The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 36

H9V 'Candyman': An above-average slash fest Self-help amid horror of Warsaw Ghetto dJi. iiifJ By Michael Kenney GLOBE STAFF CANDYMAN Directed and written by: Bernard Rose (story: Clive Barker) Starring: Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd, Xander Berkeley, Kasi Lemmons, Vanessa Williams, DeJuan Guy Playing at: Cinema 57, suburbs Rated: (violence, gore) COURAGE UNDER SIEGE Starvation, Disease and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto By Charles G. Roland Oxford University Press, 352 illustrated, $25 they associated with Jews. Lectures, given in Polish, were described to the Germans as providing basic information about hygiene and public health. But the school offered a medical course equivalent to the final four clinical years given in Polish medical schools at the time.

The fundamental question about Roland, a medical historian at McMaster University in Ontario, has documented with a rawness and an urgency the heroic efforts of doctors, nurses and social workers to care for the half-million Jews sequestered inside the Warsaw Ghetto. apartment with a sort of shrine and walls covered in paintings and graffiti. Rose challenges the audience jp contrast its own perceptions of safe university settings and dread-filled ghetto locales. The film's urban immediacy and acknowledgement race-driven tensions is only one 6f the qualities taking it beyond the genre norm. The acting is above-average, top.

Madsen's character is a strong won)-an, not the usual screeching passive victim. Vanessa Williams and Die-Juan Guy make impressions as soifl-ful project residents, and Tony Todd makes sure Candyman has a human side he's not just a killing machine despite his bloody totals. "Candy-man" is a film that takes a sympathetic view of its black characters; doesn't just use them to scare whites by triggering their racist fears. Rose's resourceful camerawork, in keeping with the rest of the film, also outdistances the genre standard. And when was the last time you heard the motorized music of Philip Glass powering a horror movie? With "Paperhouse" and now "Candyman," Rose is well on his way to becoming the thinking man's fon jiior In testimony given after the war, -jthte head of the department of medicine at a hospital located inside the -Rnnlr Warsaw Ghetto re- DOOR caUed mcident KCVieW in which a young Jewish girl was walking to a doctor's office carrying rm jar with a sample of her sick mother's feces.

On the street, the jar was rnatched from her and the contents gulped down by a starving man. "Nothing," Charles G. Roland writes in this book, "describes more nauseatingly the state of many of I Warsaw's Jews." And perhaps nothing describes "tribre bitterly the sorrow of life in Hhe Ghetto than the story recounted a young doctor of a pregnant bman a rarity in the Ghetto who mas radiant with joy "at feeling the jtaby move in her belly." But when it Swas born, "she smothered the child I because its crying would have be-' strayed the group" with which she twas hiding. But it is not for the reporting of hundreds of other bitter and nauseating incidents that "Courage Under jrSiege" claims a place of its own in Khe literature of the Holocaust. TThere is, hopefully, nothing new to 4e learned about its horror.

Roland, a medical historian at S'McMaster University in Ontario, has documented with a rawness and an J'urgency the truly heroic efforts of Jidoctors, nurses and workers for so-J3fial organizations to provide medical iJjare to the half-million Jews sequestered inside the Warsaw Ghetto. JJ But this story is even more jsenseless than the tales of horror and cruelty that make up the Holocaust literature. One understated Sentence early on barely prepares rthe reader for the anger that increases as one reads this book: "The siact that ultimately all their efforts i "seem to have been wasted by the Eirnassacres at Treblinka and else-Ibere should not blind us to the real I contribution they made." By Jay Carr GLOBE STAFF There's nothing sweet about "Candyman," the Clive Barker horror outing transplanted from Liver-Mnvio Po1 t0 Chicago's muvie gang-controlled R6VI6W housing projects. It's sheer claptrap, but it's claptrap that works, an above-average slash fest that gains from the geographical transplant, covering ground this usually brainless genre never goes near. Bernard Rose, who adapted Barkers story and directed, will be remembered as the man behind "Paperhouse," the brainy adolescent's "Nightmare on Elm Street." "Candyman" doesn't have that film's Freudian layering, but it has something no other Hollywood horror movie has a homicidal monster created by racism.

Candyman, a serial killer stalking Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project, was an artist who in 1890 slept with an upper-class woman whose portrait he was commissioned to paint. Her father had him smeared with honey (hence the nickname) and stung to death by bees, but not before chopping his right Creativity is at By Betsy Sherman SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE Avant-garde guitar hero Fred Frith is the subject of "Step Across the Border," which Swiss film-ii -a makers Nicolas Humbert and Review Werner Penzel call "a ninety-minute celluloid improvisation." The grainy black-and-white film admirably reflects, in its structure, pacing and movement; Frith's edgy music, which spins out from rock into a web of ethnic influences, sounds from nature and industrial noises. Film scholar Jonas Mekas appears early in the film and sets the tone when he speaks of the Butterfly Wing Theory: When a butterfly flut ters its wings somewhere in China, it affects everything else in the world. The self-effacing British-born Frith hand off. Returning from the dead with a huge hook jammed into the bloody stump, Candyman has been getting even ever since.

