Candyman (R)
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This came out in 1992, but I didn't see it until 2023. I was expecting it to be more of a slasher film than it is, with a supernatural element; something like A Nightmare on Elm Street crossed with the Bloody Mary urban legend. But there's barely any killing in the movie at all, and in fact it's quite awhile before the title character actually shows up. And even then it plays almost more like psychological horror than a slasher.

Anyway, there are two graduate students in Chicago, Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) and her friend Bernadette Walsh. They're working together on a thesis about urban legends, and Helen learns of one about someone called Candyman, who appears if you say his name five times in front of a mirror. She eventually finds out that he is supposedly the ghost of the son of a former slave, who had his hand cut off and replaced by a hook by an angry mob after he got a white girl pregnant. And they covered him with honey, to be killed by angry bees. (So bees later play a part in Candyman's M.O.) Helen eventually tries summoning Candyman, but nothing happens. Meanwhile, she learns that Candyman supposedly killed someone in the Cabrini-Green housing project, so she and Bernadette do some investigating there, where they meet a woman named Anne-Marie McCoy, who is raising a baby named Anthony. On a later trip to Cabrini-Green, Helen is attacked by a group of men, one of whom wields a hook and calls himself Candyman, and is presumably the one who killed the woman who died in the project as well as other people around there, I guess. It's amazing to me that he doesn't kill Helen, too, and she later identifies him to the police. So she figures he was just using the Candyman legend for his own purposes, and that of course there's no actual ghost.

It's after all this happens that the ghost of the real Candyman (Tony Todd) finally appears to Helen, and is upset that she's caused the local residents to stop believing in him. So it seems like he's going to attack her, but she blacks out, and wakes up covered in blood at Anne-Marie's apartment. Anne-Marie's dog has been killed and her son has gone missing, and Helen is accused of the crime. Her husband, a professor named Trevor, is apparently supportive of her at first, but something else later happens, which I won't spoil, that ends up in her being arrested again and taken to a psychiatric hospital. I don't want to reveal too much more, but Helen does escape from the hospital, and tries to save Anthony from Candyman. And, yeah, there's some important plot points that I'm not spoiling. I will say it seemed to me that at the end of the movie Helen was still officially believed to be guilty, but... well, I get the impression from websites that the residents of Cabrini-Green believed she was innocent. But just watching the movie, I couldn't tell if they believed that she was innocent or guilty, and they do something that I feel wouldn't make any sense if they thought she was innocent. So I dunno.

Well, I thought it was basically an okay vengeful ghost story, even if there were bits that didn't make much sense to me. I do like that at least some of the horror had a realistic explanation, but the supernatural elements were more interesting. (I think I liked the final scene the best, as there was another ghost whose motivations made more sense to me than Candyman's, and the victim was more deserving of what he got than any of Candyman's victims were.) And I'd like to check out the sequels, at some point. I guess I don't know what else to say.