Movie Review: Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)

A lot seems to have happened between the first Candyman and this movie. Annie Tarrant (Kelly Rowan) is a schoolteacher in New Orleans, whose father was apparently killed by Candyman a year ago. Her brother, Ethan (William O’Leary), accuses Dr. Phillip Purcell (Michael Culkin) — a minor character from the first one, who has sine written a book on the Candyman legend — of being responsible, convincing their father that Candyman didn’t exist.

Purcell gets killed shortly after being violently confronted by Ethan at a bar, leaving Ethan as a suspect.

The police now think that Ethan may have had something to do with his father’s death as well.

I really ought to see the original Candyman again. It’s a quality movie. Tony Todd is of course perfect as Candyman, but my favorite aspect of it is probably its Cabrini Green, Chicago setting. It manages to make everything feel so real.

Some of that is lost with the move to New Orleans, but we still see glimpses of poverty and decrepit houses and all that good stuff. It’s got a bit of a Southern Gothic feel to it. But I kind of wish it had nothing to do with Mardi Gras, because that makes it seem like this is the only reason it takes place in New Orleans.

Anyways, I really like the opening scene here, even though it’s really all exposition. Purcell’s little lecture does a good job of explaining to us how the conclusion of the first movie is viewed by the people in this movie, which is nice. There’s even a very effective false jump scare, and that’s usually an anomaly.

I know I didn’t talk about this with my review of the first movie, but I believe I mentioned it with Horror Noire. That movie really made me rethink Candyman in a way. Why was Candyman, a former slave who was lynched by racist white people over the white woman he loved, terrorizing black people? This movie sort of solves that problem, with Purcell and the Tarrants being white.

There’s a similar scene to Helen’s first trip to Cabrini-Green in the original, when Annie and her husband, Paul McKeever (Timothy Carhart), go to her old house to find some kind of evidence of something that may have happened to her brother, and they find a little shrine to the Candyman up in the attic.

At school, Annie tries to prove that there is no Candyman to her students, so she does the whole song and dance with the mirror. Nothing happens, except for a few bees surfacing just outside.

Later that night at home, she is greeted by Candyman, who’s as creepy as ever. Instead of killing her, though, he kills her husband. One of her students goes missing, too, potentially kidnapped by Candyman. So I guess I spoke too soon on Candyman only going after white people this movie.

Annie speaks to the boy’s father, Reverend Ellis (Bill Nunn, Do the Right Thing). She tries to help, and Reverend Ellis refers to the Candyman as a false god.

Annie learns a bit more about her father’s death from her brother. Apparently he summoned Candyman because he was convinced that he had a way to kill him. This all connects to some guy named Honore Thibideaux (Matt Clark). From him, we get more backstory on Candyman and his lover, and apparently there’s a mirror that you can break to break his curse.

Candyman shows up and kills him with bees, and some police officer who had been tailing Annie make their way in to find the body, but Annie runs away.

It’s these middle scenes that I find to drag a bit. We learn more about the Candyman, but stuff we don’t really need to know, and some stuff I thought we already did know.

There’s even a scene where a cop questioning Annie’s brother ends up saying Candyman five times into a mirror to taunt him, and he gets killed in seconds. It’s a rehashing of that great scene from the first movie, and it just feels like they’re going through the motions.

The score is still really good. I’m not sure how much of it is original, but it’s nice. Tony Todd is still a delight in his role. But this movie largely seems like it’s just repeating the events of the first movie. And it didn’t start like that, but somewhere in the middle, it just kind of becomes the same movie.

Rating: 4/10