrupted, the movie seems to be saying -- but keep "telling everyone."

Positive Role Models

Some characters have achieved success, but no one is a clear role model. Most fall victim to supernatural events around them in one way or another.

Diverse Representations

Positive representation of Black characters, showing both successes and trials. Characters are realistic and three-dimensional. Supporting cast includes a loving, mixed-race LGBTQ+ couple. A White art critic tries to tell Anthony's story and define his art through her own experiences, which is clearly meant to be problematic.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Lots of blood and gore. Characters sliced up with a hook, killed. Throat slashed. Blood spurts, pools of blood. Bloody carnage. Broken limbs. Strangling. Stabbing. Shooting. Gross hand wound spreading up arm, picking at icky scab, fingernail rotting, peeling off. Child witnesses her father dying via suicide, jumping from high window. Hand sawed off, hook jammed into bloody stump. Finger sliced by razor blade. Arguing. Character smashes mirrors. Broken mirror shards in hand. Scary stuff. Jump scares.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A couple kiss and cuddle affectionately. Shirtless male. Passionate kissing/foreplay. Strong sex-related dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent strong language includes "f--k," "s--t," "motherf----r," "bulls---," "a--hole," the "N" word," "ass," "bitch," and "d--k," and "Jesus" as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Adults drink wine socially, at dinner. Drinking beer at gallery opening. Brief pot smoking. Character briefly drinks alone.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Candyman is a follow-up (but not a reboot or a direct sequel) to the 1992 movie , which was based on Clive Barker's short story. Directed by Nia DaCosta and co-written and co-produced by Jordan Peele , the movie takes a progressive approach to themes raised in the original -- including the power of art and storytelling -- and it's both scary and thought-provoking. It has tons of blood and gore, with several killings. Expect to see stabbing, strangling, shooting, throat slashing, broken limbs, jump scares, a gross hand wound creeping up to the rest of the body, a child watching her father die via suicide (jumping from a high window), and more. There's kissing (both affectionate and passionate), cuddling, and interrupted foreplay; a man is shown without his shirt on. Language is very strong, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," the "N" word, and more. Adults drink socially and smoke pot. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (7)
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Based on 7 parent reviews

What's the Story?

In CANDYMAN, Anthony McCoy ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ) is an up-and-coming artist who's living with Brianna Cartwright ( Teyonah Parris ), an art curator. At dinner one night, Brianna's brother, Troy ( Nathan Stewart-Jarrett ), tells the story of Candyman, who terrorized the nearby Cabrini Green housing projects years ago. Inspired, Anthony looks into the story further, hoping to create a new series of artworks. Then Anthony meets William Burke ( Colman Domingo ), who grew up in Cabrini Green and had an encounter with the actual Candyman, and learns more. Unfortunately, as Anthony's art is shown to the world, the Candyman legend is reawakened, with horrific results.

Is It Any Good?

Neither a reboot nor a direct sequel, Nia DaCosta 's horror movie responds to elements from the 1992 cult classic and moves forward into the Black Lives Matter era, with chilling, brilliant results. Following up on the promise of her powerful debut Little Woods , DaCosta's Candyman -- with help from co-writer and co-producer Jordan Peele -- follows a bracingly logical path through Clive Barker's original 1985 short story and Bernard Rose's 1992 movie, taking the urban setting and the Black monster (played here, as in three other movies, by Tony Todd ) and examining them further. With swift strokes, like an artist passionately wielding a paintbrush, DaCosta touches on gentrification, artistic appropriation, and artistic objectivity in fascinating ways.

Using silhouette puppets to illustrate flashbacks and a musical score that echoes Philip Glass's 1992 recordings, the movie asks: Are these artists actual creators, or are they merely repeating history? How does location play into the identities of Black residents, especially when that location was designed and built by White people? Can Black people reclaim their own stories? In one striking subplot, a White art critic tries to tell Anthony's story and define his art through her own experiences. Yet in the midst of these and other timely discourses, Candyman manages to be a brutal and powerful horror tale (right from the start, with its mirror-image studio logos), perhaps even surpassing whatever Barker's original story, or any other adaptation, has ever intended or achieved. A final cry to keep telling stories -- rather than burying them, as in the Tulsa massacre of 1921 -- is an imperative crossover from horror to real life.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Candyman 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Is the movie scary? What's the appeal of scary movies ? Why do people sometimes like to be scared?

