Candy Corn (2019)

Movie: Candy Corn (2019), directed by Josh Hasty

Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.54 miles, 8’23”/mile, 01:03:12 (recovery run)

 

This was my first indoor run of the fall, boils and ghouls! Around here, the houses start getting decked out for Halloween pretty much right after the equinox, so the neighborhood lawns are already sprouting inflatable jack-o’-lanterns and the hedges are covered in that dorky-looking fake spiderwebbing, and that’s A-OK with me. As far as I’m concerned, as soon as August is off the calendar I’m running around yelling “it’s HalloWEEEEEN!!” at strangers in the street and counting down the days until October’s monthlong flood of scary movies on all channels. I don’t even care that they’re edited for television. Sometimes that’s part of the fun.

 

Sadly, it’s not October yet, but since ’tis still the season and all that, I wanted a Halloween-themed movie to run to tonight:ideally something fresh and unfamiliar to get my mind off my cooked quads (last night’s run included a mile and a half of steep uphill), but still easy enough to follow that I wouldn’t miss anything too important when wiping sweat out of my eyes or getting distracted by something shiny. After poking around through a few streaming services, I settled on Candy Corn, which turned out to fit the bill nicely.

 

Here’s the guts: Mike, Bobby, and Steve are three young ne’er-do-wells sitting in a small-town diner planning their annual bullying of Jacob, the local special needs kid—which is apparently a longstanding Halloween tradition I somehow missed, but whatever. Steve’s girlfriend Carol “I Could Do Better” Saperstein unsuccessfully tries to dissuade them, and the next day the Thug Patrol (comprising our three miscreants plus a Sad Diner Loser named Gus) confronts Jacob at the carnival where he works. Jacob fights back, things get out of hand, and the thugs beat Jacob to death and flee the scene. As it turns out, though, like all traveling carnivals, this one is run by a diminutive necromancer named Dr. Death, who handily resurrects Jacob as a masked instrument of vengeance. Never mess with a carny, folks!

 

What follows is a by-the-numbers affair in which each of the thugs, and even the guilty-by-association Carol, are isolated and killed by Jacob one by one in borderline inventive ways—tongues ripped out, spines ripped out, any number of things ripped out—usually after they spot his trademark jack-o-lantern full of—you guessed it—candy corn. Meanwhile, Head Thug Mike just happens to be the son of the local sheriff, who tries to unravel the mystery of the sudden spate of murders in this normally sleepy town; will he discover the carnival’s terrifying secret in time? And I doubt I’m spoiling anything for anyone when I say the answer is no, of course he doesn’t, because this movie ends exactly the way you expect it to.

 

I mean, it is what it is, and what it is is a Halloween movie. It has, for example, the most perfunctory gratuitous nudity ever seen just because it had to tick that box. The writing is marginal and certainly not original, but then it’s clearly an homage to what came before, so take that for what it’s worth. The characterizations are, for the most part, paper-thin—especially for the bullies, so that as they’re picked off one by one, it’s hard to care. Mostly you cheer, I guess, because… bullies? But they were more like props then people so it didn’t really matter much one way or the other. You maybe feel a little sorry for Carol every once in a while, but then she keeps making out with Steve ON PURPOSE and you’re like, okay, she’s digging her own grave, here.

 

The acting is passable, with two notable exceptions. First, the guy who plays Head Thug Mike is just appallingly awful, which I would like to believe was intentional because every Halloween movie needs that one terrible actor for everyone to make fun of. Second, Pancho Moler is punching way above his weight (note: not a short joke) as Dr. Death, and to its credit, the film gives him a fair bit of screen time, because he’s the heart and soul of this flick, and I could watch him insult the police all day long. Meanwhile, if there were any doubt that Candy Corn is a movie made for horror fans by horror fans, it’s worth nothing that genre mainstay Tony Todd has a small but non-spooky part as one of the carnies (he’s also an executive producer), and P.J. Soles of Halloween and Carrie fame does a fine job as Marcy the police dispatcher.

 

For a low-budget indie endeavor, Candy Corn has a surprisingly high production value, though of course the ’70s-nostalgia feel helps a bit with that. There’s a little CGI for some extra blood spurts, I think, but otherwise what gore there is seems to be good old-fashioned practical effects, and done reasonably well and with love; the only real standout, effects-wise, is probably the design and execution of Jacob’s back-from-the-dead masked avenger look, which is stellar.

 

Bottom line, there’s not all that much going on… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Candy Corn is a good Halloween movie: it conjures the feeling of the holiday; it knows, loves, and exploits the tropes of the genre; and it’s uncomplicated enough that you’re not going to miss much when it’s your turn to get up and dole out candy to the trick-or-treaters who just rang the bell. As long as your expectations are modest, this is a decent popcorn flick for a Halloween night.