Tag / clive barker

by Edward Champion

The Real Enemy Mine vs. The Reel Enemy Mine

My review of The Reel Stuff, an anthology of horror and speculative tales turned into Hollywood films edited by Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, appears in today’s Los Angeles Times. In addition to the reading (in most cases, rereading) I had to do for the review, I watched many films: hence, the crazed kudos for Candyman posted at some ungodly hour not long ago.

Johnny Mnemonic had the consolation of some unintentionally hilarious moments and Screamers was a hoot, complete with a distinguished Canadian actor licking a knife and scowling, “It’s never sharp enough.”

But the worst film of the bunch was Enemy Mine. I hadn’t seen the film in almost two decades, but time had not been kind. Its failure, however, had less to do with its sweeping production value (even with the visible matte lines) and more to do with its almost total bastardization of Barry Longyear’s Hugo and Award-winning novella. Aside from changing the book’s ending to include a literal mine (did they really think the audiences were that dumb?), screenwriter Edward Khmara and director Wolfgang Petersen placed less emphasis on Davidge’s unexpected role as surrogate father, introduced over-the-top meteor showers, and otherwise muted the novella’s themes of war and camaraderie. There is even a terrible moment in which Pepsi product placement gets Dennis Quaid excited.

Longyear’s novella was collected in a handsome book put out by White Wolf called The Enemy Papers, which also featured two other stories, “The Last Enemy” and “The Tomorrow Testament,” set in the same universe. But this went out of print. Thankfully, the book is also available through Back in Print. Longyear also has a website and an interesting history.

by Edward Champion

Candyman

Candyman, the 1992 film adapted by Bernard Rose from Clive Barker’s short story, “The Forbidden,” is perhaps one of the most underrated satirical horror films of the 1990s. Boasting crisp cinematography from Anthony B. Richmond, a haunting quasi-Koyaanisqatsi music score from Philip Glass (with Koyaanisqatsi-like aerial shots of Chicago housing projects reminding one of Pruitt-Igoe), and precise and intelligent direction from Rose, Candyman not only evolves Barker’s vicious take on white academic efforts to understand London slums, but dares to suggest that privileged efforts to understand life in the housing projects are indelibly linked to a more disturbing primordial journey that involves whether or not you’re willing to believe in an urban legend. Plunge into the unwashed lives if you dare. You will find yourself not only confronting the unexpected consequences of your empathy, but the hidden human costs of your interventions. I don’t think it’s an accident that Chicago is such an apposite location for Barker’s transplanted tale. Much as John Cusack and company effortlessly transplanted Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity to the Second City, Chicago, perhaps more than any other American city, evokes a misunderstood sector of society in a manner that is almost seamless.

And yet Candyman has escaped the kind of retrospective accolades one would assume that a complex film of its type would garner. It is not discussed with the same reverential susurrations that the knee-jerk film geek applies to Dario Argento, which is particularly surprising, given that this film is about as close to giallo as mainstream American film is likely to come. This was a film that Rose somehow managed to sneak through the studio system. The film’s racial subtext is unthinkable by today’s play-it-safe standards. Virginia Madsen’s academic colleague is African-American, but lighter-skinned than the residents in the housing project that Madsen’s character investigates. So is the kindly detective looking into the case, who turns hostile as events develop. It takes an assault on a white woman to get people investigating the grisly murders near the housing project. There are mirrors that likewise connote this double standard: a mirror is unsettled in Madsen’s apartment, but a gaping hole in a housing project’s bathroom permits Madsen to climb through a crevice into another graffiti-laden apartment. And it takes Madsen talking with African-American janitors to begin her investigations into the Candyman mystery. When Madsen is asked to remove her clothing by a by-the-book police officer, one is instantly reminded of Alex’s dressing down in A Clockwork Orange (a scene, incidentally, written by Kubrick that wasn’t in Anthony Burgess’s novel). And the film’s bitter finale is a wonderfully skeptical pisstake on how female martyrdom stacks up against upward mobility and class disparities. There is also something within Rose’s many false shock moments as Madsen probes further, as if to suggest that investigating beyond your class unfurls an entrenched fear.

It’s a shame that this highly revealing film has been forgotten, and it’s particularly egregious that there remains little room for a thinking horror film along these lines within today’s studio system.