Candyman (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

The original movie was a masterclass in atmosphere, an art horror that didn't resort to jump scares. This cheesy lore-heavy sequel plays more like I Know What You Did Last Summer, and it has so much stupid shit in it that it regularly slips into Scary Movie territory. There's the sassiest 'sassy gay friend' I've seen in a long time, people shout Sonic Hedgehog memes as they're getting murdered, the protagonist does a Marx Brothers mirror routine when he's getting possessed, he walks around with half his body turned to necrotised, honeycombed flesh and no one tells him to go to a hospital (when he finally does of his own accord, they put a bandage on his arm), four victims trapped in a bathroom walk one by one into a blind spot behind a cubicle and get slaughtered, the others either not noticing or not quite finding the words to warn their friends in time, the many many lore dumps are told via Deathly Hallows/Golden Army style shadow puppet scenes that sap what little tension there is, CG Tony Todd looks like one of the I Am Legend mutants, the murders are mostly done by flubbering people around the place and one of them goes far enough that it looks like a Pixar slapstick sequence, the protagonist's girlfriend sensibly tells him to fuck off and gets the hell out of there as soon as he starts acting crazy and it seems like he might be killing people but then once he's turned into Freddy Krueger she's suddenly doting over him, Candyman is an embodiment of racial violence through the last century but only racial violence against men with hook-hands and sugar-related origin stories apparently, and the whole 'cops kill Black people without justification' theme is undermined by the fact that in this movie they only do it to Black people who are living in the walls offering candy to children or Black people who are literal monsters.

Rating: Very Bad.