150 Word Review: 'Candyman' (2021)

You’ll get hooked

Photo: Universal Pictures

Director Nia DaCosta’s gloomy Candyman reboot/sequel overflows with ideas like a greedy kid’s Halloween trick-or-treat bag. It’s about police brutality, systemic racism, and the relationship between art and pain.

But Candyman is still a horror movie, and DaCosta delivers the bloody goods. She hides her thoughtful messages in the scares, like a razor blade in a Tootsie roll.

There are gory scenes mixed in with more inventive shocks, like the image of the title character floating over one of his many victims, a slaughtered teen. They made the mistake of saying 'Candyman' five times in a mirror, summoning him. In Candyman, death wants you to say his name.

The first Candyman was a ghastly gothic romance originally conceived by Hellraiser’s Clive Barker. Slow but mordant. DaCosta’s movie is more cerebral than the 1992 version, but she respects the source material. There are moments when the original and the reboot harmonize.

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DID SOMEONE SAY ‘CLIVE BARKER’: Hellraiser (1987)