Belatedly evidencing the fact that Paperhouse was no fluke (although, god knows Chicago Joe and The Showgirl did its best to prove otherwise), Britain's Bernard Rose gets his directing career back on track with his first American movie, albeit transplanting an English tale to the States and taking fellow Briton Clive Barker along for the ride.

Anthropology student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) is investigating urban legends for a university thesis when she stumbles across that of the Candyman, a black artist hunted down in 1890 Chicago for daring to love a white woman, viciously slaughtered on the site of the now infamous Cabrini Green housing project. Probing the estate and an accompanying string of sadistic murders attributed by the inhabitants to the hook-handed spirit, writer/director Rose allows himself the time to work up his tale in a slow-burn, delicately establishing place and tone before going for the throat in a big way. And this he does successfully achieves, preferring a dark, raw look to his film; the first visit Helen and her black research partner make to Cabrini is menaced by a teenage gang, walls drip graffiti, and the sun never seems to shine. A later visit ends in a disturbing and brutally abrupt encounter with inner-city gang-culture up-front.

Once he is happy with his foundations though, Rose shows himself to be no slouch in stepping up the action, Helen's first encounter with the mysterious deep-voiced black spirit (Tony Todd) in the university car park initiating the second half of the movie with a prime slice of the Grandest Guignol - a severed dog's head, a missing baby, and gallons of gore for which the law seem determined to pin Helen to the board. Rose's hand here is equally steady as the action switches essentially from an external to an internal battle, as first we the audience, and then Helen herself begin to question the existence of the Candyman and the very real possibility that she could be guilty as charged.

In essence then, Bernard Rose has taken Barker's 'The Forbidden' - an impressive short story set in Liverpool - and transposed it to Chicago, retaining the central core of urban myth and the spectacular bonfire finale (albeit, forced to lose the Guy Fawkes reference in the original not too successfully) but bringing with it a whole slew of new inventiveness and a remarkable strength; instead of side-stepping the potentially difficult issue of Chicago's often cavernous racial divide, he opts to confront it head-on, not flinching in facing down both sides - the abusiveness of the drug gangs, or the reluctance of the police to act until the victim is a white woman.

Through it all Madsen is a refreshingly punchy female horror lead, for once an intelligent, grown woman rather than the lame-brained teen scream queen, the film belonging in the most part to its women players, and ones thankfully not reliant on their men to race to the rescue every five minutes. And although Rose delivers on the requisite jump-shocks when required, we are spared much of the endless running down dark corridors and illogicality that drives all too much contemporary horror, leaving the true star as the quite astonishing score by veteran minimalist Philip Glass (his first for a mainstream picture) that employs everything from solo piano and chanting choruses to quite singular effect, all sensibly pushed front and centre for much of the running time.

Less successful, however - and despite Glass' sterling work - is a climax that carries with it the distinct odour of preview tampering, a neat symmetry with the extraordinary opening shot of a threatened cityscape undercut with five minutes of lame, cheap shock tactics that fatally sabotage the careful ambiguity of the preceding ninety and leave a sour taste in the mouth. But those aside, Candyman is an exhilarating rollercoaster ride of a horror movie that is never afraid to be just that, but is equally prepared to underline itself with an intelligence all too often absent from the video-hell that particular genre has all but become. The new benchmark of Barker adaptations, surpassing even his own Hellraiser (quoted in here, along with Roeg's magnificent Don't Look Now) and arguably the first truly essential, scary straight horror picture of the decade.