He's A One Stop Shop, Makes My Pulse Drop

Year: 1995

Director: Bill Condon

Cast: Tony Todd, Kelly Rowan, William O'Leary

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

There's perhaps no greater indictment of the "90's horror is pure trash" school of thought than 1992's Candyman, an intense urban gothic legend that seamlessly blends Clive Barker's signature sense of the macabre with the real world dereliction of Chicago's Cabrini-Green projects. On the flip side, there is perhaps no greater example of the despicable crumminess that permeated that decade than its followup, Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh, which isn't actively bad, but merely reaches a pinnacle of apathy, turning one of the most unique horror properties of the decade into a bog-standard bit of supernatural hack and slash.

Candyman 2 certainly isn't as much of a waste of time as, say Saw III, its companion for my Halloween movie marathon, and it's not even a terribly dreadful film by any stretch of the imagination. It's just such a step down in quality from the almost impermeable original that it can't escape the shadow cast by that horror monolith.

And it's quite a shadow.

In this film, Candyman (Tony Todd) forgoes his old stomping grounds for another territory: New Orleans. The newest victim of his deadly seduction (although he is neither quite so deadly nor as seductive this time around) is Annie Tarrant (Kelly Rowan), a schoolteacher who works with inner city youth and, in an attempt to decry the old urban legend, speaks Candyman's name five times into the mirror, inadvertently summoning him to wreak havoc on her and her family.

Her brother Ethan (William O'Leary) has recently been arrested and wrongly accused of Candyman's first kill - a pompous professor with more ponytail than common sense. And her mother Octavia (Veronica Cartwright, who - of all things - played the little girl in The Birds) is suffering from nonspecific cancer and old age despite looking not a day over ten years Kelly Rowan's senior. Hollywood is a weird place. Annie's father was killed many years ago in a murder suspiciously close to Candyman's MO and his return prompts Annie to investigate further into the myth and its roots in the city.

In the process she finds out that she should have just rented a DVD of Candyman, because pretty much the same thing happens, but with more baldly telegraphed jump scares. I swear, a body can't open a closet or stare out a window in this world without a hand slowly reaching for them or a mysterious figure appearing in the distance.

It's like living in Quentin Tarantino's guest house.

The film's best decision was to set Candyman's psychological torment against the backdrop of the New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations, which automatically provide a depraved, jangling environment for the horror to take place. It's no match for the original's waking nightmare of Cabrini-Green, but the atmosphere is there. Heck, that carnival even made moments of The Last Exorcism Part II look good, and if that dog wasn't dead on arrival, then I will hang up my blogger's sash and retire from the business forever.

This ambience is vital because it does much to paint over the film's bargain basement production values. This isn't necessarily a slight (I've seen films that are metric tons more soul-crushing than this), but the blood looks a little stagey and the interior design lacks oomph. The locations are like porn sets - just furnished enough to maintain realism but too sparse to entirely separate you from the fiction.

Farewell to the Flesh's best element - the return of Phillip Glass's marvelous score - doesn't help much with hiding this fact. The lush orchestral arrangements contrast with the film's overall aesthetic and highlight just how insidiously plain the entire affair ends up being. Again, this is an average film rather than a bad one, but the music provides a earthquake of pomp and circumstance that cracks open the bitter divide in quality between this film and the first.

An actual photo of the studio heads getting Tony Todd to sign his contract for two sequels.

Besides the Mardi Gras festivities, the best contribution the film has to offer to the Candyman canon is a healthy dose of weirdness, which never seems to receive as much credit for saving average films as it should. The sheer strangeness of some moments (including the implacably persistent narration by a sassy Cajun DJ - Champion Dialogue: "My belly is a mountain of love stuffed with oysters.") offsets most of the film's rough patches with delectable goofy charm.

Whether it's a prostitute dressed like Cleopatra licking snow cone syrup off the arm of a Hawaiian ice vendor/voodoo king, an underprivileged kid being told to go get help and returning with a gaggle of more underprivileged kids instead of the cops, or a Candyman survivor hanging a mirror above her child's bed, Farewell to the Flesh is full of truly bonkers decision-making, one of my personal favorite elements a film can have.