Enter Virginia Madsen, a University of Illinois graduate student and urban folklor-ist with a faithful pal (Kasi Lemmons) and a straying husband (Xander Berkeley). Seeing a doctoral thesis in Candyman, she hits the gang-ridden projects in search of him, and has nothing but regrets. Before she knows it, the baby of the woman next door is kidnapped, and she's blamed for it, as well as a couple of slasher deaths. The cops won't believe it's Candyman, whom she sees ever since summoning him by looking into a mirror and repeating his name five times (this year's campus Halloween fad-to-be). She even discovers his lair, a vandalized home in 'Border' STEP ACROSS THE BORDER A documentary film by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel At Harvard Film Archive through Oct 21 (except Monday) subscribes to that belief in the inter-connectedness of experiences: Far from putting music on a pedestal, he incorporates all sorts of sounds, from the wild to the everyday, into his pieces.

The movie's montage of locations includes New York, London, Tokyo, Yorkshire and Liepzig, and the filmmakers are disciples of the Wim Wenders school of filming from moving cars and trains. The camera does have some still moments where the interweaving of sound and image provides little epiphanies, such as when a Japanese man rakes gravel in a garden or Frith has a conversation with seagulls with his violin on a -Mike Clark, USA TODAY rocky coast Frith is an engaging subject, a little flaky but far from a space shot. The turning point in his musical formation came when he first heard the blues and realized that a guitar could be made to sound like a human voice. He speaks of being turned off by the rock musician's life of bus-gig-hotel; now he is content to be a soloist and collaborator, playing before small audiences, happy if he can stimulate the ideas of even one person. Frith seems to be a happy pilgrim, open to inspiration and discovery: We see him creating music in a kitchen with a string instrument, a bottle-scrubber and some bowls of beans.

But the avant-garde is a "lonely business," says New York musician Arto Lindsay, whom the filmmakers catch in a discouraged mood that Frith may share. "Step Across the Border' is a tribute to the doggedly creative spirit of those who swim against the tide of commercialized pop culture. UP!" "GRANDLY Between September 1939, when LdiuiJUiuJbui ffiRKD "lirnir-THE YEAR'S TOP SCREEN ADVENTURE. the school, says Roland, "is why? Why did faculty and students undertake this hazardous and apparently futile enterprise?" Roland suggests that it was partly "a form of rebellion, of refusal of the students to accept full control of their lives by the Germans." There is also the sense that comes from accounts by the very few survivors -the estimate is that of the 500 or so students during the school's 14 months of existence, no more than 50 survived the war that their studies represented "an attempt to lead a normal life." Roland quotes one student as saying that medical school was "the miraculous way of getting away from reality, of forgetting the bleak lot, the today and tomorrow, the bestiality and barbarity." The site of the Warsaw Ghetto is a short walk from Warsaw's old city, Which was carefully restored after the war and is now the city's major tourist attraction, with museums, art galleries and restaurants. A monument to the ghetto stands in the center of a large open space.

Visitors are often struck by how deserted and ill-kept it seems, especially in comparison to the old city. And should they ask why nobody seems to care about the ghetto monument, they are apt to be told: "There is no one left to care." The sorrow of "Courage Under Siege" is that it tells of a group of dedicated, selfless DeoDle who did care until there was no one left for whom to care. Revere ENGAGEMENT AV "TWO THUMBS the German forces invaded Poland, and July 1942, when mass deportations to Treblinka and other concentration camps began, some 100,000 Jews died of all causes mainly starvation and disease, but also by random killings in the ghetto. Roland cites estimates that "another 100,000 or more survived that long only because of the various self-help enterprises that operated in the Ghetto." There was the Czyste Hospital, one of the finest of prewar Polish hospitals, which happened to be located in a Jewish neighborhood incorporated in the ghetto. There were several orphanages, three maternity hospitals, soup kitchens and other social welfare organizations.

But perhaps the most unexpected institution, the one that best dramatizes the cruel waste inherent in the German treatment of Warsaw's Jews, is the medical school. The German authorities gave approval for the school, believing it would be offering "sanitary courses for fighting epidemics" such as typhus, which show tonight at Copley, Danvers, Woburn, Somerville OR DISCOUNT COUPONS ACCEPTED FOR liliMIIULildJUlJXL) THIS "A FIERCE ROMANTIC -David Arisen, NEWSWEEK DELIRIOUSLY ENERGETIC TERRIFIC BIGGER- S1SKEL EBERT pit! HAII 5 1 -Richard Schickel, TIME MAGAZINE "A MUST-SEE MOVIE stirring, passionate and romantic" LvP lnanru Lmfffietd. THE MOVIE MINUTE retNiuKiNiiuj- -OINfUKINIItt- CHESTNUT HIU )AI HAMMOND SI. 277 2S0Q iOIWS uinn kau DANVERS 777 im(SSI2l FRAMMGHAN nuiioiiiir US II20iiT2 IOO 1 "1 i.r 1 fi Hi' TI IAN-LIFE EPIC FILM, -Joel Siegcl, GOOD MORNING AMERICA lOfW! (HEM OWWiUlOKBS. 10IWS 10IWS HARVARD IOCHURCHST.

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