BEFORE: Today is Halloween, so it's the end of my Shocktober chain, which, because of my vacation, had to be cut short, only 19 horror films this month, this was by design. BUT, if you allow me to count back to "Muppets Haunted Mansion", which I watched in mid-September, perhaps this is just a scheduling issue. The "Purge" films were horror movies of a sort, and so were "Morbius" and "Last Night in Soho", and even "Sweet Girl" had a bit of the macabre to it. And "Charlie Says" was about the Manson family, so there you go. Once I factor in the September films that might have qualified, I get 28 movies, that's nearly a full month, it's just one that started early - so, on some level, this year's mission was accomplished.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II carries over from "Us", and so does Jordan Peele, as a writer and producer. It took me so long to schedule his two follow-ups to "Get Out" that there's now a new Jordan Peele film, "Nope", which I won't be able to get to this time around. I saw bits of "Candyman" while working at the AMC in the summer of 2021, and I saw bits of "Nope" earlier this year while working at my current job...I'm obligated to poke my head in on the screenings, just to monitor the sound level, and make sure that the theater-goers are keeping their masks on. Sometimes I see bits of the film this way, and sometimes those bits make sense, and, well, sometimes they don't.
But there's a whole lot of horror films I couldn't get to this year, about 50 that I have tangible copies of, either on DVD or my DVR, and then there's a whole list of both classic and new horror films available on streaming that I'm tracking, in hopes of putting together a solid chain for next year. That gives me a list of about 90 or 100 horror films, which theoretically should be more than enough, but right now, I've only got three small chains of 10 linked films each, another chain of 7 films, and then little bricks of two films here, three films there. Can I work my magic on this list over the winter break and maybe put together a bigger horror chain for 2023? It's tough to say.
Here are some of the classic films left over: "Ben" and "Willard", "Evil Dead" and "Army of Darkness", "Species" and "Species II", "Blair Witch 2", "Jeepers Creepers", "The Relic", "Swamp Thing", "Dead Ringers", the "Creepshow" movies, "The Amityville Horror" (1979), "Q: The Winged Serpent", "A Return to Salem's Lot", "Children of the Corn" and "Hocus Pocus".
Then there are the new horror films that MAYBE can help me link some of those classics together: "Antlers", "The Discovery", "Ghostbusters: Afterlife", "Nightmare Alley", "The Babadook", "Old", "Pet Sematary" (2019), "The Munsters" (2022), the latest "Scream" film, "Freaky", "Blair Witch" (2016), "Barbarian", "The Forever Purge", "Army of Thieves" and "Army of the Dead", "The Night House", "The Wolf of Snow Hollow", "Lamb", "The Black Phone" "They/Them" and "Wendell & Wild".
And the franchises I haven't even touched yet, like "Child's Play", "Nightmare on Elm Street", "Halloween", "Friday the 13th", and the "Saw" films, where could they all fit into the mix? I try to knock off at least one franchise, like "Twilight" or "Scream" each year, can I do that again? I not only don't know, I don't even have time to start researching this. First I've got to get my romance chain for next February into some kind of shape, then add some new horror films over the winter and spring, and then MAYBE I can have some kind of solid answer by summertime. Maybe.
THE PLOT: A sequel to the 1992 horror film "Candyman" that returns to the now-gentrified Chicago neighborhood where the legend began.
AFTER: You get it, right? Halloween, trick-or-treating, candy... Candyman! I played "Candyman" myself this year, sitting on my porch with two bags full of drug-store, fun-sized candy, after removing all the Kit Kats for my wife and all of the Reese's peanut butter cups for myself, of course. Let the neighborhood kids have all the Jolly Ranchers, Twizzlers, and Dum-Dum lollipops they want. This is a capitalist country, after all, and trick-or-treating is a socialist practice - they need to learn about trickle-down economics the hard way, I'm keeping the good candy for myself and donating only the stuff we don't need. I didn't seem to get many takers, I don't know if that's because we're still not fully out of the pandemic yet, or because a big man sitting alone on a porch with candy for kids just isn't a good look. Well, kids, nothing ventured, nothing gained - though maybe putting the candy bucket inside a giant cage was the wrong way to go. (I'M KIDDING!)
I'm new to the "Candyman" franchise, and it looks like this was some kind of remake or reboot, several of these actors were in the 1992 film, so I admit I'm sort of at a loss here. There are so many things I don't understand about the Candyman myth, even after watching this film, but my primary question is now, "Why does anybody say this guy's name five times in the mirror, anyway?" I mean, the second part of the urban legend is that after you do this, he appears as if by magic AND KILLS YOU. So, umm, why even take that chance? Sure, you want to test out the legend, to see if it's real, but if it is, YOU DIE. Well, I guess you die with a sense of resolve, with that big question out of the way, at least. I hope it was worth it...
And I get that we're dealing with racism again, that place where African-American social issues intersect with horror. But they really laid it on thick here, with issues concerning the projects (ghettos) in the Chicago area, also gentrification and the abysmal history of lynchings and race-based violence in the U.S., right up to an incident of cops shooting a homeless man in 1977, a man who was suspected of giving kids pieces of candy with razor blades in them. The man, Sherman Fields, was later proven innocent, but since he had a hook in place of one hand, he was believed to be evil. And then, the theory goes, he'd appear back in the land of the living any time someone said his name five times in the mirror....
But then there's another story, told with the aid of shadow puppets, of a painter named Daniel Robitaille, a black man born in the late 1800's who grew up to become a famous painter, but after he fell in love with a white woman and got her pregnant, he was tortured and killed by a mob of white men. So, wait, is HE the Candyman? Damn, this was so confusing, now I'm wishing I had watched the original 1992 movie, some of the same actors were in that film, and it feels like this film picked up on some threads from that film and followed them forward. The charater of Anthony McCoy was in that film as a young boy, and in this sequel/reboot he's a grown-up adult, a Chicago painter who's in a relationship with an art gallery owner.
