The Devil’s Candy Is Sweeter
When you move into a house that you know that there has been a murder, and you listening to metal all day long, sticking Ghost posters on the walls and drawing reversed crosses, what do you think can possibly go wrong? I’ll tell you what.
The movie begins with a fat bald manchild (yeah, body shaming, thats who I am) playing a Flying V, in the middle of the night as loud as it can be, to silence the voice in his mind that keeps telling him EAT THAT PIE (how cool is that?)! After he wakes up his mother from her slumber, she immediately starts the “Are you crazy boy (duh)? Stop playing with it (the guitar), or I’ll call the men in white to come and take you back to the looney bin”, so he shoves it up her ass (the guitar), he brings it down on her face (the amp), and he keeps playing with it (the guitar). Don’t get excited, unfortunately that didn’t happen, I just made this up. That would happen if it was my script and the movie would have been an instant classic. But let’s say that he might not stopped the voices in his head, but he managed to stop the voice of his mother (hear that Norman?)
After that first dark scene that sets the tone of the film, we meet our heroes on a more light and optimistic atmosphere. A metalhead artist (get a haircut and a real job type), his lame wife and their also metalhead daughter. A loving family of three trying to live the American dream (fortunately for us, they’re going to live a nightmare instead) by moving in a big house on the lea. Which by coincidence is the house that the big bald heavy (ha!) metal psychopath we met earlier used to live. In a big house that as long the mother is at work, because someone has to pay the bills of this family, the hipster daddy is all day in the basement playing with his …brush, until he also starts to listen a voice in his head, and the fun begins!
Every time the father sits down to paint, he loses track of time, falls into a trance and starts painting like he is hypnotised (or possessed), and when he finally wakes up from paint-tripping he has painted the cover of the new Slayer album not remembering how, when, or why. The guy is increasingly falling into this state more and more often and he blindly fails to see that his wife and daughter need him now more than ever as they all start to sink into the pits of Hell and it will not be long before the fat guy with the flying V comes knocking on their door to start a band with their daughter to play Stairway To Heaven backwards.
The fat guy who is now roaming free from the looney bin, has completely surrendered to the bitching of the voice and has become Satan’s delivery-boy because his only job is to deliver candy to the devil, and by saying candy he means little girls (how creepy is that?). The metal father (who looks a bit like Jesus with his beard and long hair and been half naked in half of the movie) will have to stand against the delivery guy of Hell (who looks a bit like a cartoon devil with his bald head and fat belly, wearing a red tracksuit all the time) but also against himself if he wants to save his daughter from becoming the devil’s candy.
2009 was the year that the Loved Ones was released, Sean Byrne’s directorial debut. A very impressive horror movie (especially for a debut) with a fun and original story, good cinematography and acting, and placed Sean under my horror radar, but unfortunately I never heard of him again until 2016 when I accidentally stumbled upon a new indie horror film called The Devil’s Candy and I noticed that the writer and director was Sean. This is his second film and it is as good if not better as the Loved Ones. He left behind the Valentine’s Day, the psycho families and the torture porn of the Loved Ones and he started working on haunted houses (like the The Amityville Horror), Satanic cults and psychological horror. This time he took the slow burn approach and created a dark and disturbing film without any physical violence and gore (there is plenty of red paint, which is the same thing) but with characters you care about and with a constant sense of dread from the first until the last scene. Along with the atmospheric cinematography and the soundtrack that includes oldies but goodies heavy metal hits, the Devil’s Candy is what the title says, a candy for horror and metal fans (likewise Deathgasm was a birthday cake). Along with The VVitch the Devil’s Candy are the best Satanic movies I’ve seen in years (the last good one was At The Devil’s Door), but of those two the Devil’s Candy was the real treat.
The evil oversized baby is played by the always pleasant to watch Pruitt Taylor Vince, and the metal dad by Ethan Embry which I’ve seen him in many cool movies like Cheap Thrills, Convergence, Vacancy and also the Walking Dead (he was playing Carter). Besides being unrecognizable in this film (not just because of the wig), he also played it real good (the part). The mum is also a known face, mostly from TV, but here her character is mainly supporting, whether she was on screen or not was kinda the same thing, so I’m not going into the process of making references, I also have to go, I wanna eat, sleep, wake up and eat again.
Originally published at videogasp.blogspot.com on February 26, 2018.