Candy Corn (2019)

1980. A trio of young men in a peaceful US small town has a very dubious Halloween tradition: beating up or otherwise abusing the developmentally challenged Jacob (Nate Chaney). This time around, they even bring guests in form of a girlfriend (Madison Russ) who isn’t at all happy about any of this and grown-up town asshole Gus (Sky Elobar). Oh, they – or really, mostly the ringleader, the local sheriff’s son Mike (Jimothy Beckholt) – also manage to kill Jacob this time around.

But don’t you worry, Jacob has been more or less adopted by the fall carnival that’s in town, and its leader, one Dr. Death (Pancho Molar) – or Lester, if you want to be prosaic – has just the right ritual for the occasion, bringing Jacob back as an undead avenger. You can imagine what’s going to happen, even though Mike’s dad the Sheriff (Courtney Gains) isn’t half bad for small town police in a horror movie.

Halloween-themed low budget horror movies are a dime a dozen now; most of them never find their way onto my blog because getting down on dreadful semi-professional productions is neither fun nor interesting to do (unless I find a movie truly annoying, or think it owes me for my time). Josh Hasty’s Candy Corn (or rather Josh Hasty’s Candy Corn going by the title credits, but I won’t) is actually a pleasant surprise in this regard.

It’s not a perfect film, suffering from the usual problems of its budget bracket. You probably know the drill: some of the actors in minor roles are less than ideal, there’s a bit of shooting around locations and crowds the film can’t afford to actually show all that much, the editing’s slightly off in some transitions – though acting and editing are otherwise at least fine, often better.

However, these are not problems that kill a film, at least not in my book, and Candy Corn does much more right than it does wrong in a lot of other respects. While there are quite a few nods to the genre traditions you’d expect a film like this to nod towards (starting with the title font looking right out of John Carpenter’s original Halloween), it is not the gore fest with no interest in its characters you’d imagine, but seems most interested in the impact of the deaths on the characters around them, spending quite a bit of time on the reaction of these small town cops who don’t usually even carry weapons to the murders, as well as showing many a scene of characters stunned by the aftermath of undead Jacob’s violence. Which actually does something rather interesting, turning this from a tale about a vengeance from the grave an audience can be emotionally satisfied by into one that’s more disquieting, a tale where everyone loses.


This interest in doing actual character work can also be seen in the way the film treats Dr. Death – in a fine performance by Moler - and his relationship to the other carnies (Tony Todd guest-stars as one, because he has been cursed by some eldritch abomination to be in every horror movie), portraying a guy who has been twisted by past bad experiences, and probably truly believes he’s doing the right thing, but also uses this emotional baggage to employ control over his peers. It’s all rather complex for what could be a very straightforward little slasher movie, and for my tastes, this added complexity makes up for the aforementioned flaws quite well.

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)

After a British author who wrote a book about the Candyman is murdered by evisceration with a hook in New Orleans (in this version, the place where the Candyman legend has its source), Ethan Tarrant (William O’Leary), who had a violent altercation with the man about his responsibility for the death of Ethan’s father, confesses to the deed, even though the audience already knows quite well the actual killer was the indeed Candyman (Tony Todd) himself.

Ethan’s sister, the school teacher Annie (Kelly Rowan), doesn’t believe her brother he is a killer, whatever he says, and thinks he’s just trying to punish himself for the guilt he feels for their father’s death. Plus, there has been a whole series of murders in New Orleans committed in the same manner, and it would be preposterous to think Ethan is responsible for all of them. Annie can’t help but look into the matter everyone else treats as an open and shut thing or just ignores over the Mardi Gras season, leading her to a hidden truth about her family history but also inviting the Candyman into her life and that of her loved ones.

As is the critical consensus about the Bill Condon directed sequel to Bernard Rose’s classic Candyman, I don’t think the first film was in need of a sequel at all, having said what it wanted to say about the still on-going consequences of slavery in the USA, the creation of myths, and a guy with a nasty hook, quite eloquently.

However, if there has to be a sequel, Condon’s film is certainly at least not the kind of embarrassing nonsense that would turn its titular character into a standard issue quipping supernatural slasher. There are some conceptual weaknesses to the film, however. First and foremost, it does tend to waver a bit between the deadly sequel sickness of trying to make the same film with the same plot beats again and the much more interesting attempt to re-locate and deepen the film’s mythology and metaphorical resonance. I was also not terribly happy about the importance a certain mirror will have for the resolution of the plot, or rather, I understand why you’d want a physical object in the film that makes it possible to not repeat the first film’s ending – and at least the mirror has a connection to Candyman’s slightly revised origin – but the way the first film and this one has turned Candyman into a living myth makes it pretty difficult to buy that any physical object, even one intimately involved into turning the victim of violence into the supernatural perpetrator of it, could be dangerous to what amounts to a killing idea. The film’s final weakness is an early insistence on including a huge number of false scare style jump scares, adding the insult of nothing actually happening to the injury of the jump scare. After the first half hour or so, that element of the film just stops completely, though, leaving at least this viewer a bit confused about why and how it was there at all to begin with.