There's something suspicious right there - isn't it a conflict of interest for a gallery owner to be sleeping with one of her artists? We see the other artists complain that Anthony's got an inside track toward getting his pieces shown in the gallery, and they may be right. Anthony hasn't made a new artwork in two years, he's creatively blocked until he starts researching the legend of the Candyman, and even then, he doesn't make a painting or anything, he just hangs up a mirror in the gallery with a plaque daring people to say the Candyman's name. WOW, is that lazy work by an artist or what? He just went out and BOUGHT a bathroom mirror at the Home Depot and called it art? Marcel Duchamp would be proud, I suppose, but we're not in the age of Dada any more, and I'm with Anthony's fellow artists on this one, if he weren't sleeping with the gallery owner, there's NO WAY that piece would make it into the show.
What's worse is that Anthony is having visions of the Candyman, or at least Sherman's ghost. Jeez-us, why don't you paint THAT? Inspiration is where you find it, after all, paint the gruesome guy with the hook hand that you see when you close your eyes, DO THE WORK, instead of just coasting and hanging up that bathroom mirror on the gallery wall! Anthony also gets stung by a bee at some point, and he keeps scratching the bite until it gets infected and pieces of his skin are falling off. Umm, he may want to have that looked at. Before long, his whole arm is going to...AHH, I see what you did there.
For some reason, the word spreads, and people keep testing out the theory by saying "Candyman" in the mirror five times, and they KEEP DYING. Does this make any sense? Hey, I heard about these high-school kids who said "Candyman" in the mirror and they all died, I can't wait to try that? Sure, and why not do the Cinnamon Challenge and eat some Tide Pods while you're at it, the world will be better off without you, or at least smarter. And when Anthony finally goes to the hospital, he accidentally finds out that he was born in the projects, and this leads him to ask his mother about the events seen in the first film, when he was kidnapped by the Candyman as a small child, and a woman named Helen Lyle saved him, but died in the process. Coincidentally, Anthony had been using her research on the legend to create his art, go figure!
I still didn't really understand what was happening at the end, maybe there is a Candyman collective and it seemed that William, the guy in the laundromat, seemed to know a lot about this. After all, he was present when Sherman Fields was killed by the police. But even though I saw the ending several times while working at the AMC last summer, I just still didn't quite get how it related to the rest of the film. Is it just me? I had to read the whole plotline on Wikipedia just to grok what was taking place in the last 15 minutes or so. And honestly, it's still pretty unclear.
It's not even really a NITPICK POINT, but the reports over the years of razor blades in Halloween candy have been blown completely out of proportion. The simple fact is that razor blades are larger than you think (also pretty outdated, most people these days use disposables or electric razors, but that's neither here nor there) and most Halloween candy is what they call "Fun-Sized", aka smaller than usual. So merely concealing a full-size razor blade in a fun-size treat would be quite a challenge, nearly impossible to do. Now, razor blades in APPLES is another story, however what kind of a sick, perverted person hands out FRUIT on Halloween instead of candy? Most kids would boycott those houses in the first place. Yet, the simple truth is that when people do investigate reports of tainted candy, it's often determined that a family member was involved in placing the foreign object in the candy, which means that either the parents loved their kids enough to teach them a valuable lesson about stranger danger, or they hated their kids enough to try to kill them for reals. You make the call. Yet, the urban legend about strangers trying to kill kids with candy persists - the story is stronger than the reality, which also kind of explains the Q-Anon thing with the non-existent pizza parlor somewhere in the D.C. area. Well, you can't prove that it DOESN'T exist...
Speaking as someone who was working as a theater usher when this film was theatrically released, it's really a dirty trick to flip the screen image for the first few minutes of the film. Do you know how many patrons just at the ONE theater I worked at ran out to complain that the film was being shown all backwards? A lot, so much that the management had to put up a SIGN warning people that the first few minutes of the film were meant to be screened in an inverted fashion. To make matters worse, the Sammy Davis song "Candyman" plays over the opening vanity logos, and it sounds all distorted and jittery. So the first few minutes of this movie are a projectionist's nightmare, even when it's being screen perfectly, it looks and sounds all messed up...
Well, it all doesn't really matter now, because Halloween is over and that's a wrap on the Shocktober chain for another year. Now I've got 25 movies left in 2022, but I have to watch 15 of them in the next 24 days if I'm going to make it to my Thanksgiving movies in time. It's still going to be tight, I've got a bunch of shifts coming up at the theater, but then the screenings sort of dry up a few days before the holiday. So, I like my chances.
Also starring Teyonah Parris (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Colman Domingo (last seen in "Freedomland"), Kyle Kaminsky, Vanessa E. Williams, Brian King (last seen in "Widows"), Miriam Moss, Rebecca Spence (last seen in "Man of Steel"), Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Christiana Clark, Michael Hargrove, Rodney L. Jones III, Heidi Grace Engerman, Ireon Roach, Breanna Lind, Malic White, Sarah Wisterman, Sarah Lo, Mark Montgomery, Torrey Hanson, Cassie Kramer, Cedric Mays, Hannah Love Jones, Genesis Denise Hale, J. Nicole Brooks (last seen in "The Weather Man"), Pamela Jones, Tien Tran, Katherine Purdy, Mike Geraghty (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Aaron Crippen, Dan Fierro, Nancy Pender, Johnny Westmoreland, Guy Spencer, Daejon Staeker, Tony Todd, Ben Marten, Fady Naguib (last seen in "Eternals") and the voice of Virginia Madsen (last seen in "Mr. North").
RATING: 5 out of 10 industrial-size clothes dryers
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