Candyman (1992)

Year 18, Day 299 - 10/26/26 - Movie #5,466

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)

Final Destination 3

Year 18, Day 298 - 10/25/26 - Movie #5,465

BEFORE: OK, I am back from vacation in North Carolina - not-so-funny story, I was very paranoid about watching "Final Destination 2", a film that starts with a horrible highway accident, just before going on a long drive on several highways. I mean, if you believe in premonitions and superstitions, you might just want to avoid the first film in this series before traveling on an airplane, or, as we established, also avoid listening to John Denver music before a flight. By extension, maybe don't watch the second film just before a long-distance drive. 

Anyway, there was an accident on I-95, just north of Petersburg, VA, but fortunately it was on the other side of the highway, northbound, and two cars flipped over, but nobody was hurt. Well, I figured that was the end of the "curse" until we continued a little further and found ourselves driving behind a truck with a bunch of logs on it - and that's what caused the accident in "Final Destination 2". I hadn't told my wife about watching that movie, but I did tell her I was a bit uncomfortable driving behind the truck, and she felt the same way. I said, "Do whatever you have to do, slow down, speed up, pull over, but this is not where I want to be." And I think we pulled into a rest stop at a Wawa or something, but we for sure got out from behind the logging truck. 

The rest of the trip went well (see below, though) and I celebrated a birthday down in North Carolina, we went out for Chinese Buffet the day before and my sister ordered in a nice meal on the day itself, plus chocolate cake and some chocolate stout I had just bought. And I got to hang out with my father for a few days, we worked on some jigsaw puzzles, I'm much faster than him but I slow my roll when we're working on a puzzle together. My sister said my visit lifted his spirits, he hasn't been doing so well since my mother passed, but he perked up a bit while we were there. 

Anyway, Tony Todd (or at least the voice of Tony Todd) carries over from "Final Destination 2". 

THE PLOT: Wendy Christensen and a group of teens who escaped a fatal roller-coaster accident face a bloody date with Death. 

AFTER: No lie, the other big thing we did down in North Carolina was to attend the N.C. State Fair, it's a really big deal down there, my sister lives near Raleigh, and that's where the fair grounds are. So I was JUST at a big fair, four days ago, and now this "Final Destination 3" movie starts off at a fair with a defective roller coaster? Well, the saving grace here is that I didn't go on any of the rides at the fair, like many other people, I was there for the food. I saw at least a hundred posts on Instagram about "Here's Everything I Ate at the NC State Fair", sure, like anybody else would care about what YOU ate, who gives a crap, why are you wasting everyone's time with a list, in the end it's not important at all, hardly worth talking about. 

So, here's a list of what I ate at the NC State Fair: a crab rangoon egg roll, a "Yam & Ham" sweet potato biscuit with country ham, a couple of my wife's nachos, an order of loaded "Mega Tater Tots" with ham, cheese, chives inside and hot honey and bacon on top, a deep-fried Scotch egg, and a deep-fried apple hand pie with cinnamon ice cream, then we got giant donuts to go, mine was a PB&J, with peanuts and peanut butter outside and raspberry jelly inside. I took a pass on a few items when the lines were too long, most notably I skipped the crab empanadas and the "Boss Hog", which was pork belly burnt ends served over fries with white BBQ sauce. We didn't end up eating the donuts until yesterday morning, when we had our first pit stop on the 2-day drive home. All the food was great, and a lot of planning went into deciding WHAT to eat, and the night before working out a path through the fair to get all of those things, with a minimal amount of excess walking. This was a "surgical strike" on the fair, sure we spent some time indoors at the arena checking out the sampling stations (Cheerwine and ice cream) but after four hours, we'd eaten our fill and we were headed OUT of the fair, and since it was late afternoon there was a big crowd coming in after work or school, so we avoided all of that. It was still fairly busy on a Wednesday afternoon, but I'd rather go then instead of a Friday or Saturday or the day when everyone can bring in 6 cans of food in exchange for a ticket, those days would be like wall-to-wall people. 

Again, we did NOT go on any rides - my wife's not into roller coasters but she has stood by while I've gone on the Cyclone or the one at the New York New York casino in Las Vegas. Well, tonight's film would seem to justify her distaste for thrill rides - because if you never go on one, then you'll never be involved in an accident on a fairground ride. Well, we love that North Carolina State Fair, but there were 5 people injured on a ride there back in 2013, and then there was a malfunction on a ride last year, some people got stuck up in the air for a while but nobody was injured. It's really the same reason I don't go swimming at the beach, as long as I don't I've got like a zero percent chance of being eaten by a shark. And I think I'd be a tasty snack for one, considering how much BBQ and fair foods I eat. 

So this film ends up about the wisdom of NOT going on a roller coaster, as high-schooler Wendy has a premonition of an accident, and she watches all of her friends die and then herself, in much the same way Alex saw the plane explosion in the first film and Kimberly saw the giant highway pile-up in the second film. They have these visions of the future for a reason, because after they get over being scared shitless they can take action, get off the plane or don't get on the highway, or, yeah, umm, get off the roller coaster in a panicked state, I'm sure the amusement park staff just LOVE it when that happens. Once Wendy realizes that her premonition isn't just regular fear leaving her body, it's definitely coming true, she tries to tell everyone that the track is broken and the electronics of the ride have not been maintained, and for her effort she is merely thrown out of the ride. But she did manage to convince a few other people, and Kevin, her seatmate, started a fight with Lewis, the football star, and then a bunch of other people were made to leave the ride as well. Those people were mad at first about not getting to ride the coaster, but their feelings turned to relief when pieces of their friends started to rain down from the coaster. 

