BEFORE: Well, I'm sorry if you came here today looking for "Final Destination 4", but it turns out that there IS no movie with that title - there is a fourth movie in the series, but it's not called that. (IYKYK). Surprisingly there is NO possible chain through all the Final Destination movies, so I had to improvise and mix two franchises together if I want to watch all the movies in both of them.
Tony Todd carries over from "Final Destination 3" but they did NOT cast him in "The Final Destination", which was probably a mistake. I mean, somebody has to carry over from one movie to the next, right? RIGHT? He does return later in the series, I mean, the films take place in different cities so in the "FD" universe, one guy can't be everywhere, I get it. Or maybe Mr. Todd just wasn't available for a couple years because he was very busy or had health problems or something. Maybe they used archive footage later on, I just don't know yet. But I'm taking a detour into the "Candyman" movies to keep the chain alive, and this way I don't have to circle back here in a later year, unless they happen to make another "FD" movie.
Either way, I'm all turned around here - but maybe it's for the best, I was getting burned out on the "Hey, it's just Final Destination again but on a different vehicle" pattern. Why, it's almost like killing off every character in your franchise's latest film is a bad idea, because then we can't come to care about those characters over time, but hey, what do I know?
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Candyman" (2021) (Movie #4,275)
THE PLOT: The Candyman, a murderous soul with a hook for a hand, is accidentally summoned to reality by a skeptic grad student researching the monster's myth.
AFTER: The 2021 sequel film was my film to watch ON HALLOWEEN just four years ago, I had seen parts of it during the late summer of 2021 as it was playing in an AMC theater where I was working as an usher. But by the time I watched the film, I'd already quit that job and I'd been working at the theater run by the college for, well, over a year. Still, I'm going to put this one on the "Screenings I Worked At" list, it counts. That means it took four years from me saying, "Hey, maybe I should watch the original film, one of these days..." to me actually doing that. Well, it takes as long as it takes.
So now I've gained some understanding beyond what was related in the 2021 film - Candyman was the son of a slave who became a prominent painter in the late 1800's, who fell in love with a white woman and impregnated her, leading to his death by lynch mob, although before killing him the mob amputated his hand and gave him a hook in its place - then they smeared him with honey and allowed him to be attacked by angry bees. Then they lynched him and burned his corpse in a funeral pyre, which took place on the future location of a housing project in Chicago. Now, there are a few things that don't make sense there, like if the mob was going to kill him, why did they bother to give him a hook hand? That would only be useful if he had lost his hand and was going to be around a while and needed a way to grab things. And the bee thing seems rather like a lot of work too, why not just kill the man? And then burning on top of the lynching, it all seems a bit much. I'm not saying it couldn't happen that way, the mob mentality being what it is, maybe the while people disagreed over his punishment so they just decided to hit him all with it at once, you know, to satisfy everyone.
Helen Lyle is a graduate student of anthropology at UI Chicago, and she and her friend Bernadette are writing their thesis about the Candyman myth, and have interviewed several people who believe in the urban legend about the ghost that appears when you look in a mirror and say his name five times. It's kind of a "Beetlejuice" situation, except it's more work and the same questions apply, like how long can you pause between saying the name, like what happens if you say his name FOUR times today and then one more time tomorrow, does he show up? Or does the counter reset at midnight, like what are the rules on this? More importantly, WHY would anyone who believes the story actually say his name that many times, if they think the spirit is going to show up and kill them? Do they have a death wish, or have they just not thought this through all the way?
NITPICK POINT: Some of the people who they've interviewed don't even have the story straight, like some people have mixed it up with the urban legend about the stoned couple that put the turkey in the crib and the baby in the oven. WTF? And you know that just never happened, so it sheds doubt on the whole "Candyman" thing from the get-go. We also see some razor blades inside Halloween candy later in the film, and BTW, that never happened either. Sure, there were people who were trying to poison kids, at one point, but specific (probably terrible) kids and they weren't just handing out dangerous candy to random kids. Still, the legend survives despite the facts not supporting it, and as a result some neighborhoods still do not participate in "trick or treat" out of an abundance of caution. While in North Carolina I saw segments on morning TV for "Trunk or Treat" events, which is when a church group or school has a closed-off party and people distribute candy from their car trunks, so kids aren't going to random houses where evil strangers are doing bad nasty things. Umm, it's fine, but if somebody was interested in handing out bad candy at a "Trunk or Treat" event they could just do that, and also the name doesn't make any sense now, because it should be "Trunk AND Treat", not OR. I thought, what the heck does somebody have against tricks, are the kids so fragile now that they can't be triggered by a little pranking, or not inventive enough to come up with a trick if they don't get a treat? What a world we live in...
Anyway, Helen starts researching the "Candyman" story as it relates to the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago, and since she lives in a condo building that was originally designed to be affordable housing, she happens to know that there's a hole in every apartment, behind the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, if you pull out the medicine cabinet you can push on the other apartments medicine cabinet and gain access to the other apartment. Regarding the murder of a woman named Ruthie Jean, Helen believes she knows how the killer got into her apartment, via the medicine cabinet hole. NITPICK POINT #2: This doesn't make much sense either, because it seems like it would be extra work to leave a medicine-cabinet-shaped hole in the bathroom walls, it wouldn't make the cost of construction much less, in fact it might even be MORE expensive to leave this hole between apartments, building a totally solid wall would (I think) be cheaper and faster and make the building stronger, but what do I know?
But Helen and Bernadette visit the murder site and sure enough, there's a hole behind the medicine cabinet that leads to a secret vacant apartment. NITPICK POINT #3: And in both buildings, the other apartment just happens to be vacant? That strains credulity just a little more, like are the condos not selling well in her building? Do they not need every single apartment in the Cabrini-Green project to be full? While there, they also meet a resident there, Anne-Marie, who is not a junkie, not a prostitute, she's just trying to raise her baby boy in safety.
