A Taste of "Hard Candy"

Yesterday I caught a great movie at the "el cheapo" theater in Pasadena. You can't beat a $4 matinee price, no matter how spooky the ladies room is . . . ahem ahem. Anyway, the wife and I went out there to watch "Hard Candy", a great revenge movie with some seriously twisted moments. We're talking pedophilia, suicide, and castrations . . . not in that particular order.

It's about this photographer who has a penchant for seeking out underage girls to seduce them on the internet. He meets up with a girl (we're talking 14 year old girl here) at a local coffee shop and starts putting on the moves. He's smooth, well learned, and knows just what to say to impress the impressionable youth. After telling her that he has a bootleg MP3 of a concert from a band that she likes (well, at least he thought she liked) he "lures" her back to his house on the hills, where he shows her the lay of the land. They have a couple of drinks, and then the party gets a little out of hand for Mr. Smooth.

Suddenly, he feels a little queasy and crashes down onto the floor. He wakes up a little later, and he's tied to a chair, and the girl, Haley, starts to tell him how she was onto him. How she used different screen names to find out more about him. She even finds out that he used Amazon.com to look up things to say about different bands and books that she was interested in. She had planned the whole thing.

From here, she begins to torture him. She wants him to confess to a murder of another young girl who disappeared. He wants her to show her where he hides his stash of kiddie porn. When he won't tell her, after he's denied everything, she finds his safe, and cracks it open using a little bit of cunning. Apparently, honor roll students should never be given vendettas. From here, it moves over to the castration scene, which is intense to say the least. I was wincing through the whole thing. It doesn't end quite where one would, and the guy is able to get himself free.

This is where a lesser movie would throw in the towel and just do the same old bullshit ending. But "Hard Candy" takes the hard route, and the showdown on the roof makes so much sense it's creepy. This movie ends just the way it should end in the real world. Not that this reflects my opinion of how the government should deal with convicted pedophiles, it's just that . . . some of these guys deserve what they got coming to them. Sometimes, justice is metted out by the least likely of sources.

Great movie. Highly recommended. Seek it out and watch it, you won't be disappointed.