What does the final message, "tell everyone," mean? What other messages do you think the film is trying to convey about art, race, and identity? The filmmakers have put together resources and organizations that support racial justice and healing; click here to learn more.

Why do you think the movie is set in the art world? How much art is created, and how much is "borrowed" from other places? What does this all mean? What does it mean for a movie called Candyman ?

How does this film compare to the other movies in the Candyman series, and to the original story?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 27, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : September 16, 2021
• Cast : Yahya Abdul-Mateen II , Teyonah Parris , Nathan Stewart-Jarrett
• Director : Nia DaCosta
• Inclusion Information : Female directors, Black directors, Black actors, Female actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Horror
• Topics : Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
• Run time : 91 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : bloody horror violence, and language including some sexual references
• Last updated : August 25, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Candyman (1992)

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The new Candyman was modernized for the wrong audience

It’s cluttered, preachy, and not nearly scary enough

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Nia DaCosta’s Candyman , the repetitive, superficial fourth entry in the horror franchise, is set in Chicago, the same city where Bernard Rose’s original 1992 version of Candyman began the saga by exploring the connection between mythology, urban legends, and anti-Black violence. Those themes haven’t abated since Rose’s film hit theaters — they’ve only intensified. But the new version muddles them, with flat social commentary, and even flatter horror thrills.

DaCosta’s version opens in 1977, as an echoed, haunting rendition of Sammy Davis Jr.’s signature song, “The Candy Man,” jangles. The camera peers over the Cabrini-Green row houses, the infamous housing projects located auspiciously on the city’s affluent north side. The police are patrolling for a local murderer, a Black man with a hook attached to his arm. He’s been accused of putting razor blades in candy and giving it to children, hurting a young white girl in the process.

The residents, including a young Black boy heading to a basement laundry room, avoid the cops who are patrolling for him. The racial dynamics at play, and the overpoliced location, make the situation ripe for trouble. Similar to Rose’s film, DaCosta uses the racial dynamics of Cabrini-Green to set up a story about white-inflicted racial violence, the ways white folks encroach on Black spaces, and the harm that an overzealous police force and apathetic government can cause to neglected Black people.

Several rounds of Black Lives Matter protests and the proliferation of videos capturing Black death at police hands have crystallized Rose’s film as a fantastical folkloric horror, a palpable parable of Black reality, set on a forsaken side of town. DaCosta is the recipient of those themes, responsible for translating them into a story that fits the present racial environment. But her Candyman is a confused, overstuffed web of shallowly presented ideas, including critiques of gentrification and the white critical lens, and a request for Black liberation.

After the flashback opening, DaCosta’s Candyman jumps to the present day, where Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a noted visual artist, carries out a chemistry-free relationship with art-gallery director Brianna (Teyonah Parris). Lately, Anthony has been in a creative rut. His previous series of paintings, featuring Black men with nooses draped over their necks and bare chests, is now old news. But then Brianna’s brother (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) tells Anthony the legend of Candyman, in a campfire story that sums up the events of the 1992 film: Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) ventured to Cabrini-Green and kidnapped a Black baby, but died in a bonfire. Anthony, who connects with Black pain on a shallow level, exploiting it for personal fame, decides to make Cabrini-Green his next subject.

This won’t be the only time we hear of Candyman’s legend: How you need only to say his name five times in a mirror to call him, or how his story traces back to the late 1800s, when a lynch mob captured him for fathering a child with a white woman. They cut off his arm, covered him with honey, and unleashed a swarm of bees to kill him. While viewers who haven’t watched the 1992 film will probably need this refresher on its plot, DaCosta’s sequel recounts the events of the prior film no less than three times, making its 90-minute runtime terribly distributed.