But let’s get to the good stuff, for while this certainly isn’t as good as the original, Farewell to the Flesh does quite a few things very well indeed. There is, for example, the great use Condon gets out of the film’s relocation from Chicago to a New Orleans in the thrall of carnival season. It’s not just that (pre-Katrina, obviously) New Orleans as it is used here is an excellent, moody and picturesque place that, in this season, seems to sit right on the threshold between heaven and hell, it is also that the city’s history lends itself particularly well to what the film says of the US history of slavery and racism, and the sin of trying to be mute about it. Though it has to be said that the Philip Glass score doesn’t sound much like New Orleans. Ignoring his entries into the Twilight series (which I haven’t seen and probably never will), Condon as a director seems particularly interested in liminal spaces and their connection to identity or its construction, so this aspect of the film is quite clearly right up his alley. The film also understands class as another dividing factor of people’s lives much more so than many horror films do, but also realizes that people aren’t only the sum of their tribal identity of their class and their race, so we also get a character like Annie from a certainly privileged (in the old meaning of stinking rich) background who is a more than just decent human being.

Once the film hits its stride, the more directly horrific elements of the plot become rather effective too, with a handful of nightmarish sequences that make use of quite a lot of old-fashioned tricks having come down from the Hitchcock school of suspense, as well as some cool set-ups for somewhat graphic sequences that don’t stop at being cool but actually carry thematic and even emotional resonance. Condon does a great job at fitting all of this into the proper mood of dread and doom too, with a dark and rainy New Orleans (or in part dark and rainy New Orleans as portrayed by an LA soundstage, I assume) full of desperate revellers mirroring what’s going on around Annie (or perhaps the other way round).


All of that’s not bad at all for a sequel nobody asked for.

In short: The Final Wish (2018)

Following the death of his father, luckless lawyer without career options and money Aaron (Michael Welch) returns to his home town to continue the fights he and his mother (Lin Shaye) never grew out of, pine after his former girlfriend Lisa (Melissa Bolona) – who is now together with his old nemesis, town sheriff, asshole and potential abuser Derek (Kaiwi Lyman). Well, actually, he’s just coming for the funeral, but that’s not really how things play out.

For strange things clearly connected to a sealed urn belonging to Aaron’s antiques dealer father start happening. Whenever Aaron makes a wish (and Aaron uses the phrase “I wish” with the absurd regularity of a character in a script with a certain lack of imagination) it becomes true; not in totally benign ways, mind you: when he wishes himself to be prettier, for example, he gets hit by a car and the resulting plastic surgery does indeed improve his looks. Or that’s what the film and everyone around him says, for in one of this thing’s better ideas, there’s barely any visible difference at all there.

Irregularly, the wishes do cost the lives of people as a price, but the film never sets this part of the wishing rules up terribly well, and really only seems to include them because a horror film needs to have corpses in it, or something. Obviously, Aaron has acquired a jinn, and just as obviously, things are not going to stay nice and profitable for him for long. Though, making things easier on a guy whose middle name apparently is “I wish”, this jinn doesn’t grant the traditional three wishes but seven.

Timothy Woodward Jr.’s The Final Wish is one of those examples of contemporary horror I wish I liked better than I actually do. It certainly looks pretty good (particularly for its budget bracket), and the director does add some neat little touches to some of the spookier scenes. I also enjoy how much the film starts out as your typical US indie movie about a luckless guy returning to his hometown; that is, for as long as it actually seems to put the proper effort into building the characters and their situation. Soon enough, we drop down into cliché horror movie character land where people turn into idiots whenever the script demands it, and where the character relations the film first sketched out well enough are never filled in properly, because it prefers spending its running time on co-writer Jeffrey Reddick chasing his one big success, Final Destination, with a couple of kill scenes that pointlessly and without any thematic reason play out like a cheaper and more subdued version of that franchise, bargain basement Lynchisms like a random clown appearance, Tony Todd popping in for a scene of pointless exposition, and other stuff that gets the film nowhere. And let’s not even mention the embarrassing look of the jinn once we get to see it.


