Prep for Candyman: Reading the Reviews

The Rotten Tomatos critical consensus of the 2021 version of Candyman are somewhat mixed. Before watching the movie, I'm reading four reviews from top critics: Salon.com, Bitch Media, Rolling Stone, The Chicago Reader, and The Observer. Just a side note, I had no idea that Jordan Peele was a co-writer and co-producer on this film. I have not seen the original 1992 version with Tony Todd and Virgina Madsen, and have not (before now) read anything about the movie though I also like that the director is a Black Jamaican woman, Nia DaCosta.  

The first negative review is by Melanie Flanders in Salon. She pinpoints the problem areas in the title of her piece, "No sweets for the New Sweet in Candyman, which neglects the legends seductively scary legacy."  Overall, the criticism is that the movie focuses too much "around messages about over-policing and state-sanctioned brutality alongside incisive critiques about gentrification, both geographic and artistic." She critiques the film for being too didactic when it should be visceral, too much about sermonizing and not enough about evoking an emotional response. She also states that the black people potrayed in the film are stereotypes, and though she acknowledges that the film continues the idea of a Black victim who is exacting revenge on white people, she says that it doesn't fully realize the potential for tragedy or its potential to be truly horrifying as it relates to horror perpetuated on Black bodies. 

The Observer writer, Simran Hans, finds the film to be more appealing, but also a bit too meta. In "Candyman review: Knowing horror sequel", she acknowledges that the film has visual flair and also has a satsifying body horror aspect, with the main character's body turning into a living honeycomb in a squishy sequence, but the reviewer is also put off, stating that "constant meta-commentary, and the tendency to anticipate criticism, eventually begins to grate."

Sheri Flanders in her article from The Chicago Reader "Nia DaCosta's Candyman hooks into something new," feels that the remake does a good job of leavine "behind some of the more awkward details (like an uncomfortable fetishization of white womanhood and gratuitous titties), and hooks into some new subject matter, including gentrification, generational trauma, and art as a provocation." She offers a quick summary of the 1992 version (white woman graduate student, investigating an urban legend, visit Cabrini Green to find out more, repeats "Candyman" in the mirror five times, unleashes a bloodbath, and goes crazy). She states that the newer version, while still dealing with issues of violence visited on Black bodies from slavery to modern day over-policing, does not delve into the realms of trauma porn as the original movie did. Instead, the filmmaker leaves the violence to shadow-puppetry--recreating it in a visual way that is "at once whimsical and devastatingly terrifying, with the mechanism that controls the marionettes operating in stark relief, creating a dreadful commentary about the inescapable hand of fate."  She does say that while the film delivers some jump scares, it's never quite the thrill ride of other scary films, but still worth the watch. 

Finally, in Rolling Stone's "Candyman Movie Review: Yes, the remake is brutal and timely, but it also overreaches for relevance," by K. Austin Collins, the reviewer takes issue with the remake's self-awareness and irony--finding it to be too, too aware--similar to the review in The Observer. This piece is better at giving the reader the geographical layout of the setting and its history. Cabrini Green is a location that exemplifies what is wrong with public housing in urban areas. As she explains:

Black American despair by way of Chicago’s ill-fated Cabrini-Green projects, which were once home to 15,000 residents and were, over the years, immortalized in popular culture by the giddy, hard-won vibes of the sitcom Good Times and, more urgently, by Cabrini’s firm foothold, in the public imagination, as a totem of everything wrong with public housing — a conversation that might have morphed into real public concern for the lives at stake in that place, in a city whose yawning history of errors toward race and housing have long been documented, but which instead became the terrain of political jockeying, the kind of bandying-about of blame (toward public-housing efforts, toward working-class Black people) that often left those lives forgotten.

From there, she points out that the remake is dealing with Cabrini Green of today, a part of Chicago where people have tried and failed to life out of its challenges--in part by failed gentrification of more upwardly mobile Black people. They are played in this film by members of the art world, including the two main characters, Anthony and Brianna who are struggling to be relevant in the still white dominated art world.  One way that Anthony attempts to break through is by essentially selling out by painting subjects of black pain, returning to Cabrini Green to mine that subject matter that the white art world people seem so willing to consume. There, he is stung by a bee, which begins his morphing into the monster he will become. Ultimately though, she faults the movie for taking on perhaps too too much, and being unable to bring it back together, as well as (at times) seeming to forget that it's a horror movie. 

So, from this brief review, it seems that there is material to discuss about race, gender, and consumption/capitalism. Stay tuned. I plan to watch the film this Saturday.