The What Happened to This Horror Movie series digs into the third Candyman film, Candyman: Day of the Dead
You’ve seen Candyman haunt Cabrini Green. You’ve seen Candyman terrorize his ancestors in New Orleans. Now, see Candyman as you’ve never seen him before… on the direct-to-video shelf. Though the previous iteration Farewell to the Flesh had made nearly $14 million on a rumored $6 million budget, the reviews weren’t great, and the powers that be decided the franchise was no longer sticky nor sweet enough for the big screen. Candyman was banished to the direct-to-video bin with a razor-thin budget. The result would be a movie that Tony Todd was disappointed with and Clive Barker chose not to put his name on; A movie that would bury the Candyman franchise for the next quarter century. This is what happened to Candyman 3: Day of the Dead.
After the events of Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, series creator and legend Clive Barker seemed ready to jump back into the franchise. He told AOL at the time, ”I am very proud of both the Candyman pictures, but I haven’t been approached by Polygram for a third picture. Of course, it took almost ten years for Hollywood to make a sequel to “Alien”, so anything is possible.” Barker inexplicably wouldn’t be contacted again until after the film was made. The production screened the final product for him after it was already complete and asked him to unceremoniously put his name on it anyway. Barker declined, saying, “I declined to put my name on it. I really don’t think I contributed anything to its creation and it seems entirely phony to plunk your name on it, take the money, and run. I didn’t think it was a badly created movie, I just didn’t think it had anything to do with the mythology I originally created. I would have felt like a big old fake.”
Those who did create Candyman 3 included Director Turi Meyer who had previously directed the also direct to video horror film Sleepstalker. Meyer also wrote the script after previously working on Leprechaun 2 and Carrot Top’s Chairman of the Board. Meyer’s frequent collaborator and fellow Chairman of the Board writer Alfredo Septien was also brought on board and Candyman 3: The Skinemax sequel was born.
The story the writers would conjure found us a shocking twenty-five years after the events of Farewell to the Flesh. Meaning this 1999 sequel would take place in 2020. There were so many red flags. So many red flags. It centered around Daniel Robitaille/Candyman’s great, great, great-granddaughter Caroline. Though you wouldn’t know it by all the sexual interactions the film puts the two in. Caroline (who is the little girl seen at the end of Farewell to the Flesh) is haunted by her family’s past and the seeming inability to ever find pants. Her mother (who was very clearly a recast actress) went through all the things we witnessed her go through in the last film only to succumb to Candyman after all, having her throat slit by him in her bathtub. Which, was of course deemed a suicide. But hey, Caroline did get some sweet paintings out of the deal. Paintings that her friend Miguel is trying to use to promote his art gallery in a trashy, true-crime-esque type of way. Caroline judges him but attends the event anyway and is naturally goaded into saying “Candyman” into the mirror five times because we aren’t here for a TED talk. And you know what happens next…
Candyman arrives on an actually pretty kick-ass bee train and starts hooking folks through their stomachs while asking his great, great-granddaughter to be his victim. Again, in an all too sexual fashion. The story is different than previous iterations by way of its unique supporting characters. After Candyman slaughters some friends halfway through a softcore porn scene that involves eating a honeycomb naked, the cops set their sights on Caroline’s new friend David. This is because he’s not white and these cops are as racist as the day is long. It’s a specific point the film makes repeatedly. Seriously. These dreadful detectives remind you they are racist more times than an infomercial tries to fit their 1–800 number in before the ad ends.
David and Caroline take a bunch of sexy tequila shots together and a romance ensues, but not before she meets his abuela. A psychic healer, who is kind of scary and has a penchant for the dramatic. She has Caroline whisper her troubles into an egg, which she cracks. Inside the yolk blood begins to pour out, followed by a bee. Which everyone knows means she has to find and destroy Candyman’s paintings to stop him once and for all. Inconveniently, the paintings have already been stolen by a gang of roided-out Good Charlotte super-fans. They tie Caroline up and put her in a questionable ball gag allowing Candyman to murder the shit out of everyone. Afterward, Candyman one more time tries to put his fingers in his great, great, great Granddaughter’s mouth and makes out with her a little before she breaks free of his trance. She then fights off a few bees and destroys his painting, causing him to explode into a terribly filmed special effects sequence. Finally, the bad cop shows up just in time to be shot by good cop Ernie Hudson Jr and take the fall for the Candyman murders. Getting Caroline and David quite literally off the hook and destroying the myth of Candyman in the process.