There’s a good movie hiding under all the dross, one that talks about lives not going as well as those living them wished (see what I did there?) via an evil jinn that actually uses the yearning that comes with not living up to any of one’s dreams for evil, but the film we actually get is a deeply mediocre bit of cliché horror wasting talent and time on things I’ve seen done better a thousand times.

In short: Excessive Force (1993)

Generic cop on the edge Terry McCain (Thomas Ian Griffith) and his partners Frankie (Tony Todd), and guy who dies too early for me to actually write down his name (Mister X) follow Terry’s vendetta against mob boss Sal DiMarco (Burt Young) into a drug deal between some of DiMarco’s men and members of the Irish mob, provoking the devolution from deal into shoot-out. Thanks to McCain’s use of torture on a suspect afterwards, DiMarco escapes another court indictment, leaving Terry quite angry and without shouldering any of the responsibility for something that is absolutely his fault all the way, of course. What only DiMarco and his men know is that three million dollars went missing during the bust, and DiMarco quickly pegs the cops as the responsible party.

Soon, the quite three-million-dollar-less Terry is the only of the three cops alive, and finds himself framed for murder and hunted by cops and gangsters alike. Why, you could think there’s some sort of conspiracy is going on.

Excessive Force’s excessively generic action movie title actually hides a generic cop movie featuring and written by lead Thomas Ian Griffith himself. The script for the whole affair is so bland, obvious and been-there, done-that clichéd even an actor could write it, so excitement, interesting ideas or even just somewhat involving execution of tired old ideas is right out. If anyone goes into this looking for even the tiniest bit of interesting characterization, she’ll be quite out of look, and neither Griffith’s script nor Jon Hess’s competent yet bland direction have much to add to the experience, particularly since neither the action scenes nor the dialogue are delivered with any sort of flair.

The latter is particularly sad in a film with such a fine cast of character actors that doesn’t just include Todd and Young but also features James Earl Jones and house favourite Lance Henriksen. Unfortunately, that’s Jones and and Henriksen phoning it in, Young biting the bullet very early on, and Todd only featuring in a few scenes, so we spend most of our time with Thomas Ian Griffith being as boring and obvious as his script, and Charlotte Lewis being pretty. Even though I do approve of Mother Nature’s work on Miss Lewis, that’s really not enough to keep me awake during a film.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,jon hess,thomas ian griffith,lance henriksen,james earl jones,tony todd,charlotte lewis,action,crime

Three Films Make A Post: It's not human and it's got an axe!

The Heirloom (2005): This Taiwanese movie starts out as a stylish and effective haunted house movie with some truly weird scenes about the draw of its haunted place. Unfortunately, after about an hour, it starts to loosen up for a few too many sweeping, melodramatic gestures that don't interact as well as they should with the supernatural part of the movie.

Still, it should be worth it for the delightful weirdness of scenes of people in thrall of the haunted house falling asleep somewhere else only to wake up inside it again, with no possibility of them having just entered through the front door alone.

 

Voodoo Dawn (1991): Two New Yorker college students travel into the Deep South to visit a friend studying the life of poor migrant workers. Alas, their friend has fallen victim to the evil Haitian voodoo priest and ex-Tonton Macoutes Makoute (Tony Todd), who is trying to make a super zombie out of body parts, as you do.

The boys throw in with the local good voodoo priestess (Theresa Merritt) and farm worker Tina (Gina Gershon) to fight the always evil Mister Todd.

Voodoo Dawn is a basically decent film trying to work inside the voodoo zombie tradition. From time to time, it's agreeably moody, but shies away from any actual discussion of class or race and too often replaces atmosphere with (not all that gory) slasher storytelling.

The super zombie is just a very bad idea, executed in much too silly a way for the rest of the film it appears in.

Still, the most of Voodoo Dawn is decent enough and tries not to be offensive, which is more than I would have expected from an early 90s voodoo film.

 

Star Trek (2009): Given that he is responsible for three of my favourite TV shows of the last decades, I was going into JJ Abrams' Star Trek re-imagining with the hope of really enjoying it. Alas, I found it to be alright at best. It's a typical modern blockbuster, so fixated on being exciting all the time that it's coming out on the other side of excitement again, and gets a bit boring in its hyperactivity. From time to time, the film throws a bone to fans of the classic show in form of an obvious quote, until it is time to get explodey and loud again.

I also would have wished that the film updated the original concepts and characters of the show in a more meaningful way (say by including a female Kirk, or at least one who isn't the old tantrum-throwing egomaniac), and not only by pissing on the shallow bit of humanism the original had. Of course, Star Trek is still more watchable than about half of the original movies, but being better than Star Trek V isn't exactly an achievement in my book.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,taiwanese movies,horror,sf,tony todd,in short