The Devil's Candy (2017)

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This movie starts as your typical haunted house movie. But then starts to take shape and differentiate. There's no twist whatsoever, just a terror movie done right. The soundtrack is excellent.

This movie seems to be produced or written by a speed or death metal music fan. The writers infuse at least three characters with metal as a defining interest, yet this does not relate well to the suburban family setting.That was the confusing introduction to the primary characters.The rest of the film is slow to develop. Its difficult to tell who is possessed by what. The characters are flat, and the choices by the director for actors is odd. The primary character, a father , is heavily tattooed and resembles modern interpretations of Jesus. He listens to terrible music and paints mediocre art. His daughter is a cliche of a teeneager who listens to Metallica and dyes her hair purple. She wears the same rock and roll t-shirt get up throughout the movie. At least the costume people didn't have her wear a Ramones t-shirt as in the movie "Mama"! Total cliched people, but not relatable to a family living in a farmhouse in Texas!The plot of this movie stretches credulity, especially in the ways the local sheriff handles the crimes in this movie. A known madman allowed to roam around freely and stay at a local motel? The known suspect from a serial murder spree not monitored though he lives in a town of less than 1000 people?Its difficult to take this movie seriously. There's the requisite religious imagery that is so popular today in horror films, and chanting voices and of course death metal, but all this thematic effort is overplayed and wasted. The CGI fire scenes are not convincing and the injuries sustained by the protagonists should be fatal!Horror fans have got to expect more from productions like this; cosmetic flourishes and iconic imagery combined with "edgy" characters does not a movie make.

Metal music and horror .. although metal is often adorned with kind of horror or satanic imagery, for me personally .. those two things do not necessarily go together well.Well, here it does work. There is good chemistry between the father and the daughter (not so much the father and wife though) .. the acting in general is exceptionally well done. The movie is visceral and does not shy away from showing a lot, yet leaving a lot yet to imagination. In contrast with so many other horror movies, this one offers bright, vibrant colours, loud music and a family that actually seems to work well enough.All in all, the movie was fun to watch, not really scary though. There are no "real" jumpscares .. which i appreciate .. and the effects were subtle enough.However it is not without flaw .. it suffers from the very same problem most horror movie storylines suffer from .. poor communication between the characters.. for some reason the people in most horror movies fall for the very same tropes over and over again ... they do not openly talk to one another. It is just one of the points that i do not like much in horror movies.But i can fully recommend it as a suspenseful crime movie.

For his second feature film, following on from his little-seen but well regarded Australian horror The Loved Ones in 2009, Tasmanian director Sean Byrne delivers a haunted house film with a difference in his creepy, odd and often unsettling sophomore feature The Devil's Candy.Released during festival runs and other territories in 2015, we've had to wait extra-long for Devil's Candy to arrive on our shores but for those local horror hounds that were amongst the many who enjoyed the deliriously depraved and memorable The Loved Ones all the way back in 2009 will be glad to see Byrne has lost none of his inventive filmmaking spirit with Candy.Saying to much about the films plot would ruin the films intriguing yet brief 80 or so minutes of runtime as Ethan Embry's struggling heavy metal loving painter Jesse moves his wife and daughter into a new house in rural Texas, only to find the house holds the presence of an evil force that's amplified by the odd appearance of one of its previous residents, Pruitt Taylor Vince grubby and disturbed Ray Smilie.Nothing about Candy is typical horror, from the use of heavy metal infused music, editing choices and a particularly well-used axe-guitar, Byrne is having fun messing with usual genre tropes while eliciting out great turns from Embry and Vince as the journey of these two-men, connected by the presence within the property that is anything but a friendly spirit.Byrne has a blast playing with the usual haunted house/possession playbook rules and his actors are all game, it's a shame then the film almost appears and disappears too quickly. There's a feeling there was more that could've been built on here and while it's nice Byrne lets us make up our own backstory as such, more time spent on his characters and building the groundwork of his story would've done wonders for a film that intrigues with its originality and set-up but ends up culminating in a fashion that feels like somewhat of a copout for what's come before it.Final Say – A promising and sporadically brilliant sophomore feature from Australian native Byrne with a killer soundtrack, The Devil's Candy is another fine calling card for the local director and hopefully another stepping stone for him on his way to a genre classic, a feat you can sense is well within his grasp.3 axe guitar's out of 5