31 Days of Halloween

Day Twenty-Six: Shitty Candyman Sequels


Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh



The Candyman series immediately drives off a cliff with Farewell to the Flesh. A lot of this movie's problems are standard in subpar horror sequels: bad acting, lesser retread of better ideas to diminishing returns, lack of scares, etc. What makes Candyman unique is the racial elements to its horror. I suppose it’s a credit that the filmmakers did not run away from this more challenging material... but maybe they should have because the movie they've delivered is confused. First, expanding on Candyman's origin story only makes him more clearly a victim and enhances our sympathies for him, only for the film to still treat him as a monster to be defeated. And to that point, the heroine in this film turns out to be Candyman's white ancestor, who is horrified by the racial violence he was subjected to as a man and overcomes the monster he has become. In other words, the film is about white descendants symbolically overcoming the historical violence committed against Black people. I'm not going to go as far as calling the movie racist but the subtext is definitely uncomfortable.

I might be able to vibe with the film in spite of its thematically troubling aspects of it executed reasonably well as a horror movie but it decidedly does not. Bill Condon is woefully ill-equipped for horror, evident in his direction mirroring horror tropes but in such a way as to copy the genre's sensibilities rather than meaningfully execute them. Knowing the words but not the music and all that. Also, what's the deal with that ending beat. Why does it play like comedy?

D


Candyman: Day of the Dead



Everything interesting about this series has been scrubbed out by this point. The movie also sucks for all the ordinary reasons cheap slasher sequels suck, but the fact that Candyman has so much interesting text and subtext makes its squandering all the more disappointing.

D-