Candyman

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-

               Let me start with a bit of a disclaimer: There are plenty of reviews of Candyman that will tell you how brave or relevant or powerful the film is, or how the film is any number of other adjectives that used to actually mean something but now just vaguely denote agreement with something’s message. I’m not that guy. When it comes to horror films, I’m here to tell you if a movie is: 1. Scary, 2. Gory, and 3. Fun. My assessment is, respectively: 1. No, 2. No and 3. Fuck No. In the grand tradition of modern horror, the new Candyman is less interested in scares and bloodshed than it is in value-signaling and hammering you over the head with social messages.

               The source material for this series is the 1985 short story The Forbidden by English author Clive Barker. The original story takes place in Liverpool and Candyman is a white man. The original Candyman film (from 1992) moved the setting to Chicago, made the Candyman a black man and added a backstory about slavery and a forbidden love story between a black man and a white woman. I know, it’s unusual for Americans to shoehorn racism into a story, but it happened. I have always considered the original film to be effective but a bit overrated, but also think that the character and the concept are better than the overall film. In particular, Tony Todd’s performance as Candyman is iconic and creepy and he deserved far better than the godawful sequels that he got in the 90s. And he sure as shit deserves better than this.

               I still maintain that the core concept behind The Forbidden/Candyman is a solid one, but this new version doesn’t seem to agree with me. The 2021 version abandons the core ideas in favor of a vague, meandering rant about identity politics and police brutality. Our protagonist is a pretentious dickbag of an artist named Anthony who lives in the Cabrini Green housing projects, the setting of the original film. As a child, Anthony had an encounter with a man named Sherman Fields, who I will hereafter refer to as Bullshit Candyman. The hook-handed Bullshit Candyman comes out of a wall and offers candy to young Anthony, causing him to flee in terror. Bullshit Candyman is then killed by the cops because the cops are racist; it has nothing to do with the fact that he has a hook-hand and spends his time inside the walls of housing projects and luring children with candy. He was probably a good guy.

               In the modern day, older Anthony is searching for inspiration for his art and learns the legend of Candyman from a local and here is where the film truly lost me. This is a direct sequel to the original film, yet the legend is completely different. Here, the Candyman is not a single person, but rather a mantle. Every time a black man is killed by the cops and/or white people, they become a new iteration of the Candyman. Their deaths apparently all involve bees and hooks in order to keep the original motif, so white folk in this area have a damn specific brand of hate crimes. Anyway, so Anthony’s version of Candyman is not the iconic Tony Todd iteration, but the friendly dude that just wanted to lure children into crawl spaces with candy before being cut down in the prime of his career. But Bullshit Candyman only appears in mirrors and doesn’t really speak, so the well-spoken, cultured ghoul of the original is lost and replaced with a vague notion that the main character is gradually being possessed by the entity of Candyman. This oddly makes it seem more like a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge or Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II than it is a Candyman film.

               In short, the title character is basically eliminated in everything but a symbolic sense, which makes zero sense in the context of the original film. This is a film that forgoes both logic and scares in favor of unbearably heavy-handed messages. The villain is no longer a slasher, but the threat of racism and gentrification that is loosely embodied by some vague notion of Candyman. One could reasonably argue that the same could be said of Candyman in the original film, but this version makes one long for the subtlety of 1992, when thematic content could be treated as a conversation rather than a bludgeoning. There is no grey area in the 2021 version of this story; white people are awful and cops are cartoonishly evil without exception.

               My sole compliment (and the only thing avoiding an F grade) is that the cinematography is often solid, especially in the kill scenes. Although the villain barely has a presence in this film, the few times that he is shown as mirror reflections are momentarily effective and allow for some clever camerawork during the few moments that this film attempts to be a horror film. These moments make me wish that this film was more of a supernatural slasher film. You know, kind of like the original Candyman.

               I don’t think I’m unreasonable in my expectations for films. When I go to see a movie called Candyman, I expect to see Candyman. Somehow, this film couldn’t meet that high bar. Similar to the godawful 2019 version of Black Christmas, the new Candyman just uses an established horror brand to pull people into a theater so that the filmmakers have a captive audience when they get up on their soap box to deliver their message. Their brave, relevant, powerful message.

Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candyman_(2021_film)#/media/File:Candyman_(2021_film).png