A “spiritual sequel” to the horror film “Candyman” (1992) that returns to the now-gentrified Chicago neighborhood where the legend began.
Tony Todd brought an air of menace but also empathy as the titular character in Bernard Rose’s 1992 “Candyman.” In a flashback to the late 1800s, we see him chased by a lynch mob and then mutilated, his right hand cut off with a hacksaw and a large steel hook inserted into his stump which was smeared with honey, attracting bees that stung him to death while also being set on fire, all because he fell in love with a rich white man’s daughter. You couldn’t help but feel sympathy and compunction for him, all because he followed his heart. In the years after his death, history became legend, and old tales surfaced claiming that if you stood in front of a mirror and said his name five times, he would appear and kill you with his hook. Eventually, his legend faded into obscurity but then in the 1980s, a young woman named Ruthie Jean was found dead, apparently, from a sharp instrument resembling a meat hook.
I thought the new version of “Candyman” was a remake of the original so imagine my surprise when I realized early on that it was actually a sequel, or a “spiritual sequel” as some people are calling it. But my genial epiphany quickly dwindled as the film succumbed to conventional horror tropes and textbook jump scares and what could have been a spine-chilling good time, turned out to be an amateur exercise in futility. Director Nia DaCosta’s second big-screen outing, after having directed the 2018 drama “Little Woods” and who is currently shooting Marvel Entertainment’s “The Marvels,” shows almost no signs of life throughout the entire 91-minute runtime. When we get our first glimpse of the new Candyman, he is just standing casually behind several doomed characters, there is no buildup to his appearance, one minute the characters are talking, the next, Candyman is standing directly behind them, no tension, no sense of dread, just an appearance, then death, then the scene ends.
The story takes place almost thirty years after the events of the first film and centers on Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a visual artist who is struggling to create new works to display in his girlfriend Brianna’s (Teyonah Parris) art gallery. When he overhears a story about the legend of the Candyman, a supernatural being who supposedly terrorized the housing projects of Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood, he starts to delve into the area’s sordid history, even visiting the site of the last of the Cabrini Towers which were demolished a decade earlier. As his investigation expands, he begins having nightmares and hallucinations of Candyman, which reignites his passion for painting but his new works are filled with gruesome and terrifying images, not just of Candyman but of his victims too, much to Brianna’s dismay. Even though Cabrini Green has become gentrified over the years, Anthony soon discovers that its modernized and renovated facade can’t hide its horrifying and macabre past and that history is about to repeat itself all over again.
There is absolutely nothing original or intriguing about this film, other than its title. Director Nia DaCosta has no sense of storytelling prowess and her narrative flows in formulaic fashion, from its pedestrian opening, right up until its ponderous finale. The acting, overall, is fine, but Tony Todd is sorely missed, even though his appearances in the original were all-too-brief, they were the highlights of the show, and God knows this iteration could have done with an occasional highlight or two. Even though there were two less-than-stellar sequels to the original, “Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh,” and “Candyman: Day of the Dead,” the new movie disregards the events of both films, serving as a direct sequel to the first one. If you haven’t seen the original “Candyman,” I would highly recommend it over this run-of-the-mill, uninspiring dud, hell, even the two sequels were more creative and scarier than this one.
In Theaters Friday, August 27th