Each iteration of the retelling uses the same visual style, with bewitching silhouette images from real-life painter Kara Walker , who makes miniature black cutouts of people to convey the legend. In the beginning, this motif offers a captivating storytelling method, marrying the origin of myths with the idea of shadows on a cave wall. But DaCosta hits that well one too many times, and on each successive deployment, the strategy is less intriguing, mostly because there’s little meaning behind the aesthetic choice. While Walker’s art often interrogates the past, disrupting the romanization of America’s racial fairytale and the idea of a grand melting pot , the redundant retelling blunts the intended depth of her work.

That’s a general problem with the script, written by Jordan Peele , Win Rosenfeld, and DaCosta: Candyman is so message-driven that it flattens into a generic fable. During his research, McCoy ventures to Cabrini-Green, traversing through the nearly abandoned row houses. He meets William Burke (Colman Domingo), not only one of the area’s last residents, but a totem for the hurt and sense of abandonment felt by the city’s terrorized Black folks.

Domingo does some Herculean heavy lifting as William. He’s speaking for this community, and in a sense, almost every African-American urban neighborhood, when he tells McCoy about seeing a Black man wrongly accused of being Candyman, and beaten to death by police. Domingo nearly pulls it off, imbuing an agony and hidden rage within William that isn’t totally fleshed out in this withered script.

DaCosta’s previous film, Little Woods , was lived-in and detailed because she used the rugged landscape as an extension of her characters. In Candyman , Cabrini-Green isn’t as well-leveraged. Viewers who have never been to Chicago may not know the geographical importance of Cabrini-Green: The housing project bordered the Gold Coast, one of the city’s luxe neighborhoods. Barring a brief shot of Chicago’s glittering downtown skyline, which backgrounds the row houses, DaCosta’s film doesn’t work to convey that economic disparity, and why the city desperately wants to gentrify the former projects to make room for more luxury housing.

Today, those row houses are the last remnants of Cabrini-Green — the brick towers shown in Rose’s film were demolished in 2011. Those abandoned homes still hold a foreboding, from the memories of police brutality that scar the landscape, and the generations of Black folks who once dwelled in the complex. But DaCosta’s film doesn’t convey any of that, because she barely filmed in the neighborhood.

The lack of a visual metaphor makes the film’s exploration of gentrification more of an assemblage of nonspecific dialogue. It talks about what gentrification is, and not what it looks like. The same can be said of the movie’s kills, which are less propelled by plot, and more message-driven. There’s plenty of blood-spewing and bone-cracking, but with no sense of the terror lurking in the shadows, or the foreboding behind the walls.

The movie also delves into body horror, while exploring the obsessive sacrifice artists make for their art. After Anthony is stung by a bee, a rash develops on his hand, slowly causing his skin to itch and peel. His burst of neurotic creativity coincides with the deterioration of his body. The practical makeup work here is highly effective and gruesome, as is Abdul-Mateen II’s cowering performance. During this period, McCoy produces a plethora of pieces centering Black death. Much of it is rote, because he’s exploiting Black folks’ shared historical pain in a shallow manner. A white art critic who isn’t impressed with his work sees a different repetition, one about Black artists perpetually crying about gentrification. She’s totemic of an ignorant white-centered critical lens, but DaCosta’s critique of that lens isn’t very interesting, or connected to the overarching narrative.

Like Anthony, DaCosta struggles to craft art that isn’t wholly informed by the past. From Anthony listening to Helen’s audiotapes to other visual motifs — like a hole in the wall behind a mirror — this film is filled with copious references to the prior Candyman entries. But what story does DaCosta want to tell? If this is a movie about the legend of Candyman, then why is he no more than an underutilized boogeyman? If this is about the residents of Cabrini-Green, then why not feature them or the area more heavily? Vanessa Estelle Williams reprises her role from the 1992 film, and considering the rich depth of her backstory — in the first movie, her baby was kidnapped by Candyman — it’s a wonder why this story wasn’t centered on her.

