Candyman: Farewell To The Flesh movie review (1995)
In the new film, directed by Bill Condon, there's once again an attempt to establish a real world in which Candymen aren't possible. Kelly Rowan stars as a New Orleans schoolteacher whose father was killed years earlier, Candyman-style. Now her brother has been accused of killing a Candyman expert, and a student in her class has started drawing the Candyman. How does the kid know about him?
The movie doesn't develop, alas, with the patience and restraint of the earlier film. It's got one of those soundtracks where everyday sounds are amplified into gut-churning shockaramas, and where we are constantly being startled by false alarms. There's a scene, for example, where a character walks up behind the teacher, and the soundtrack explodes. My notes read: Scream! Shock! Rumble! Crack! - followed, of course, by the guy saying, "Sorry, I thought you heard me."
The movie also pulls the old "It's only a cat" routine, where a shrieking, snarling presence from out of frame turns out, yes, to only be a cat. There is even an "it's only a raven" sequence, no doubt in honor of Clive Barker's predecessor in the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe.
The story proceeds. Characters near and dear to Rowan are slashed Candyman-style. Eventually, led by the little student from her class who seems tuned in to the Candyman, she is led to an old plantation, where all is explained. Read no further if you would rather not know that the Candyman turns out to have been a slave who fell in love with his master's daughter, and she with him. When she became pregnant, the enraged plantation owner set a mob on the slave, which cut off his arm and smeared him with honey, so that he was stung by thousands of bees, which is how he got the name Candyman.
Is there an entomologist among us? Are bees attracted by honey? I would have guessed they'd be rather blase about it, and would be more quickly attracted if the victim had been smeared with one of those perfumes they advertise on the cable TV. Never mind. The slave, whose name is Daniel Robitaille, sees his bee-stung face in his lover's mirror, and somehow his spirit goes into the mirror, so that if you look in a mirror and say "Candyman" five times, that's going to be more or less the last thing you do. (I have tried this, and it doesn't work.)
