Directed by Bill Condon
Starring Tony Todd, Kelly Rowan, Bill Nunn, William O'Leary, Timothy Carhart and Veronica Cartwright
Trivia that no one could possibly care about - this was the first R-rated movie that I ever saw in a movie theater. Some fateful afternoon many moons ago, I was able to persuade my brother at gunpoint to take me to [i]Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh[/i], and after what was no doubt a very long, painful session of screaming, he relented. If you're expecting a more epic story, I'm sorry to disappoint you just like I've done many, many times before. It SHOULD be noted, however, that the reason for my bratty fit was that I had already seen - and loved - the original film so damn much.
You'd be hard-pressed to find many horror fans out there who dislike the original Candyman directed by Bernard Rose and based on a pretty damn good Clive Barker short story. In this guy's opinion (and this is my fucking blog, people), it's one of the three or four best horror flicks of the '90s, a perfect marriage of stylish direction, awesome acting, and more than its fair share of genuinely creepy money scenes. And then there's Tony Todd in the title role himself. Tragic, scary and captivating all at once, all with that ungodly deep profundo voice. Any way you slice it, it's horror perfection, and I inducted it into the Registry once upon a time here on the blog. Type "Lick Ness Monster Candyman" into Google if you're interested.
Lo and behold, three years later we got this - the first sequel, and one of only two, thank christ, because holy jeebus did the quality go downhill in a hurry. Of course, my 12-year-old self just thought it was awesome seeing an R-rated movie. I could have seen Ishtar that day and thought that it ruled. I don't think this film is HORRIBLE, per se, but I've definitely done an about face in the years since that first viewing. Let's get cracking.
Admittedly, I haven't seen the film in a few years, so if some of my details are wrong...I doubt anyone cares. What I DO remember, however, is that the opening sequence involves the snobby professor (Michael Culkin in one of the all-time best pretentious douche roles, and he's just as good in this movie) giving a speech about the events of the first film before summarily getting killed. It's a scene that really grabs our attention, and since it followed Douche Prof getting accosted by a man who appears none too fond of him, it immediately casts a little bit of ambiguity to the murder. But yeah, we totally know who did it.
For much of the film's running time, we are privy to something of a family drama. Our star character is Annie Tarrant (Kelly Rowan, who does a decent enough acting job, although she's certainly no Virginia Madsen), whose father was murdered several years earlier in apparent Candyman-style fashion. The guy who accosted Douche Professor? That would be her brother Ethan, played by William O'Leary of Tim the Tool Man's brother relative fame. The film attempts to go through the motions that the original does with setting up an innocent character to take the fall for the crimes of the Candyman in Ethan, but the emotional punch is simply not there this time around, possibly due to the fact that we spent approximately six seconds with him before his incarceration and partially because he's played by William O'Leary. We also meet Octavia (Veronica Cartwright), Annie's booze-addled mother who serves as both the human antagonist and protagonist at different points of the story as the guardian of this family's secrets.
In spoilerish information that should surprise nobody, we get the full background story on the Candyman in this film. As he always does, Todd does an aces job playing the role, both in its monster form and in the tragic back story where a slave meets his untimely end due to the actions of an unruly mob, honey, and a whole lotta angry bees. This is the movie's OTHER money sequence; it's graphic and emotional, the kind of stuff that the original movie lapped up with wreckless voracity, and it effectively launches us toward the kill-filled second-half of the movie as Annie summons the Candyman to present-day New Orleans by saying the sacred chant. I'll leave it up to first-time viewers to discover her family's connection to the Candyman; the journey there is a little tedious, and that's the problem.
While the movie does its best to replicate the tone of the original, there's something about the execution that is nowhere near as captivating. For starters, the actors are nowhere near as invested as the stable in the original. At best, they're mediocre, and at worst, they're just going through the motions, with the exception of Cartwright as the matriarchal Octavia (and Todd, of course). The characters that they portray are also nowhere near as sympathetic or captivating, and as a result, the sporadic death scenes carry nowhere near as much weight. Remember that gut-wrenching scene in the first film where Madsen wakes up to find the single mother screaming about her missing baby? We get nothing like that in this film.
Having said that, the background information is quite good, and there's an admittedly cool framing device involving a radio announcer that does a really good job setting a dark tone. Put simply, there's some good stuff to be had in this movie, but you have to wade through a lot of disappointment to find it.
** out of ****. Loses points due to comparison to the first movie; decent otherwise.
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