USA
AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY [REGION ‘A’ ONLY] AND DVD
RUNNING TIME: 95 mins
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera, Official HCF Critic
Coleman Tarrant is murdered while investigating the deaths of three men in a manner similar to the Candyman legend. One year later – and three years after the Candyman murders in Chicago – Professor Philip Purcell writes a book about the latter case but is himself killed and Coleman’s son Ethan is accused of his murder because of previous confrontations between the two. His daughter Annie tries to discredit the legend by invoking his name, but instead summons Candyman to New Orleans on the eve of Mardi Gras.…
As I wrote my review of Arrow’s superb new Blu-ray of Candyman [which can be read be read here], I realised that it had been a great many years since I’d seen the two sequels, and couldn’t even remember much about them, though I recalled them as being okay. So, having convinced myself even more of Candyman’s stature as one of the best- indeed possibly the best – American horror film of the ‘90s [okay it wasn’t a particularly good decade for horror], I held a debate with myself whether to rewatch and review the follow-ups, neither of which were as popular as the first film and which failed to create a hit franchise, even though the title character remains iconic. There wasn’t even much background information about them circulating unless I wanted to import the Region ‘A’ Blu-rays, which I opted not to do so I could watch the films and get these reviews in quickly while I was on a Candyman kick. Maybe in the future I’ll add my ‘background information’ bits.
Only a short while into Candyman: Farewell To The Flesh I had a hunch as to why this brief series failed. In the first film, it’s ambiguous as to whether Candyman actually exists, or at least until near the end – while it’s also ambiguous as to whether he’s the ghost of Daniel Robitaille the poor plantation slave punished in the most horrific way for getting the daughter of his master pregnant, or some kind of evil spirit conjured up by the deprived black community of Cabrini Green. The sequels dispense with the idea of wanting viewers to interpret things for themselves, and drastically simplify things, therefore cheapening the premise considerably and reducing Candyman [okay, I haven’t rewatched the third film yet, but I’ll be surprised if it does anything different], a character full of metaphorical significance, to little more than a conventional bogeyman who occasionally pops up to eviscerate anyone who says his name five times [and a few who don’t] and pester the heroine to join him in death. And yet Farewell To The Flesh really isn’t bad, and is at times actually quite good, but it just can’t help but look very poor compared to its masterful predecessor. The basic story, though working at a far lower level than before and partly rehashing the first one, is still in its own way quite strong, even though the script thinks that the revelation of something near the end concerning its heroine is a big deal even though I reckon virtually anybody would have worked it out way before then. There are a few effective sequences, New Orleans makes for as appropriate a setting as Chicago was before, and the film is brave enough to kill off people you may not expect to be killed. The biggest problem if taken just as a horror movie is that it isn’t particularly scary, something that can be probably largely be put down to perennial journeyman director Bill Condon [two Twilight films, Beauty And The Beast] who knows what he’s doing but can’t help but bring a certain blandness and lack of personality to his work.
The background story of Robitaille is retold, with just a little bit more detail, in the opening by Phillip Purcell whom you may remember as the rather snarky professor from the first film. The film rather overuses this tale, with quick shots of a flashback utilised throughout and then the whole flashback shown in detail near the end. It’s quite a powerful and nasty scene as we see the hand-lopping and the bee-stinging, and I like the touch of the little boy who tries some of the honey and says “it tastes like candy”, causing the others to call him Candyman which if you think about it is otherwise quite a daft name for this particular character. However, it would have had even more impact without those earlier shots, and why does the swarm of bees look far less convincing than the one we saw previously? Anyway, the lengthy build-up to the death of Purcell- who believes that Helen took on the persona of Candyman and killed those people three years ago – is well done, with a really rather good false scare when he pretends he’s being attacked by Candyman during his lecture to show people how silly all this Candyman stuff supposedly is, though two more false scares is possibly overdoing it, and there are far too many of these throughout the film. And right from the beginning Philip Glass’s incredible score from the original is also overused. Despite the impact it made, it was used sparingly in Candyman, but here it’s plastered all over the place and because of the minimalist nature of much of the music gets a bit monotonous. And why get Glass [who didn’t even like the films] to write a new theme for Annie and then not use the melody portion of it until the end credits?
Initially it’s Annie’s brother Ethan who’s blamed for the murder as well as that of his dad, and he’s clearly traumatised by something he’s seen. But when Annie, a teacher, calls Candyman’s name five times in her classroom to show her pupils how daft the Candyman legend is, folk start dying around her including members of her own family, one of which is quite a shock considering how early it happens. As before, the evidence points to the heroine having committed these killings, though of course this time around we know for sure that she didn’t do it. One bit that annoyed me was when the sight of somebody being murdered by some invisible being turns up on a monitor, because it symbolises this film’s dumbing down and making matters explicit or obvious, though taken on its own it’s quite a good scene. At least the kills are suitably brutal, Candyman sometimes choosing to throw his victims through glass or out of a window as well as hooking them, and the bees are used in one this time around though I personally feel that they could have been employed more in both films. And when the film comes up with a way to kill Candyman, it seems a bit more logical than a stake through the heart and the image of him cracking apart like a mirror is a strong one, though why on earth does Candyman pretty much tell Annie how to kill him a minute or so before she actually does? The cobwebbed old house that starts to collapse in the Mardi Gras rain does make for a dramatic setting for the climax, though generally Condon unsurprisingly doesn’t make the most of his locales. Annie fleeing Candyman through streets filled with party-goers should have been a nightmarish sequence, but it just falls flat. And the final scene feels as if they thought up a final shock and then cut the actual shock out, rendering it pointless.
A radio DJ’s supposedly funny commentary quickly get annoying, though I did like the amusingly dislikeable detective Heyward Sullivan played by Randy Oglesby who you just hope will get polished off. I can see many critics today complaining how the film sometimes uses African-Americans as figures of fear and even saying that the film is therefore racist, though considering that Annie is being terrorised by Candyman who is black, and therefore may very well feel uneasy around other black people, most of these moments seemed quite logical to me. You probably wouldn’t get such bits in today’s pathetically touchy climate though. There’s very little of the social commentary that you had before, just a continued sense of Candyman’s rage and an almost throwaway line “one less potential drug dealer, one less potential murderer” referring to how the white police don’t care about a black kid disappearing in a plot line that ends up being virtually thrown away. As for Candyman himself, Todd still plays the part with considerable dignity, and is still able to give a vivid sense that he lives on his pain and people’s fear of him, but he’s not given the poetic lines he was before.
Kelly Rowan fares okay as Annie for some of the time but doesn’t convey enough sadness and desperation in the second half, while Veronica Cartwright gives herself a none-too-convincing Louisiana accent, hardly necessary because nobody else talks like that in the film. Condon and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler opted to shoot everything in a muted palette which hardly evokes the setting, though there are a few strong images, like an altar of candles and skulls enshrined to Candyman with a painted portrait on the wall above of him crying out in anger with his hook and other arm reaching out. In the end Farewell To The Flesh could never have been anywhere near as good as Candyman what with the direction they decided to take it in, do I guess you can’t really criticise it for not even seeming to try. Taken on its own terms it’s a reasonable supernatural slasher with some good kills and a half decent story, even if it’s really a sequel that had no reason to exist – and shouldn’t it really have been about the undead Helen anyway?….
Rating: 6 out of 10 stars
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