“Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” wears all of its Mardi Gras bona fides flaccidly at the end of a hook-handed sleeve as if draping itself with the skin of a centuries-long multi-cultural bacchanal could make up for a story too dull to even break skin. Bill Condon’s 1995 sequel to Bernard Rose’s classic from 1992, both starring the inimitable Tony Todd, hopes to transmute the marrow-deep symbolism of the original by replacing the projects of Chicago with the wrought iron streets of New Orleans, a city where an urban legend of a lynched black man named Daniel Robitaille returned to life to enact revenge against the living through the object of universal vanity feels not just appropriate, but tailor made. It only makes sense to explore the origins of the man whose name repeated five times into a mirror brings bloody terror in the very place where he lived and was buried. The film, set amid the final days before Mardi Gras, obviously has the evisceration of moral decency as it’s stated guiding star, “farewell to the flesh” being the Latin translation of Carnival after all, and yet its attempts to find meaning beneath the thin trappings of the season never bother to interrogate why New Orleans would be a place which could give birth to a rage fueled supernatural monster or how that rage might manifest in the inherent contradictions of the city itself.
“Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” tells the story of the Tarrant family, a New Orleans lineage that goes back over a hundred years with deep ties to the city. Three days before Mardi Gras Day, Annie Tarrant (Kelly Rowland) is called away from the school where she teaches because her brother Ethan (William O’Leary) is wanted in connection with a series of vicious murders that have snaked their way from fauborg to fauborg; each done in a similar bloody fashion, a la hook. Ethan claims innocence, believing the murders committed by Candyman (Tony Todd), a legend their father was obsessed with and perhaps even died summoning years before. Annie’s own art class of young black children has heard the legends of Candyman, with one of her most promising students, Matthew (Joshua Gibran Mayweather), even drawing what seems to be psychic depictions of Daniel Robitaille’s murder. Hoping to assuage their anxieties, Annie turns to a mirror and repeats the name five times: Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman. Nothing seems to happen besides a bee suddenly slamming into the window and dying an agonizing death on the sill, witnessed only by the unsure Matthew. Needing answers, Annie, along with her fiancé Paul (Timothy Carhart) visit their childhood home, a crumbling plantation house on Esplanade with sizable slave quarters on the property. She finds in the home’s attic a lavish shrine to Candyman built from graffiti, candles, skulls, and piles of sickly candy. Returning home that night, Candyman comes for Annie in her home, skewering Paul through the back with his hook and revealing that she is pregnant. As Mardi Gras looms, Annie is on the clock to discover the long-buried connections between her family and Candyman, before the last stroke of midnight bids farewell to not only flesh, but bone and blood as well.
The most profound gap in quality between “Candyman” and “Farewell to the Flesh” is best exemplified with each film’s opening credit sequence. The original begins with a god’s-eye view of bustling downtown Chicago, a metropolis of skyscrapers and go-getters making their way in the world. Traversing down the long interstate in a single unbroken helicopter shot, watching cars passively bustle to and from their little lives as if ants venturing through the labyrinthine tunnels of their farm, we stay far above, at a remove, yet cannot help but notice the distinct shift in the socio-economic landscape as the business districts fade into dilapidated warehouses along the outskirts of the city. These two socio-economic realities co-exist along the same stretch of road, which may as well be a lightyear long. Bernard Rose is showing us something about the story he hopes to tell before we even know for sure who the Candyman is or what we should be afraid of. This is the movie in one image: the journey of privilege descending down into housing projects that polite society left long ago to rot. “Candyman” is about that pestilence left festering in the carnal soul of American life, of the power that revenge stories hold on our collective imagination, and how nothing is more frightening to the ruling class than to have their atrocities Uno-Reversed upon them. It is a rich text, brimming with subtlety, and is also one of the scariest movies of all time. “Farewell to the Flesh”, one might imagine, would have a field day with New Orleans, a city overflowing with meaning along every street corner and at every bend of the Mississippi River. The racial history of New Orleans is an unsubtle one whose violence still reaches through time and space to clutch the present in ways we may never fully be rid of, and perhaps for good reason. It’s no mistake that we bury the dead above ground. Though we tell ourselves it is for practical matters, it helps us remember not only that we will die, but also that we inherited the world the dead left for us, and perhaps it is best they remain visible to bear witness. Bill Condon seems uninterested in diving into any of these sticky inconsistencies, of a city built by enslaved black labor that was also a bastion for liberal ideals for hundreds of years, and of a season that combines the cultures of a half dozen peoples of various racial backgrounds whose de facto main attraction is a Krewe manned by only men whose secret society rejected anyone not born of European ancestry until 1991. The New Orleans of “Farewell to the Flesh” is a tourist’s view of the city, of the river, the bridges, the Cathedral, of costumed revelers throughout the Quarter, of jazz on every radio station, and a Dr. John-sounding DJ named “The Kingfish” growling along the airwaves about “the merriment before the penance” of Lent. While Condon clumsily attempts to broaden the thematic palette with several sequences showing impoverished, mostly black, neighborhoods far from the floats and frivolity, there is a chronic disconnect of intention and specificity that leaves further introspection a moot point, soon abandoned, within the wider fabric of the story.
“Farewell to the Flesh” makes the mistake of trying to locate a precise focal point for Candyman’s supernatural crusade against the living by presuming that Annie and her family are his long-lost ancestors, a secret hidden for over a hundred years and seemingly shielded from societal ire by the light-skinned nature of the subsequent generations. While this hints at a movie that could have waded into the murky history of colorism in New Orleans, fertile fruit for a filmmaker to sink their claws into, the film ultimately keeps these revelations as plot machinations only, which is a shame. Still, any inherent meaning placed upon Candyman’s vitriol feels presumptuous and beyond the point made by his desire to ravage those foolish enough to summon him. Candyman’s fury is universal in its horror and literary in its tragedy, that of a man murdered for love who, by some twist of fate, is able to turn his anger upon the world. He is essentially a “tulpa”, a cryptic manifestation of collective thought made real, or in this case, the natural byproduct of racial injustice made flesh. For the purity of his blood lust to be portrayed as a means to propagate a bloodline is peeling the tail without sucking the head, leaving the flavor behind in favor of easily digestible meat. In the film’s final Mardi Gras sequence, Annie is chased by Candyman through the rain-slick streets of the Quarter, where a day of genial parading has morphed into a nighttime rave of masked locals and tourists alike drinking and dancing and puking and fornicating with reckless abandon. Annie stumbles her way through the crowd and finds herself near a hellfire float with the “Kingfish” playing emcee to the present desecrations; a white man dressed in the accoutrements of Bacchus, lord of wine, revelry, and fertility. This charlatan, this faceless voice of the city, who turns out to be little more than a portly man in a robe and grape leaf laurel, cackles as if the devil himself, a jolly pied piper egging along the intoxicated masses toward their own destruction. There is a universe where this tulpa, this physicalization of all the good and ill of the city, was held front and center as the true corrupting nature of goodness; as the jocular mask hiding centuries of perversion of flesh and family in the name of tradition. A local might know to look for that, but Condon certainly didn’t. Oh, what a movie we could have had.
“Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” is a disappointment, a failing of Tony Todd’s iconic characterization and of Mardi Gras itself. If we have learned anything, it’s that perhaps the best voices to speak truth to horror about New Orleans are the ones who live and die here. At least they know where the bodies are buried and which ones are worthy of excavating.
You can rent a copy of “Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” and a wide selection of other New Orleans/Louisiana-set films from Future Shock Video.
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