“Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” (1995) is a sequel to “Candyman” (1992), which unfolds in New Orleans and focuses on the Tarrant family. It starts with the professor who told the origins of the urban legend in the original feature. He is on a promotional book tour during Carnival, which in Latin according to the local DJ, means the movie’s subtitle though meat is more likely than flesh because occurs prior to Lent. After the professor dies after Ethan Tarrant confronts him, the entire family gets sucked into learning more about the myth to defend him. Bill Condon directed it, and he would go on to direct “Gods and Monsters” (1998), “Dreamgirls” (2006), “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1” (2011), “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2” (2012), “Mr. Holmes” (2015), “Beauty and the Beast” (2017) and “The Good Liar” (2019). Rand Ravich, who subsequently wrote “The Astronaut’s Wife” (1999), and Mark Kriger cowrote the screenplay. This review will have serious spoilers so if you want to watch this film, consider yourself warned.
“Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” continues the myth by taking place in a desperate area, having similar graffiti tags as the first film, placing Candyman’s seat of power in a location with derelicts who would rather not have visitors, missing children and having the protagonist, Annie, lose consciousness and have visions whenever she is in Daniel Robitaille’s presence. Daniel Robitaille still reserves his best manners for the protagonist, another blonde woman, brutally kills everyone else and seems to want to reclaim/resume his old life, but it does not resonate as it did in the first film. Bees are still his harbingers, but are more aggressive and act as the equivalent to his hook. His image does not appear on video recordings.
Unlike the first film, thwarted ambition and oppression do not drive the protagonist or other victims. The only similarity between Annie and Helen is their comfort in black communities and desire to save black children otherwise Annie is happily married and professionally fulfilled. Everyone who says Candyman five times does not believe that he is real and is trying to prove a point to someone else either to reassure or taunt them. Candyman’s subsequent appearance is a rebuke and throws another log on the fire of his legend. The Candyman franchise is also a haunted house franchise, but the location changes. Instead of haunting the place of his death, he is haunting another location with great historical significance for him. This installment also marks the beginning of tying Candyman’s reappearance to certain time periods like Carnival/pre-Lent so his looming figure does not stand out in crowds, and cops and bystanders do not notice the fleeing, fearful protagonist. Like the ghosts in “Supernatural,” this film introduces the idea that his spirit is tied to an object, and it is possible to destroy him.
“Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” introduces the idea of a cursed family. The film visually tries to make us forget that the location of his death was in Chicago. The flashbacks make it seem as if he was not a freed man, but an open-shirted enslaved person fleeing a mob in an empty field. We get to see Caroline, Daniel’s lover, but it made me wonder what would happen to a white woman if her child was black. In this cinematic fiction, she survives, has enough money to buy a home among people unfamiliar with her and continue to live as a white woman with her children passing. It also makes Caroline’s mirror and the appearance of the bees as a supernatural equation to creating the Candyman. While mirrors are known in folklore as a vehicle to transport or trap souls, bees have only been positive though they can be symbols of resurrection. Caroline becomes unknowingly complicit in helping Daniel transform into Candyman.
“Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” equates a white family acknowledging and accepting their black roots with associating with a “monster.” Blackness becomes monstrous in this installment, and its existence literally threatens whiteness and white families, i.e. by threatening their ability to exercise white privilege. Instead of seducing the victim, the invisible family stain of blackness infects everyone and leads to death. It starts with Ethan Tarrant, who is arrested for the professor’s murder and suspected of patricide. Then Annie becomes a suspect in the murders, including her husband and mother. Their vulnerability to the police and Ethan’s rejection of the law are possible hints to their lineage. Candyman’s murders become punishment for not acknowledging him. He wants Annie, who is also an artist, to choose him so they can become a family since she is pregnant, and Candyman has been obsessed since the first movie with playing supernatural undead house with a nuclear family.
The reason that “Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” and the subsequent sequel “Candyman 3: Day of the Dead” (1999) do not work as well as the original is that the filmmakers forget that just because they are sexually attracted to the blonde protagonists does not mean that their blood relative would be! Candyman knows that they are his relatives, but the filmmakers still make his beckoning as sexual as he was in the first film. Ew, no. They still want a Dracula type seducer and for audiences to lust after the protagonist, but the filmmakers refuse to put in the work to depict a paternal supernatural bond. Incest is not sexy. They needed to start casting some olive-skinned brunette women.
It is a shame because Tony Todd got a wardrobe upgrade and was looking particularly smoldering in a long black coat and a charcoal gray cravat. He appears seven minutes into the movie. Sadly every black man and person in black acted as a jump scare as a possible Candyman. There were some interesting themes that could have been developed. Rather late in the film, Daniel is presented as an anti-Christ figure, a false god promising eternal life, and after Annie defeats him, she goes to church to get a cross of ashes on her forehead. This theme is a continuum between the original, this film and its subsequent sequel since he has an altar of candles and skulls. It is the only thing that explains why random child, Matthew, has visions of Candyman’s past even though he never said Candyman five times in a mirror. Matthew as an artist is another possible link. He is the son of a preacher and a child so he could be tapped into the supernatural. Otherwise Matthew’s disappearance and Annie looking for him echoes Helen’s search for a kidnapped baby in the first film, but by the end of the film, we realize that Matthew exists to save Annie.
If Caroline deliberately created Candyman by keeping the mirror and sticking the mirror in the slave quarters where he was born, then forbids her kids from playing there, then Candyman is just as much Daniel and Caroline’s child as her biological kids. Side note: I have an issue with this premise because in the first film, Daniel was born a free man so nooooooooo his birth would not be recorded with the other slaves, who did not get recorded well then, and if you are a white person who loves a black person, no black person wants to be put to rest in slave quarters. If their biological kids get to be white, then their supernatural kid gets to be the black boogeyman. In the first film, Candyman is a messed-up individual that follows his impulses, but in this film, he only kills white appearing people: fathers, a brutal cop, any descendant who denies him and a folklore expert. “Candyman” (2021) explored this idea from the other side, but it started here. Parallel to racist rage is class rage that the cop expresses against Ethan. This film laid the seeds for a vengeful Candyman avenging himself against irrational hatred, above the law.
I did love that all the black characters knew more about Daniel Robitaille than his own family! Veronica Cartwright as the lush matriarch was delightful. The best portrait of Caroline Sullivan is in “Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh,” and the most intriguing scene is when Candyman destroys his own work. That act explains his desire to kill his entire blood line than anything else that happened in the movie, a repressed anger at himself, for what he became and his dumb, oblivious descendants. Todd was always a better author of the myth than the filmmakers. His gesture seemed to say, “I brought you into this world, and I’ll take you out.” I liked that Annie was a source of a couple of the jump scares, the latter in a mirror while wearing black, i.e. embracing her heritage, and if the film had aimed for a Halloween: 20 Years Later confrontation, it could have worked.
Is “Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” a good movie despite its flaws? No. The story is too disjointed, and small details stuck in my craw. Who is paying for the shredded screen? How can you an autograph a black page with a regular pen? If you are trying to kick someone out of your bar, would you wreck the place in the process? No one had a real New Orleans accent. What is with all the chicory references-real question? Ethan was the most anti-climactic character. He did not actually know anything. When Annie finally sees Kingfish, it feels as if it was supposed to be imbued with meaning because she stops and looks up at him while the camera slows down. What was the significance? The ending is very Poltergeisty, and the graphics are painfully dated.
It ends in New York as Annie tells her child, Caroline, about the family history, including an old photograph of Daniel Robitaille. I am disappointed that the sequel was not located there. With a family history like that, what mother in her right mind would give a mirror mobile to their child?