The acting is all-around wobbly, but results in some terrific bad-good moments (the frightened mountain lion yowl that erupts from Rowan's throat is unforgettable), and the half-hearted stabs at some sort of discourse on class disparity are at least commendable for trying to achieve anything beyond the surface level. All in all, Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (Which, now that I think about it, should definitely have been called Farewell 2 the Flesh. This was the 90's, it should have been a moral obligation) isn't a total waste of time, but is only recommendable to fans of the original.

TL;DR: Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh is a watered down copy of the original, but is just strange enough to make a name for itself.

Rating: 4/10

Body Count: 7

1. Phillip Purcell is stabbed with a hook in a bathroom.
2. Paul is hooked and split up the abdomen.
3. Mr. Tarrant is hooked in a flashback.
4. Honore Thibideaux is attacked by bees.
5. Detective Ray is hooked in the interrogation room.
6. Ethan is shot by the police.
7. Octavia is hooked through the back.Word Count: 1012

Reviews In This Series

Candyman (Rose, 1992)
Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (Condon, 1995)
Candyman 3: Day of the Dead (Meyer, 1999)

A Flock of Seagulls

Year: 1963

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Suzanne Pleshette

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The second part of my horror class' Hitchcock Halloween Double Feature was his highly divisive second horror feature The Birds. In my experience, The Birds is a pea soup horror movie - you either love it or you hate it. There's no in between. As evidenced by my inclusion of the film in my Five Scariest Movies article, I am firmly in the "love it" camp.

For most pre-1970's horror movies, viewers are advised to view them from the perspective of the audiences of the time. "If you think about what movie effects were like in the 30's, you'd be totally terrified of Frankenstein/Psycho/The Creature From the Black Lagoon too, man!" Well that's all fine and dandy, but sometimes I don't want to watch horror as an academic. I came to be scared, not to imagine somebody else being scared.

The Birds is one of the few films between cinema's inception and, let's say Night of the Living Dead in 1968 that still holds up tremendously under the scrutiny of the jaded eye of the modern horror fan. Some of the effects do show their age, but this film is a showcase of some of the best composite cinematography available at the time. It's not modern perhaps, but it's still great workmanship and consistently exciting.

No, those birds weren't there. No, I don't care. I'd still run.

The trick of The Birds lies in its plotting. Melanie Daniels (beautiful newcomer Tippi Hedren) is a young and mischievous San Francisco socialite who meets handsome swain Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) by chance in a bird shop. She pretends to be an employee for sh*ts and gigs, but her ability to aid him in procuring a pair of lovebirds for his kid sister is impeded by her utter lack of knowledge about bird species.

The two quarrel good humoredly and Mitch leaves empty handed. Because her schedule was free that weekend, Melanie decided to purchase a set of birds and deliver them personally to the man with a note admonishing his rudeness. When she discovers he's on vacation she follows him up the coast to the beautiful town of Bodega Bay. Through a series of misunderstandings and good-natured lies, her prank goes too far as she ends up chartering a rowboat, traveling across the bay, and sneaking into his mother's house to deliver the birdcage.

Basically, for the first half hour or so, The Birds is a zany romantic comedy until... a lone seagull swoops down from the sky and claws Melanie's forehead. What follows is a series of increasingly vicious attacks by different flocks of birds that continues throughout the movie. The delightful and charming opening of the film was but a sham to suck you in, get you involved with the characters, and then run them through a conveyor belt of never-ending terror.

But thanks to the amount of time we get to spend with the actual people in the plot as opposed to just the horrors, the film is also successful as a character study of the interactions of a broken family [Mitch is supporting his widowed mother (Jessica Tandy) and his little sister (Veronica Cartwright) on his own] and a woman who's trying to find her way in life.

So we have this opening act of stellar old-fashioned romantic comedy followed terrifying bird attacks combined with a hearty family drama. And the biggest surprise? The gore effects are good too! Evidently the deterioration of film censorship came a long way in the wake of Psycho leading to grisly scenes like the neighbor with his eyes pecked out.

Lazy bum didn't even change out of his pajamas.

The success of The Birds with its abrupt tonal shifts and delicate juggling act of themes lies entirely on the backs of three people: Alfred Hitchcock (obviously), sound designer Bernard Hermann, and Tippi Hedren.