Like Anthony, DaCosta seems to want to say something substantial with her work. Her Candyman makes broad metaphorical strokes about the larger urban Black experience, but it’s aimed at an oblivious audience that needs didactic storytelling to understand racial politics. The film’s end is particularly muddled, doing more to set up a sequel than to smartly bind together Candyman ’s varied, nascent themes. The film is missing out on a cohesive vision, to the point where the audience will spend the entire film waiting for the flashbacks and summaries to end, and for DaCosta’s movie to finally begin. But by the end, she’s only offered a visually stunning homage to the original film. For a director of her talent, that isn’t enough.

Peele’s own directorial work tends to explore fraught social issues on a subtler level than this, but the other projects he’s backed — Twilight Zone , Lovecraft Country , and Hunters — have been underwhelming because they approach their subjects with suffocating bluntness. DaCosta’s Candyman , a sequel clearly filmed by a director with only a cursory knowledge of Chicago, a lesser understanding of the ways legends haunt us, and an unevenness for looping frights in with social commentary, is bold in its ambition. DaCosta tries to pay tribute to a classic horror film while upping the ante of that film’s social conversations, but she follows in the same disappointing steps of Peele’s other produced projects. She doesn’t have the voice required to approach these issues with depth.

Candyman debuts in theaters on August 27.

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Candyman Pizza

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2347 Sheridan Dr

Tonawanda, NY 14150

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I was looking forward to their very tasty pizza, with a crisp crust and flavorful cup and Char pepperoni, but we noticed that the table next to us got two pizzas that they said they didn't order it was given to them by a different server than ours. So it took an extremely long time to get our pizza. Our server made up for it. It wasn't her fault. Bourbon bbq wings were also done on the pit and worth the wait.Thank you to our server.

Decided to give the pizza a try, it was decent, but didn't really hit the spot for me. I'd give a 3.5 if we could. The sauce was a little sweet for me, and it seemed like the flour used for the dough was maybe a mix that had some brown flour included? Just wasn't overall my taste. It was well cooked, and I like how much basil was on it as I feel some places skimp. As for the ambience, typical local WNY bar feel. People were really congregating near the entrance for some reason with their drinks, which was odd. I did take out as my normal place was closed at it was later in the evening, so can't comment too much on the service, but the pie was ready fast after I ordered and the person who was at the counter was pleasant. Overall I likely wouldn't return as as the flavor overall just wasn't my taste, but I can see why some people like it so much.

Margarita pizza

We orders a pepperoni pizza to go, by the time we picked it up and got home it was cold and we had to reheat which we wonder if this affected the quality. Even with the reheat this is a really good pizza, thin crust and very flavorful. The pies are small, bigger than an individual pizza but just enough for two to split and be full enough. We need to go back and try the pizza in house to compare and this might be close to a 5/5- will update when we try it !

Wow. What an amazing place. Went here twice in the last week because the pizza was so good. Ordered several different pies and wings and all were absolutely fantastic. The Candyman is a perfect wood fired pepperoni with that sweet heat of the hot honey added. For you ricotta, meat and hot banana pepper fans (one of my fav combos) the vodka 2.0 absolutely delivers. The loaded margherita was so unique and had the perfect ingredients of each topping on it. Mine and the tables favorite was the Quattro formaggi. So creamy and funky with the addition of blue cheese. Wings were cooked perfect. Went with the cattleman's and flaming garlic parm. Garlic parm are some of my go to wings but sometimes they lack flavor. I tend to drag them in a side of hot sauce when I order. These accomplished that with the sauce on them. Perfect amount of heat. Cattleman's were delicious if you like that flavor. Decor and atmosphere are very nice, and the tap list and mixed drink list has something for everyone. Owner Vinny and waitstaff were a 10/10. Our waiter was hustling all night and extremely attentive. If you haven't been here yet and have been eyeing it up, get here, you are not going to be disappointed.

