Post by Dracula on Sept 26, 2021 19:04:28 GMT -5
Candyman(8/30/2021)
Slasher movie remakes were very much the rage about ten years ago when movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th were being rebooted. It’s a trend that’s coming back around now what with the recent Child’s Play and Halloween reboots and the latest entrant is a new reboot of Candyman a slasher series that couldn’t be more relevant now and the film was even produced and co-written by Jordan Peele, so expectations were pretty high for it. I’ll start with the positive: the film looks great. Director Nia DaCosta gives the film some really slick cinematography and the film’s slasher kills are really well staged. Someone simply looking for cinematic bloodletting will be satisfied. The film is also ambitious; it wears its politics on its sleeve and is very interested in tying in Candyman, a movie that was already to some extent about America’s racial sins manifesting as an avenging ghost, with this current Black Lives Matter era. So it looks good and it’s trying to do something more challenging than your average slasher movie, so why doesn’t it entirely work? Well, the script is kind of a mess. I’ve called the movie a remake but it’s actually a direct sequel which specifically and extensively references the events of the first movie. I would think that was a cool approach to rebooting a series normally but it may have backfired here. The original Candyman is a very messy movie in terms of its mythology and internal logic and this movie wants to both accept all that as canon while also adding its own messy rules, logic, and mythology that contradicts both the old movie and often itself. Also, while I admire that the movie is trying to inject politics into its proceedings, I’m not sure that it ever really manages to say anything particularly original or profound about any of them. Gentrification is invoked as a concept frequently but isn’t illustrated all that vividly and police violence is also central but is generally addressed in fairly obvious ways. Ten or twenty years ago a horror movie addressing politics in overt rather than subtextual ways would have seemed sufficiently novel to be impressive unto itself but increasingly I think we’re going to need a little more than that.
**1/2 out of Five
Slasher movie remakes were very much the rage about ten years ago when movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th were being rebooted. It’s a trend that’s coming back around now what with the recent Child’s Play and Halloween reboots and the latest entrant is a new reboot of Candyman a slasher series that couldn’t be more relevant now and the film was even produced and co-written by Jordan Peele, so expectations were pretty high for it. I’ll start with the positive: the film looks great. Director Nia DaCosta gives the film some really slick cinematography and the film’s slasher kills are really well staged. Someone simply looking for cinematic bloodletting will be satisfied. The film is also ambitious; it wears its politics on its sleeve and is very interested in tying in Candyman, a movie that was already to some extent about America’s racial sins manifesting as an avenging ghost, with this current Black Lives Matter era. So it looks good and it’s trying to do something more challenging than your average slasher movie, so why doesn’t it entirely work? Well, the script is kind of a mess. I’ve called the movie a remake but it’s actually a direct sequel which specifically and extensively references the events of the first movie. I would think that was a cool approach to rebooting a series normally but it may have backfired here. The original Candyman is a very messy movie in terms of its mythology and internal logic and this movie wants to both accept all that as canon while also adding its own messy rules, logic, and mythology that contradicts both the old movie and often itself. Also, while I admire that the movie is trying to inject politics into its proceedings, I’m not sure that it ever really manages to say anything particularly original or profound about any of them. Gentrification is invoked as a concept frequently but isn’t illustrated all that vividly and police violence is also central but is generally addressed in fairly obvious ways. Ten or twenty years ago a horror movie addressing politics in overt rather than subtextual ways would have seemed sufficiently novel to be impressive unto itself but increasingly I think we’re going to need a little more than that.
**1/2 out of Five
