I meant to check this out as part of my extended Horror Franchise Marathon but shit got a little hectic when my daughter got born and it kinda slipped through the cracks. Now I make no bones about my contempt for the Candyman series. I never “got” them I guess. Everyone talks about how atmospheric they are. To me though, they’ve always been pretty weak. This is the best one of the trilogy. Candyman fans may think I’m being sacrilegious but that’s just how I feel. It probably had something to do with my lowered expectations more than anything.
Donna D’Errico plays the great granddaughter of Candyman (Tony Todd). As a promotion for an art exhibit featuring the Candyman’s paintings, she says his name five times in front of a mirror and resurrects the hook-handed madman. Predictably, he goes around murdering a bunch of people while offering his descendant a chance to become a card-carrying Candywoman.
While the first two Candyman flicks where all about being pompous and slow-moving, this Direct to Video sequel is a bit more down and dirty. It actually tries to give the audience what they want; namely titties and blood. The other films tried too hard to be “legitimate” movies and consequently got bogged down in a hurry. Part 3 is refreshingly content with just being a lowbrow Direct to Video horror sequel. For that and little else, I admired it.
Although Day of the Dead is an improvement over the previous installments, it still isn’t very good. The “plot” just basically calls for Candyman to harass D’Errico while forcing her to watch as he guts her friends. This is OK for the first 45 minutes or so but it gets a bit tiresome after awhile. You also have to deal with some annoying Candyman worshipping punks/art critics, a bunch of stupid dream sequences, and an ending that pretty much sucks too.
Todd once again gives a menacing performance as Candyman. You know, it’s a shame that time and again, he gives 100% in these movies and each time the filmmakers let him down. I mean they have a great looking psycho and all they do with him is make him say inane shit like, “Join me in death!” over and over again in a voice that sounds like a cross between Barry White and Darth Vader.
Nick (A Nightmare on
Suggested Drinking Game: Take a shot every time Candyman says, “Be my victim!”
Before directing such critically beloved fare as Gods and Monsters, Kinsey, and Dreamgirls, Bill Condon helmed this shitty sequel to the already shitty enough Candyman. This time out, the hooked-handed Candyman (Tony Todd) is brought back to life in
This flick is just a straight up mess. Like the Freddy and Michael Myers sequels, this installment gives way too much background on the Candyman and ruins the mystique of the character. All it does if further jumble up an already incoherent plotline. The worst part of the movie though is the constant false scares. Seriously, there had to have been like 27 false scares in this movie and all of them are punctuated by piercing screeching sound effects that will give you a headache. Speaking of headaches, the movie also features an irritating Cajun DJ that provides idiotic narration throughout the flick. This guy is so annoying you’ll want to just punch his fucking lights out.
Tony Todd’s performance is again the best thing this lame flick has to offer. It doesn’t help that he’s barely in it. Like the first movie, he mainly just kills people with his hook, but he spices things up in this one by unleashing a horde of killer bees out of his stomach. No matter how awful Candyman 2 was, I still have to give screenwriter Rand (The Maker) Ravich some points for creativity as this is the only movie that I can think of in which a Sno-Cone salesman has all the valuable exposition on the film’s villain. He also wrote some good dialogue like, “You’re next! Groin to gullet!” too.
The Candyman (Tony Todd from the Night of the Living Dead remake) is the ghost of a slave who was lynched for knocking up a white chick. The lynch mob cut off his hand and covered him with honey and let him get stung to death by thousands of bees. Afterwards they burned his body on a funeral pyre and spread his ashes all over a nearby field that would later become a ghetto in Chicago. 100 years later Candyman, armed (no pun intended) with a hook that’s shoved through his stump gets his revenge on people whenever they say his name five times in front of a mirror.
Virginia Madsen stars as a grad student doing a paper on urban legends who becomes interested in Candyman. Eventually Candyman frames her for his murders and she gets put into a psyche ward. In the film’s fiery finale she sacrifices herself on a bonfire in order to save a kidnapped infant and later goes on to become another murdering urban legend. (She looks like Annie Lennox on a bad hair day.)
All of this would have been all fine and dandy as candy but director Bernard (Paperhouse) Rose makes things as confusing as possible by having Madsen have a lot of irritating blackouts which frustrated the heck out of me and interrupted the flow of the film. I also didn’t buy the fact that Candyman was trying to pin his murders on Madsen. I mean here we have a screen psycho that has at least as much promise as Pinhead, and the filmmakers strip him of his menace by making him more or less a weenie. Say what you will about Freddy, Jason, Chucky, or Leatherface, but at least they take credit for their murders.
The fact that the plot has more holes in it than a honeycomb compounds the killer’s muddled motives. Consider the opening scene where a young white girl in an upscale part of town says “Candyman” five times in front of the mirror and gets killed. That doesn’t jibe with the fact that Candyman ONLY haunts the ghetto where his ashes were spread. And while we’re at it, why would he be in the ghetto murdering black folk if it were the white people who initially hunted him down and lynched him? And why would he want Madsen to become an urban legend killing machine too? I’d think you’d want to corner the market on that shit. I guess the ghetto is big enough for both of them to slaughter.
In addition to the sketchy screenwriting, Rose skimps on the blood and guts which is the film’s final nail in it’s cinematic coffin. Sure things are fairly bloody, but Rose never SHOWS hardly any of it, just the aftermath, which is a little wearisome to say the least. Candyman DOES castrate a retard (off screen), decapitate a dog (off screen), and carve up Kasi (Silence of the Lambs) Lemmons (off screen). Rose does offer a few squirts of arterial spray, but for the most part, you don’t see a damned thing.
Todd does a fine job in the role of Candyman and exudes a lot of authority with his scary baritone voice, but is done a great disservice by the weak script. It doesn’t help that he doesn’t show up till the movie’s halfway over either. He DOES get the movie’s best dialogue, which includes such lines as: “What’s blood if not for shedding?”, “I’ll split you from your groin to your gullet!”, and “Be my victim!”
Look fast for Ted (Army of Darkness) Raimi, who has a small role near the beginning of the film.
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