Stop for a beer at caputi's and some candy man pizza and you won't be disappointed! Love their flavors. I personally love to get the white pizza and make it Jen style and add fig and prosciutto!

The first time we went the food was absolutely amazing, the service was beyond amazing, and the drinks were fantastic. Today, our pepperoni pizza was ridiculously overcooked, and our drinks were weak short pours. Our server was very sweet, but new. When she asked how dinner was, I said just this. She gave me a sad face and not a single manager even talked to us. I wasn't seeking anything free, but some acknowledgment that our $110 meal was not what it should have been would have been nice. At some point we'll be back, but it's going to be a while. I'm annoyed more by management's non-response than I am by the overcooked food and 1990's-style caputi's drink I paid $10 for. Had a manager acknowledged our complaint and had a conversation, I would have walked away satisfied. Now I'm wondering whether they are victims of too quick success, and are fading from belief what goes up does not go down. Tonight's dinner was like a 1.5 star, but our first time was 5. So I averaged and rounded to 3.

Came here for a special whiskey pairing dinner and had a great experience! The food was great. The pizza is brick oven style, and I really enjoyed both pizzas I tried (their cheese and pepperoni, and another with bacon, blue cheese(?), and walnuts). I also really enjoyed their salad and some fried appetizers they served. Drink selection was creative too. I ordered a loganberry cocktail which was delicious. They also have a bunch of beers to choose from as well. Service was fantastic too. Everyone was very friendly, drinks were made quickly, and food came out hot and often too. Cool atmosphere. Great place to hangout with a few friends, or enjoy a sit down pizza dinner.

Whiskey tasting event

Best pizza around. Can get backed up quite a bit if its busy so might not be best to go if you need a quick bite

I was looking for a pizza place in the area and found this place during a Google search. It was a weekday night around 8pm and there was only one other table there. We ordered our food, the menu isn't as inventive as I would have hoped, but we settled on two pizzas. What makes this place unique is the wall decor. Every wall has something different and are good conversation starters, but you can only talk for so long before you start to wonder " where is my food?" Perhaps, because this restaurant shares a space with a bar next door they supply the food for them, which is why our 2 small personal pan pizzas took nearly 90 minutes to arrive! Aside from the wait, the pizza was just okay. The bottom was burnt black on both of them we ate what we could. The dough was dull and the sauce was bland and really left nothing to the imagination. All and all I would come back perhaps for the trivia Night which they do have weekly or maybe if I just wanted beer and bar food. I hope the menu and the service improves! The concept is unique, but poor execution

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Not too bad! We got wings and pizza. Came out reasonably quick and the taste delivered. Great spot if you're looking for a quick bite in the area

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‘Poolman’ Review: Chris Pine Gives It His All, Which Is Not Enough

The trying-to-be-edgy comedic tone and presence of danny devito might make you think you're watching an unaired episode of 'it’s always sunny in philadelphia.' but chris pine's writing-directing debut isn't nearly that good..

Chris Pine seems like a nice guy. He has a clear reverence for cinema, for Los Angeles and for his fellow actors. Historically, he’s proven to be a talented actor with the star power to carry a blockbuster film like Star Trek , as well as indies like Hell or High Water . But as good-natured and skilled as he appears, Pine can’t direct a movie. Or, at least, Poolman , his directorial debut, fails on multiple levels. Written by Pine alongside Ian Gotler , the film struggles to find its tone and its narrative, despite an A-level cast and crew. 

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Pine plays Darren Barrenman, a Los Angeles pool cleaner who either pays homage to or is a pale imitation of Jeff Bridges’ The Dude from The Big Lebowski . Darren lives in a trailer adjacent to the swimming pool of the Tahitian Tiki complex where he works and spends his free time writing letters to Erin Brockovich, which attempt to narrate an otherwise convoluted story. Along with a group of his pals, including Annette Bening ’s therapist Diane, Danny DeVito ’s Jack, and Jennifer Jason Leigh ’s Pilates instructor Susan, Darren frequently goes up against the city of Los Angeles with complaints about new land developments (or something like that). He also might be trying to make a movie or possibly a TV show. Darren uncovers a conspiracy involving a local politician named Stephen ( Stephen Tobolowsky ) and mysterious femme fatale June ( Dewanda Wise ) that is related to water . Or maybe to zoning rights? Honestly, the story is a muddled mess that never clears itself up. 

