Candyman is not Dr. Giggles

For 28 years, I have been laboring under a number of misapprehensions about the horror movies Candyman and Dr. Giggles. This weekend, as an ongoing attempt to make this a horror October like past Octobers, I decided to watch both and set it all straight in my head.

I had thought going in that my reasons for confusing them were one thing, when they turned out to be something else entirely.

First, let's discuss how we got here.

For years, when I would hear Candyman mentioned, I would think "Oh, is that that one with Larry Drake?" Drake being the actor most famous, at the time, for playing Benny, the mentally challenged office messenger on L.A. Law. 

The 1992 horror movie that stars Drake is not, of course, Candyman, but Dr. Giggles. The reason I appear to have confused them was that they came out a week apart from one another, on October 16th and October 23rd, respectively, both in time for Halloween.

However, it was only this weekend that I even figured out both movies were from 1992. 

When I first started to disentangle the two in my head, comparatively recently when I heard Candyman described as an urban horror movie (and realized it starred Tony Todd), I thought the reason I had confused them was because Drake plays a dentist in Dr. Giggles. It would seem logical to have a homicidal dentist go by the name Candyman, and to have the ravages of sugar on your molars play some role in his chosen method of killing. (Or, more likely, a syringe filled with novocaine jammed down victims' throats.)

Except, as I learned on Saturday night when I watched the second of the two movies, Dr. Giggles is not about a homicidal dentist. In fact, Drake's character's big thing is supposed to be surgically removing the hearts of his victims while they are still alive. (Though, confusingly, that's almost never how he actually kills people.) He's a surgeon, and probably wouldn't know a thing about your mouth unless he needed to remove a tumor from it.

So essentially, my entire understanding of both of these movies was completely wrong.

As it turns out, the only similarity between them is their release dates. And the biggest difference is their quality.

Candyman, which I watched on Friday night, has actually been remade from a script by Jordan Peele, and would have come out already except for the pandemic. It's now scheduled for 2021. And now I know why Peele thought it was worth remaking.

This is a dark and blood-chilling story of a Black man who was tortured to death for micegeneation in the late 19th century. He had his hand sawed off and then was covered with honey so that bees would sting him to death. The legend is that he haunts a particular Chicago housing project with a hook jammed into the stump of his arm, but you can also conjure him -- anywhere, I guess? -- by looking in the mirror and saying his name five times.

While the different parts of the Candyman mythology don't really speak to each other -- the hook, the bees, and saying his name five times could be their own defining characteristic for a horror movie ghoul -- that is pretty much the only complaint I have about Bernard Rose's film. The mood is set from the start when the credits play over a God's eye view of highway traffic, and then go into a chilling opening voiceover in which Candyman talks about gutting a person with his hook, and summons an unholy quantity of bees to darken the skies of downtown Chicago.

That mode is maintained throughout, through a number of gruesome killings, but also through the psychological torment visited on the protagonist, played by Virginia Madsen. (As a side note, as I was watching, I temporarily forgot about the existence of Virginia Madsen and thought I was looking at a young Gillian Anderson. IMDB set me straight.) After summoning Candyman through the incantation, she is repeatedly framed for the gory deaths of other characters, jailed and hospitalized as she has to argue for her innocence and fend off further visitations from the title character. It made me think of this year's The Invisible Man in its attempts to make society's view of a hysterical woman part of the horror, though this was nearly three decades earlier, and therefore, three decades more radical in its thinking.

Of course, you can't discount the other ways it is advanced, setting a horror in the housing projects and having many of the characters be African-American -- including the monster. There are chilling images of the murder of the man who became Candyman painted, mural-style, on the inner walls of the housing project, including this one image they return to of a man's gaping mouth as he screams. I'm getting chills just thinking about it. The abstract terror that hovers over this movie is regularly grounded by the brutality of the hook-related disembowelments. A grisly and unshakeable Halloween viewing treat indeed.

Dr. Giggles, on the other hand, is a piece of shit.

Whereas Candyman takes pains to establish the character's awful backstory, Dr. Giggles does pretty much the opposite. Oh, it gets to why Dr. Evan Rendell is the way he is -- he lost his wife to a heart condition, and is seeking a "replacement heart" in all his victims -- but it jumps right in on a scene of mayhem on the operating table, in which Giggles is giggling and performing reckless surgery on his victim as mental patients he released from their confinement are watching from the upper viewing area of the operating theater. The speed with which we are dropped into events is disorienting, and we don't ever really get our bearings.

Candyman is more complex for the ways it forces us to sympathize with the title character for what happened to him. Dr. Giggles is having none of that. I can only think of a single moment in the film when you see him display anything approaching sorrow for his lost wife, but it's over very quickly. The filmmakers didn't want to open up any scenario where you would want anything less than the total destruction of the villain. So instead, he just drops one bad medical pun after another while dispatching his dozen or so victims throughout the course of the film.

I also couldn't help but notice the poor production values. The post-dubbing was really off in a number of the scenes, giving the movie the sense of having a far lower budget than it probably had. (The opening credits sequence, in which we travel through the internal organs of a patient through computer animation, shows that the movie did have some financial resources at its disposal.) The acting is quite bad too, though I enjoyed seeing a young version of future Charmed actress Holly Marie Coombs when she was only 18.

I noted that comedy was listed among the genres for Dr. Giggles, which suggests that some of the terrible one-liners and other details were intentional. But really, that doesn't excuse this movie for me. It's like trying to tell me that Hubie Halloween -- which I saw earlier this week and absolutely loathed -- was funny because it's supposed to be bad. That may be true, but all I see is a bad movie, and that's the case with Dr. Giggles.

And now I will most certainly never confuse the two again.