You could say his name five times or watch the VID. YOUR CHOICE.
I’ve smoked a cigar and rubbed an egg all over myself and I STILL don’t know my future. That’s that Hollywood hogwash for ya.
Overall, recycling is a wonderful thing...except when it comes to dem fancy pitcher shows. Original ideas tend to be anathema to Tinsel Town and the weightless, inconsequential third chapter in the Candyman franchise relies heavily on rehashes of the previous two entries. Day of the Dead offers little insight into Tony Todd’s tragic artist turned urban legend boogeyman and even less when it comes to fresh characters or inventive storytelling. Now that we’ve seen his work, it’s clear based on his paintings that Daniel Robitaille was a pioneer in the field of Glamour Shots.
Go West, young Candyman, and get yer hooks into those pretty little Angelenos.
Like the bland, plastic city in which it takes place, the cast of characters who find themselves at the mercy of Todd’s increasingly irrelevant spectre less resemble human beings than the living dolls you’d find on the ripest of daytime soap operas. Donna D’Errico probably imagined she was channeling Virginia Madsen’s brilliant, tortured work from the original, but director Turi Meyer can’t help but exploit the Baywatch actresses’ bleach blond beauty by terrorizing her in a lackluster opening clad only in panties and a t-shirt. As Robitaille’s great-great granddaughter, D’Errico has to deal with a lotta crap, but she shouldn’t have to get it from her opportunistic, sensationalizing sleazebag boyfriend. Don’t worry, his curating days are numbered. Imagining Candyman’s descendant as another artist is an interesting detail which comes to absolutely nothing. Sure, Robitaille’s art will eventually lead to his downfall, but I liked destroying a monster with a picture much better in Tales from the Hood.
Old ideas are merely repackaged and redelivered. Spirituality rarely intruded upon Barker and Rose’s original concepts and the Day of the Dead setting is nothing but Mardi Gras from Farewell to the Flesh. The female lead once again has a friend who gets butchered and she’s routinely blamed for all the murders. D’Errico isn’t a terrible actress, but she’s written so poorly as to have hardly any tenacity or fighting spirit. At one point, she declares bloody vengeance only to immediately run headfirst into a body and shriek. Not the best look for a badass who ends up having to climb a makeshift shrine that looks like the gothic version of a Double Dare obstacle. The only original angles are a subplot revolving around racist cops and a hilariously pointless rivalry between two dueling pairs of detectives. That, and the appearance of an out-of-nowhere Candyman goth punk cult who end up on the pointy end of Todd’s hook. The least the movie could’ve done was show them getting massacred. What a gyp. Todd doesn’t embarrass himself, but his constant, née annoying insistence that D’Errico become his victim wears thin quickly and borders on supernatural harassment. Like, he’d be cancelled so quick.
Meyer doesn’t have a bad eye for composition and there’s even a bit of visual flair along with some welcome nudity and gore, but the pacing and storytelling feels limp with none of the gravity or operatic grandiosity of the original. It comes off as no different than any other late 90s supernatural horror.
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