He's A One Stop, Gotcha Hot, Stab You 'Til Your Heart Goes Pop (Candyman 3: Day of the Dead (DVD))

Member Name: plipplop

Product:	Candyman 3: Day of the Dead (DVD)
Date:	30/04/09 (123 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Relatively short running time

Disadvantages: Pretty much everything else

This is a review of the film only. Candyman: Day of the Dead was produced in 1999 and released straight to DVD in 2003. The region 2 DVD shouldn't cost you any more than a few pounds.

After the death of her mother, Caroline McKeever inherits an infamous art collection handed down through generations. The artist was a gifted painter named Daniel Robitaille, but the man's artistic capabilities have long since been forgotten as he has now become more familiarly known as The Candyman. Legend has it that if you say his name five times in front of the mirror, The Candyman will appear, only to slaughter the person who summoned him forth. When Caroline decides to allow her friend to exhibit Robitaille's artwork in his gallery, she hopes that it will enable the public to see past the Candyman legend, but on opening night, she soon realises that this will never be the case. In an attempt to dispute the legend of Candyman, she stands in front of an ornate mirror and says the fearsome name once, twice and then three times more.......

Based around a novel by the acclaimed author Clive Barker, the character of The Candyman has always been a struggle for me. Whilst the writers have attempted to piece together an appropriate back story the character somehow doesn't ring true to me and I remain to be convinced that there was enough material for more than one movie. Essentially a supernatural stalk and slash series, the Candyman franchise suffers from a weak central character and a lack of any real direction. Created from a tragedy, we're led to believe that The Candyman exists only to exact his revenge on the living but with this knowledge in mind, the suggestion that anyone would actually summon him just to be slaughtered remains scarcely plausible at best.

Nonetheless, there have (thus far) been three Candyman movies and Day of the Dead is the most recent and (almost certainly) the weakest of the three. Suffering from an abject lack of budget, imagination and creativity, it's no real surprise that the film went straight to DVD and (even more worryingly) it's no surprise that it took the best part of four years to get there.

Borrowing heavily from a number of other, more popular, horror franchises, there's a terrible whiff of 'nothing new' about Day of the Dead. Don't be fooled by the Romero-esque subtitle, by the way. The titular twenty-four hours refers only to a religious festival that provides a shamelessly tenuous opportunity for our anti-hero to put in another performance. Otherwise it's a combination of supernatural dreaming (Freddy Krueger anyone?) combined with unstoppable slaughter (Friday the 13th) and a supernatural urban legend (insert any American teen film you can think of). Writer/director Turi Meyer's lukewarm narrative kind of dances around the issue, desperately trying to thrust large-breasted scream queen Donna D'Errico into as many predicaments that involve a low-cut T-shirt as possible. It's a constant barrage of dream sequences, hallucinations and strange apparitions, interspersed with an occasional appearance from the Man himself, resplendent in velvet smoking jacket and dodgy hook.

These are just some of the reasons that the Candyman series is so lame. For starters, he's just not frightening. The required stupidity for any potential victim is so enormous that anyone who does actually say his name five times deserves to be slaughtered randomly in front of his or her bathroom mirror. What kind of bad guy has to wait to be summoned? Imagine how flat the Friday the 13th films would be if Jason could only come in and garrotte you if he had an invitation? Worse still, in Day of the Dead, Meyer seems to make it up when he feels like it, as the man of candy seems to be able to pretty much appear and disappear just when he wants to. There's nothing eerie or mysterious to it. It's a simple succession of cheap jumps and shocks conceived in such a way that only the most lily-livered audience member would be slightly spooked.

The Candyman looks rubbish too. Essentially just imposing actor Tony Todd in a big coat, here he sort of floats along occasionally as if walking were too good for him. As a result of his origin (explained fully in previous episodes) he has a fondness for bees, which just sort of turn up in occasional swarms when the director thinks the audience is getting bored. Todd's hook looks decidedly ropy and appears to be attached only by paper glue, such that it has a tendency to wobble about when it should be a little more threatening. Todd himself is frightfully over the top and inadvertently comical too. It doesn't help that the dialogue is so corny, but he really does make a ham of his constant 'surrender yourself to me" lines and it has to be said that the likes of Ant and Dec would almost certainly make for a more imposing villain. Worse still, there are occasional flashes of the man beneath the coat; a sort of gooey, emaciated thing that looks like it was made on Blue Peter when the budget was running really low.

There are other tiresome things. Meyer decides that to spice things up a bit, he'll introduce a cult of Candyman-followers who crop up and disappear again very quickly. Needless to say, they're your usual bunch of Goth deadheads, draped in black velvet, smothered in eyeliner and obsessed with the main man in a way that is only ever going to lead to certain disaster (hurrah!) Even more tiresome is the relationship between McKeever (Donna D'Errico, the patron saint of breast implants) and some random Hispanic guy who gives her something to get excited about. Yet more tiresome again is a nasty, bigoted policemen who really only occasionally serves a (painfully obvious) purpose and is notable only on the basis that the actor (Wade Williams) would go on to play almost exactly the same role in Prison Break.

Candyman 3 is certainly not a very good horror film. Given the fact that the Candyman really only has one method of murder (the hook) there's nothing innovative about the violence and it actually feels very tame and boring. There's no suspense here either, so nothing really works on the level of a conventional thriller. There's no mystery or intrigue (everything is explained virtually by numbers for even the dimmest of audience members) and by the time it all draws wearily to a conclusion, it's unlikely that anybody left will really care what happens next. Fortunately, it does at least draw the trilogy to a sort of conclusion, though not on a significant enough scale to have justified three full films.

Day of the Dead is an absolute waste of effort and time and one to be overlooked by all but the incredibly desperate. This isn't even a good idea done badly; the Candyman is a ridiculous villain and the suggestion that the original should be remade is something that should be buried even more quickly than this turgid shocker.

Summary: The Candyman trilogy shudders to a tepid halt