I'm sorry, but the real loser here is Jason, Wendy's boyfriend, who just HAD to sit up in front on the coaster, and even before Wendy's premonition, when she expressed that she was nervous about the ride and wanted to sit in the back, Jason still took the front seat and sent Kevin back to look after Wendy. This is terrible boyfriend behavior, if your girlfriend is anxious or nervous, you ride with her, duh, not just because it's the chivalrous thing to do, but if she's scared she's going to want to grab on to somebody, and Jason really should have made sure that was HIM and not Kevin. Just saying. Wendy, you're better off without him, because he didn't really care about you. Oh, sure, he asked to be let off the ride but only AFTER Wendy was removed and the ride had already started moving, and that's some really weak sauce, bro. 

I'm just three movies into this franchise, and already the pattern is nearly exactly the same, the survivors research accounts of premonitions and they learn about Flight 180 from the first movie (which was six years ago at this point, in both movie time and IRL) and it doesn't take long for them to figure out that Death is stalking them even if they can't see it coming, but it's coming for them. So it's JUST the first movie again, but on a roller coaster this time, just like the second movie was just the first movie, but on a highway instead of a plane. There's a bit at the end of tonight's film that takes place on the NYC subway, so we're knocking off both trains and roller coasters tonight, where will the NEXT film take place, on a boat?

Wendy also took a lot of pictures for the school yearbook, which seems a bit weird because usually the yearbook is supposed to be full of the kids AT SCHOOL, OK maybe in the high-school play or on the football field, but why would the yearbook print photos of the students going to a fair or amusement park? They would do that on their own time, unless this was some kind of organized class trip, but I don't think that it is. It's important to the plot that Wendy got pictures of all the people who were being stalked after the accident, because that gave her clues about how each one might die - but it's still hard to believe she would take photos of them at the fair for the yearbook. Sorry, screenwriter, this makes no sense, please try again. Also, it really strains credulity to say that the photos "predicted" their cause of death. Like the thinnest of clues are used here to predict the future, like if the photo was over-exposed somehow that means the person is going to burn up or die in an explosion. You know, sometimes a bad photo is just a bad photo. 

Also, NITPICK POINT, who's to say who would have died in what order aboard the roller coaster accident, especially for the people who were kicked off the ride? Since they didn't die, what evidence is there to suggest the order in which they WOULD HAVE DIED if they stayed on board the ride? And now Death is making sure to kill them in exactly that order, because the Grim Reaper has OCD or something? It's hard to believe these people would get so caught up in finding the logical order in a very illogical thing, which is being stalked by Death and killed because somehow surviving an accident is a thing that needs to be rectified ASAP. Somewhere there are people who have brushes with death or they survive accidents and then they live for 20, 30, 50 more years, it's been known to happen. Now we're being told that if you survive an accident or you miss that doomed flight or you overslept on 9/11, well, that's it, the clock is ticking for you because Death is right around the corner, he's got a new plan for you. 

The fear that emanates from this franchise is all about the lack of control, finding out that your death could come at any time, and even knowing about it coming may not allow you to prevent it. It's going to be a random signpost falling on you, or a nail gun at work that falls on you (or you fall on it) and you'll have no say in the matter. BUT that's real life, every day, at any point you could trip and fall in the shower or your house could have an electrical short or you could die in a bizarre gardening accident, and if you're a thrill-seeker it's even worse, your parachute might not open or you could realize too late that your bungee cord is not connected on the other end. Well, sometimes Death doesn't even need to try that hard.  

We celebrate the attempts to defeat Death here, even if they end up being fruitless. Well, we all have to go sometime, and you can't just sit around in your house all day and go nowhere. That's my plan for the next couple of days, after cheating death by surviving all that deep-fried food at the fair AND a bunch of Carolina BBQ a few days later. However, I will have to go back to work this week, and I'm scheduled to fly back down to NC a few days before Thanksgiving to watch my father for a few days while my sister's family works at the Macy's parade. I don't really feel comfortable being in charge of another person for 4 days, but there will be home health aides to assist me, so there's that. And I get a free turkey dinner (or something) out of it - I cashed in a bunch of SkyMiles so it won't really be costing me a lot to make that trip. But first I've got to get there, finish my October films and then a reduced number of November ones. 

Directed by James Wong (director of "Final Destination")

Also starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in "Black Christmas"), Crystal Lowe (ditto), Ryan Merriman (last seen in "The Ring Two"), Kris Lemche (last seen in "In Time"), Alexz Johnson, Sam Easton, Jesse Moss (last seen in "Tucker and Dale vs Evil"), Gina Holden (last seen in "The Butterfly Effect 2"), Texas Battle (last seen in "Coach Carter"), Chelan Simmons (last seen in "Good Luck Chuck"), Amanda Crew (last seen in "She's the Man"), Maggie Ma, Ecstasia Sanders (last seen in "Hot Tub Time Machine"), Jody Racicot (also last seen in "Black Christmas"), Patrick Gallagher (last heard in "The Tiger's Apprentice"), Dylan Basu, Alberto Ghisi (also last seen in "She's the Man"), Stuart Cowan (ditto), Harris Allan, Alexander Kalugin (last seen in "Miracle"), Nels Lennarson (last seen in "Horns"), Jacob Rupp, R. David Stephens, Andrew Francis (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks"), Cory Monteith, Grahame Andrews (last seen in "The 6th Day"), Tony Morelli, Nesta Chapman, Dustin Milligan (also last seen in "The Butterfly Effect 2"), Jim Shield (last seen in "Seventh Son"), Lou Bollo, Colby Johannson, Keith Dallas (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Michael Stewart, Victor Ayala, Agam Darshi (last seen in "Colossal"), Dylan Basile, Matt Ellis (last seen in "Rememory"), Che Aimee Dorval, Jackie Jenkins Jr. (last seen in "The Lovebirds"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 charms on Julie's "good luck" bracelet