Mihai Toma Willing to get rich very fast, three ex-convicts join forces to accomplish the perfect crime: kidnapping a famous movie-star and forcing her to play the main role in a pornographic movie which will be broadcasted live over the internet. They set up an elaborate plan and start executing it but as you might expect, deviations will inevitable occur. Jealousy, pride, hunger for money and self- pleasure might end their plan early. Will they be able to stick to it till the end?Contrary to what you might think, this movie isn't a pornographic one. Except from 2 sequences which together take about two minutes and in which nothing very explicit is shown, it's everything but erotic. It feels cheap from one end to the other but that doesn't necessary make it a bad movie. It has some essence in its story but nothing elevated. You really get to see what people are ready to do for money, but that's about it. Despite its mediocrity, you will be presented with a really unexpected finale. I have to say I wasn't expecting it, by any means.I can't actually recommended it but if you get your hands on it, you might want to take a look, at least for its ending.

Rich Wright It's sleazy. It's nasty. It's also got Coolio in it. But despite a few drawbacks, Stealing Candy just about delivers the goods... if you're looking for an erotic thriller with a bit more to it than T & A. Don't expect deep psychological drama of a girl taken prisoner and forced to do an X rated Internet clip. There is however, a decent enough set-up, a pretty good twist halfway through (although I would have saved it till the end) and reasonable performances from a cast that could charitably be described as B list, and on that subject...The 'world renowned ' actress at the centre of this plot is simply awful in the bit of movie-making we see her do, so the chances of her earning a multi-million pound deal from a major studio seem... well, impossible. Even if she did get her thrupenny bits out for thousands of web geeks. And while we're discussing unlikely scenarios, I'm getting a little tired of scenes where pretty young females fell the men who are trying to kill them, having more than ample time to finish them off... and then choosing to leg it instead, so the chase may resume. DO YOU WANNA LIVE OR NOT?It ain't a film for the discerning. If it's playing at 2 am on some obscure cable channel though... why not? 5/10

Brandt Sponseller Stealing Candy certainly isn't a "perfect" film, but for what it is, it's not at all bad--it kept me more than entertained, it was both sexy and thrilling, filled with tension, and the twists were done well.The most obvious flaws are technical, but this is clearly a low budget film. Either the original film or the DVD transfer is "low definition" rather than high, and too many times it's obvious that the cinematography goes a bit out of focus. It has almost a home video texture--for a moment, I was afraid that this was going to be a no-budget stinker.But the script is good, the performances are fun (if a bit campy, but I like that), and Mark Lester is a capable director. It helps that Jenya Lano is incredibly sexy in this, but the thrust of Stealing Candy is a crime-thriller film with a twist--in ways reminiscent of the superior Suicide Kings (1997), but without the black comedy.That might seem to suggest that Stealing Candy is derivative, and that wouldn't be wrong--aside from Suicide Kings, it has similarities to many other films, including another excellent heist-gone-wrong flick, Killing Zoe (1994). Most oddly on this end is that scorer Dana Kaproff must have been commanded by Lester to, "Write something that sounds like Bernard Herrmann here", and you could swear that the result doesn't just sound Herrmannian, but that it was actually lifted from a Hitchcock film. That's one of many things that telegraphs some twists to come, but Lester pretty skillfully "misdirects" us from expecting particular twists, too.At any rate, if you're someone who subtracts major points for derivativeness and lack of technical polish, approach Stealing Candy with caution, but if you're like me--you do not demand that films belong to the cult of originality and you enjoy a bit of cheese in your thrillers (we even get the cheesiest Baldwin brother here, Daniel--I'm a big fan of the Baldwin brothers' work), then this is worth a watch.

misbegotten Some movies have what I call a 'killer premise' - a core concept that's so intriguing and original that it's fool-proof. Any movie built around it is almost certain to entertain.Examples would include SPEED (if a bus goes under 50 mph, a bomb on board will detonate), S.W.A.T. (the police have to transport a mega-rich criminal across town - after he's publicly announced he'll give $100 million to whoever frees him) and PHONE BOOTH (man answers ringing public phone, only to be told he's in a sniper's sights and if he hangs up, he's dead).STEALING CANDY also boasts a killer premise, only in this case it's also dark, twisted, and ever so kinky. Namely, a group of criminals plan to make a fortune by kidnapping a world famous, glamorous, Hollywood movie star. Only they don't intend demanding any ransom - instead they're going to force her to have sex live on the pay-for- view website they've set up. But needless to say, things don't quite go as planned, resulting in some twists and turns that you probably won't see coming.Directed, produced and co-written by Mark L. Lester, who's best known for helming the Arnie action movie COMMANDO, and the sci-fi flick CLASS OF 1999, for most of it's running time STEALING CANDY is effectively a one set play with only four characters, and all of the principle cast deliver solid performances. Daniel Baldwin excels as the group's computer wizard, estranged from his wife & son and only involved in the scheme because his boy needs costly medical treatment. Rapper turned actor Coolio is surprisingly okay as the thuggish, untrusting and violence-prone member of the gang, while Alex McArthur - playing the mastermind - has proved in the past to be a reliable actor, but isn't too impressive here, perhaps because his role is less showy than his co-stars. As abducted movie goddess Candy Taylor (the Candy of the title) relatively unknown actress Jenya Lano is never less than utterly convincing, her stand-out scenes being those in which the gang want her to broadcast a message to her fans via the internet, and she has to immediately switch from terrified hostage to confident and alluring sex symbol.I would highly recommend STEALING CANDY to anyone looking for an intelligent adult movie or a dark, non-mainstream thriller. However, if you watch this film expecting a skin-fest you'll be disappointed. There are only three scenes featuring either nudity or partial nudity, and they're all relatively brief. However, the sequence in which Candy finally has sex on camera is very impressive: it's intense, genuinely erotic and sizzlingly hot. Some would say that it's over too quickly, but I'd disagree: sometimes less is more. It's certainly better than many of the sex scenes that appear in the majority of low budget erotic thrillers and vanilla porn flicks that litter the late night cable schedules.STEALING CANDY went straight to DVD, but considering how fond Hollywood is of recycling tried-and-tested concepts, I won't be surprised if a big budget movie revisits this idea in the next several years, in much the same way that the premise of LIBERTY STANDS STILL was given the studio treatment in PHONE BOOTH. It would be intriguing to see a genuine Hollywood goddess - someone like Nicole Kidman, Scarlet Johannsen or Jessica Alba - in the Candy role. Unlikely? Perhaps. But Meg Ryan shed her clothes a couple of years ago, in an attempt to revive her career with the adult movie IN THE CUT, so anything's possible.