After learning the full Candyman story from a very pompous professor, Helen comes back to the projects and meets Jake, a young boy, who tells her that "Candyman" assaulted a young boy in a nearby public bathroom, and everyone knows not to go in there, or Candyman will get them. So, naturally Helen checks it out - remember this is a woman who was told the consequences of saying "Candyman" in the mirror five times, and she did it anyway. Inside the very disgusting men's room she meets a local thug who slashes her with a hook, but it's not the REAL ghost Candyman, just a local dealer who probably sells his drugs there and doesn't like strange white women coming around. When she recovers, Helen is able to identify the thug for the police and then she's free to continue her odd quest to meet the ghost Candyman, for some reason.
When she is visited in a parking garage by the ghostly one, he says things like "Be my victim" and he sort of hypnotizes or enthralls her, and she blacks out. When she comes to, she's covered in blood and she's in Anne-Marie's apartment, along with the head of Anne-Marie's dog. She (for some reason) picks up the cleaver and gets her fingerprints on it, and then has to fight a hysterical Anne-Marie to escape - but the police arrive and find her holding the weapon and covered in blood. Anne-Marie's infant son is missing, taken away by the Candyman, but Helen is charged with several crimes. She can't say where the baby is, because she doesn't know, and honestly it's not clear if she killed the dog or Candyman did.
Her husband and lawyer get her released on bail (thanks to white privilege) and she desperately wants proof that the Candyman exists and did the bad thing - so, yup, you guessed it, she says his name in the mirror five times AGAIN. Very, very stupid, because he shows up again and this time he kills Bernadette, who was just coming by to check on Helen. Once again, Helen is covered in blood and is found holding the murder weapon. Like, OK, one time is maybe an accident, twice is not an accident - so it's possible that Helen is a serial killer and has imagined the Candyman coming to her and making her black out. She is committed to a psychiatric hospital and when the doctor asks her to tell him what happened in her apartment, she decides it's best to summon Candyman YET AGAIN so the doctor can see first-hand. Yeah, well, that's it for the doctor, another mysterious stabbing death but Helen escapes again and is on the run. By all means, keep digging that hole deeper and deeper...
She shows up at her apartment and surprise, surprise, her husband Trevor is now living with one of his grad students, and they're re-painting the apartment to be Pepto-Bismol pink. Yuch. What's it been, Trevor, a whole month? There's just no way he wasn't already sleeping with the student and cheating on Helen, he absolutely was. What a piece of garbage, but honestly Helen should have known, because she started sleeping with him when SHE was one of his students, right? He did it once, he'll do it again. Helen returns to the projects and gains access to the secret apartment again, but this time she follows the holes in the walls through more secret apartments and she discovers Candyman's lair, also there's a mural on the walls that shows Candyman's origin story, and the woman he was in love with looks an awful lot like her. So, is she the reincarnated lost love of the slave's son? It's unclear, but the mural does seem to point that way.
The residents of the project have been building a big bonfire outside, you know, for Halloween night, as you do. Candyman decides to hide the baby in the woodpile to turn that into another funeral pyre, but it's also unclear what he's trying to accomplish by doing that. He puts Helen in the pile as well, does he think that killing Helen will reunite them in the afterlife? Best guess? But Helen uses her last bit of strength to try and save the baby, even if she doesn't survive. The ending would seem to suggest that she became a vengeful spirit much like Candyman did, and this way maybe Trevor gets what's coming to him. I mean, sure, but we kind of got there the really hard way, didn't we?
It's a horror story, it's a film about racial inequality and class warfare, cheating husbands and professors who sleep with their students, and then of course you've got the evil spirit who is also somehow a bunch of bees walking around in a human costume. So yeah, it's about a lot of things that don't really coalesce into one coherent storyline, that's for sure. But it's so far out there you kind of have to reward it for getting somewhere and also kind of everywhere. There's also a bunch of Philip Glass music, which, sure, was very popular at the time for reasons.
The doctor at the psychiatric hospital was played by Stanley DeSantis, who I never met but I did have some business dealings with. He had a side-hustle which was a graphic design company that made t-shirts and the animator I worked for hired him to make two of his cartoon strips into t-shirt designs, and we ordered, I don't know, 30 or 40 of each one in various sizes and sold them at Comic-Cons and online. But when we needed to make more t-shirts, we could not get in touch with him because he had died in 2005 and we never got the masters back from him in order to make more t-shirts from another company.
Directed by Bernard Rose (writer of "Candyman" (2021))
Also starring Virginia Madsen (last seen in "Her Smell"), Xander Berkeley (last seen in "The Divergent Series: Allegiant"), Vanessa E. Williams (last seen in "Imagine That"), Kasi Lemmons (last seen in "Vampire's Kiss"), DeJuan Guy, Marianna Elliott, Ted Raimi (last heard in "18 1/2"), Ria Pavla, Lisa Ann Poggi (last seen in "Honeymoon in Vegas"), Adam Philipson, Eric Edwards (last seen in "Blade"), Carolyn Lowery, Barbara Alston, Sarina C. Grant (last seen in "Coma"), Michael Culkin (last seen in "Boogie Woogie"), Bernard Rose, Terrence Riggins (last seen in "What's Love Got to Do with It"), Gilbert Lewis (last seen in "Don Juan DeMarco"), Rusty Schwimmer (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Baxter Harris (last seen in "Species II"), John Rensenhouse, Mika, Stanley DeSantis (last seen in "Fools Rush In"), Diane Peterson (last seen in "Arlington Road"), Michael Laren (last seen in "Trust Me"), Michelle Blackwell
RATING: 6 out of 10 non-functioning toilets (seems about right)
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