Poolman is presumably a satire of LA noir films like Chinatown , but DeVito and the trying-to-be-edgy comedic tone frequently trick you into thinking you’re watching an unaired episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia . The story is largely to blame for how much the movie falters, especially since Pine called in a notably talented crew to make the visuals look decent. Matthew Jensen, who shot Wonder Woman , acts as the DP and attempts to infuse a nostalgic sense of classic noir into the scenes. But even the music by Andrew Bird can’t transform this into an enjoyable 100 minutes.

I’m sure Pine meant well. He probably had a good idea and couldn’t execute it. An incredibly stoned person wouldn’t be able to decipher Poolman —and neither can a general audience. The entire cast, especially Pine, gives their all. It’s a lot of great actors attempting to find footing in the deep end of a stagnant, murky pool. It’s a miss, without any sense of being entertaining for all its flaws. Everyone here can do better and should. And next time, leave poor Erin Brockovich out of it. 

• SEE ALSO : Will Keen On Playing Vladimir Putin On Broadway in ‘Patriots’

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‘Arachnid’ – Matilda Lutz Starring in Spider Horror Movie

Spider horror movies seem to be all the rage, with Infested streaming on Shudder and Sting now available on Digital at home. And there’s another one on the way, with Deadline reporting that Matilda Lutz ( Revenge ) will star in an upcoming spider movie titled Arachnid .

The project is the first from the new genre label Badlands, a partnership between Thunder Road ( John Wick ) and Screen Gems executive Scott Strauss that Deadline first reported on.

Jayson Rothwell ( Underworld: Blood Wars ) wrote Arachnid , with Ángel Gómez ( Voces ) directing. Deadline notes, “the spider thriller is due to begin filming this July in Madrid.”

“I am lucky to be in business with Thunder Road and Renegade,” Strauss said in a statement shared by Deadline. “Badlands will be an extension of both companies’ entrepreneurial spirit and is moving quickly to acquire and produce a fresh slate of horror IP.”

“Thunder Road has been looking to expand into the horror space and we are thrilled to partner with someone as smart, creative, and hardworking as Scott,” said Thunder Road Partner and President of Production Erica Lee. “His experience and track record speak for themselves and our team is dedicated to making Badlands a success.”

Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has four awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

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‘Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare’ – First Image from ‘Poohniverse’ Horror Movie

The filmmakers behind Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey are expanding their public domain horror universe with a handful of upcoming “ Poohniverse ” movies, including  Bambi: The Reckoning ,  Pinocchio: Unstrung , and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare .

Variety has scored the first image from Neverland Nightmare , seen above.

The website details, “ Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare follows Wendy Darling as she strikes out in an attempt to rescue her brother Michael from ‘the clutches of the evil Peter Pan.’ Along the way she meets Tinkerbell, who in this twisted version of the story will be seen taking heroine, convinced that it’s pixie dust.”

Scott Jeffrey  will direct Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare , expected Halloween 2024.

Jeffrey tells us, “I am taking inspiration from French cinema while in prep for this movie. The film will be incredibly tense. I would say it’s a mesh between Switchblade Romance  and  The Black Phone with our own spin on it. It is a nasty, violent and incredibly dark movie.”

Megan Placito  has joined the cast as Wendy Darling,  Kit Green  is Tinkerbell,  Peter DeSouza-Feighoney  ( The Pope’s Exorcist ) is Michael Darling and  Charity Kase  ( RuPaul Drag Race ) is James. Martin Portlock will be playing the twisted version of Peter Pan.