Alfred Hitchcock's talent at manufacturing suspense is a given, of course, but it is commendable that after having so thoroughly proven himself with previous films, he still sought out ways to make his next movie even bigger and better. The lengthy attack scenes in The Birds are like Hitchcock wrapping his hands around your neck, pausing for a minute, and then slowly squeezing until you're gasping for air.

One sequence in particular in which a murder of crows attacks a schoolhouse is terrifying, not necessarily because of the fact that murderous (ha) birds are attacking young children, but rather because of the fact that we see them slowly gathering behind Tippi Hedren as she obliviously smokes a cigarette.

We know what's going to happen. And there's nothing we can do to stop it. The pressure builds and builds until it finally explodes into a cacophony of squawks, beaks, and wings. The slow boil approach that Hitchcock uses here more or less erases the inherent silliness of the film's premise, allowing us time to ponder just how many uses a sharp bird's beak might be put to. Or just how many birds there are in the world. Or the fact that random acts of nature similar to (but perhaps slightly less preposterous than) this happen all the time.

This slow easing into the more absurd elements is handled so masterfully that even when the birds blow up a gas station, it is still closer to Psycho than Birdemic.

Believe you me, you see this and you're not gonna be thinking "This is a ridiculous plot point." You'll be sprinting away as fast as you can.

But enough about Hitchcock. Everybody know's he's great. Bernard Hermann, sound designer and composer of the score for Psycho, plays an equally important role in the overall impact of the film. He was originally hired to write a score, but he thought it would be best to keep the film absolutely devoid of music (save for a hauntingly creepy moment set during the children's choir class).

Instead the audience's ears are buffeted with a hurricane of squawks and flaps that underly and occasionally overtake the action in most every scene. This attack on the eardrums is unsettling in the highest degree and keeps one firmly planted in the universe of the movie no matter how much they might want to get away.

And you do want to get away.

Which brings us to Tippi Hedren. The star of the show. Sure, Hermann and Hitchcock did the grunt work, providing a magnificent framework for this woman to thrive, but without her star turn as Melanie, the film would have been rudderless and careening wildly.

Melanie Daniels is a human Barbie doll. She's gorgeous and fabulous. She's rich, playful, and irresponsible. She grew up toying without people, paying no mind to the consequences. But after a media snafu in Rome (and through the cavalcade of bird attacks), she has become unmoored, searching for her place on the shelf of life.

Melanie is a wounded woman. She was once free as a bird (geddit) but she needs to find a place to land on her feet.

She supports charities. She's putting a poor Third World child through school. But to what ends should she dedicate her characteristic passion? With an uncaring father and an absentee mother, she has never known the unconditional love of another person, which during the course of her adventure she finds not in Mitch but in his initially untrusting mother.

Melanie's complicated personality layers and deep hurt are handled with great care by Ms. Hedren who puts in one of the single best performances in a horror film that I've ever seen. Equal parts blasé, fabulous, vulnerable, and tenacious, this woman is a masterpiece of character, both in writing and performance. Without her, The Birds is nothing.

Such fabulous. Much appreciate.

It's true that The Birds is much less monumental and groundbreaking than Psycho, but in my opinion, it is the better movie in terms of tension, thrills, and character development.

I have opinions, so sue me.

One last thing before I go (I'm about to lay down some Film Theory 101 on y'all so the uninterested can feel free to skip to the end): The nature of the bird attacks is a mystery. Is it because we're polluting the Earth? Is it because Melanie is a classless ho (as some of my classmates seem to think - they are not very nice people)? Is it because of the two lovebirds who remain in their cage in the Brenner house?

Who know?

That's the nature of nature - to be unfathomable and illogical. Things happen. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad. Some of them will peck out your eyes. And that is infinitely more terrifying than some half-baked environmental treatise.

I would like to think that my theory is supported in the scene where Melanie is trapped in a phone booth outside the diner. Around her she sees representations of fire (the gas station explosion), water (a stray fire hose is mucking up the works), air (the birds, naturally), and earth (an overturned cart of cabbages). These four natural elements present in the same scene imply that the bird attacks are merely a force of nature - elemental and inescapable.

And that's why I'm afraid.

TL;DR: The Birds is Hitchcock's best horror film, hands down.
Rating: 9/10
Word Count: 1573