While most of this was indeed the type of horror movie that reinforced the worst stereotypes of the genre, Tony Todd was once again fantastic in the role. He had some great lines and even better kills in spots. Specifically, the murder of a prickish cop who was in, what he thought, was the safety of his vehicle. While you knew you could always count on Tony Todd to bring the goods; The rest of the cast also wasn’t nearly as bad as you might expect. The character of David was played by the more than capable Jsu Garcia who you’ll likely remember as Rod from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Garcia has a surprising amount of range and likeability that no doubt contributed to his long career in acting. The leading role of Caroline went to September of 1995’s Playboy Playmate of the Month, wife of Nikki Sixx, and Baywatch actress Donna D’Errico. D’Errico held her own in a role that asked her to do quite a bit and at times a bit too much. Director Turi Meyer was also impressed with her performance saying that the studio felt that “Not since Jamie Lee Curtis has an actress reacted so persuasively to emotional and tangible torment.” While that’s an unfair comparison, the faults of Candyman 3 don’t by any means rest on D’Errico’s shoulders.
Day of the Dead was filmed in eighteen days in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. The production was so rushed that the actors allegedly had a maximum of two takes before they were required to move on to the next shot. The audio commentary for the film also claims the budget was closer to $1 million than the $3 million the studio previously boasted. The production assumed it wouldn’t be able to even rehire bee handler Norman Gary for the production. Thankfully, Gary reduced his fee to stay with the franchise and complete what he had started. You know it’s bad when even the bee handler knows you’re on a budget. And thank God. I’m sure the actors didn’t want a guy you found on Craig’s List and paid in 7/11 gift cards to be handling thousands of bees. Which, in many late 90s straight-to-video situations would have been the case. Yes, we’re looking at you, Dimension Films.
Though it’s clear Candyman 3 was working on a budget, necessity can truly be the mother of all invention. While on set one day in Eastside Los Angeles, a group of crew members caught some graffiti artists tagging some local spots in the area and paid them each $100 to do the same to their set, giving it a touch of realism. Of the many things missing from the previous films (such as a budget or a purpose) the lack of Philip Glass’ iconic score is also missing. Candyman 3 composer Adam Gorgoni had planned to use at least themes from it but was banned from doing so as they owned none of the rights and likely couldn’t afford them.
If you haven’t yet gotten the hook that this was a film on a budget, well, they ran out of money before filming the opening credits. While the Studio wanted them to simply lay credits overtop of the opening scene, the director and cinematographer were not to be denied. They instead found some equipment, blacked out the windows of a garage, and filmed the opening sequence themselves using Candyman’s prop hook. Which you just know was a creepy shoot. That location screams one of the urban avant-garde settings where Candyman would have shown and started gutting folks.
Finally, Candyman 3: Day of the Dead was released directly to DVD with little fanfare and even less of a response from critics. The film currently sits on the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes with a 21% “rotten” rating from critics and a 30% rating from fans. There aren’t a lot of nice things said about the film. Even these days. Tony Todd famously wasn’t a fan of the film himself, letting fans know at Fangoria’s Weekend of Horror’s Convention he was disappointed with the outcome. The craziest part of Day of the Dead’s legacy, however, is what it meant for the future of the franchise. Or rather lack thereof.
In 2004, it was reported by Fangoria that both Tony Todd and Clive Barker were working on a big-budget stand-alone Candyman film that wouldn’t have anything to do with its predecessor. Todd and Clive met multiple times and even storyboarded some of the film that Todd said would be set in New England. The movie would have featured an image of Candyman in a blizzard and had the slasher terrorizing an all-girls school and more specifically a professor who was a descendant of Candyman. It was also reported that Clive Barker was working on… hold on to your boots… a Freddy vs Jason style team-up film between Hellraiser’s Pinhead and Candyman. We never saw either of these films for whatever reason, and the franchise would lay dormant for over twenty years after Day of the Dead, when Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele resurrected the property in 2021.
And that, my friends, is what happened to Candyman 3: Day of the Dead.
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