Created by J.M. Barrie way back in 1902, the character of Peter Pan – like Winnie the Pooh – is in the public domain, even if the iconic Disney iteration of the character is very much not.

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‘Poolman’ Review: In the Sun Too Long

Chris Pine’s shaggy debut feature has a charismatic cast that rambles along with him on a Los Angeles detective adventure.

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By Nicolas Rapold

In “Poolman,” Chris Pine’s debut feature, he plays Darren, a distractible pool cleaner who becomes an amateur detective when he learns of a municipal conspiracy in Los Angeles. The sure-why-not plot, modeled on the California water grab in “Chinatown,” is less interesting than the charismatic cast that rambles along with Pine on his excellent adventure.

Pine’s yarn was savaged when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, but the sour response is a bit like getting mad at a golden retriever for rolling around in the grass. A shaggy civic gadfly, Darren grandstands at City Council meetings and becomes so self-absorbed that he forgets what his girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) does for a living. His Jungian psychiatrist, Diane (Annette Bening), and her story-spouting filmmaker hubby, Jack (Danny DeVito), look after him like foster parents, while apparently overseeing some kind of movie about his life.

Darren is clued into the unnecessarily confusing water scheme by June (DeWanda Wise, glamorous and gorgeously costumed), who’s an assistant to his nemesis on the City Council (Stephen Tobolowsky). But the amateur sleuthing through Los Angeles landmarks — smartly shot on film by Matthew Jensen (“Wonder Woman”) — plays second fiddle to what’s really a collection of warm character sketches and mild eccentricities punctuated by meditative visions.

Pine wisely avoids winks to the audience. But he whiffs at making the mystery especially gripping, leaving one instead to savor the moments, like a note-perfect Bening calmly talking Pine’s befuddled pool man through his latest setback.

Poolman Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.

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Killer Legends Streaming: Watch & Stream Online via Peacock

By monicaprabhakar

Killer Legends is a 2014-released gripping documentary directed by Joshua Zeman. He along with researcher Rachel Mills, investigate the real-life crimes that gave rise to these chilling tales. The film explores the origins and truths behind four of America’s scariest urban legends.

Here’s how you can watch and stream Killer Legends via streaming services such as Peacock.

Is Killer Legends available to watch via streaming?

Yes, Killer Legends is available to watch via streaming on Peacock .

Killer Legends blends historical research, interviews, and reenactments to uncover the truth behind the urban American myths. It covers the Hookman, tracing back to lover’s lane murders; the Candyman, linked to Ronald O’Bryan’s cyanide-laced Halloween candy; the Babysitter and the Man Upstairs, connected to the 1950 murder of babysitter Janett Christman; and the Killer Clown, tied to serial killer John Wayne Gacy. The film not only seeks to demystify these legends but also to understand why they resonate so deeply with our collective fears.

Killer Soup features Rachel Mills, Joshua Zeman, Cindy Butler and Stephen Winick.

Watch Killer Legends streaming via Peacock

Killer Legends is available to watch on Peacock.

Peacock has a lot of intriguing and entertaining movies and documentaries.Some of the docu series and movies to watch on Peacock are The Murder of Gabby Petito: Truth, Lies and Social Media, Curse of the Bermuda Triangle, The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show, Psych 2: Lassie Come Home, John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise and America’s Hidden Stories.

You can watch via Peacock by following these steps:

• Go to PeacockTV.com
• Click ‘Get Started’
• $5.99 per month or $59.99 per year (premium)
• $11.99 per month or $119.99 per year (premium plus
• Create your account
• Enter your payment details

Peacock’s Premium account provides access to over 80,000+ hours of TV, movies, and sports, including current NBC and Bravo Shows, along with 50 always-on channels. Premium Plus is the same plan but with no ads (save for limited exclusions), along with allowing users to download select titles and watch them offline and providing access to your local NBC channel live 24/7.

Killer Legends’ official synopsis is as follows:

“ Delving into our collective nightmares, this horror-documentary investigates the origins of our most terrifying urban legends and the true stories that may have inspired them. “

NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.

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