BAD CANDY (2020)

Studio:      Dread Presents
Director:    Scott Hansen, Desiree Connell
Writer:      Scott Hansen, Desiree Connell
Producer:  Digital Thunderdome
Stars:     Zach Galligan, Michael Aaron Milligan, Kevin Wayne, Corey Taylor, Riley Sutton, Derek Russo, Kenneth Trujillo, Jason Thompson

Review Score:

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Summary:

Radio DJs tell a series of scary stories on Halloween night.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Radio show hosts Chilly Billy and Paul tell a series of scary stories to their listeners on Halloween night. Several stories feature a supernatural killer clown called Bad Candy, who was magically drawn to life by a young girl named Kyra.

After smashing pumpkins around town, a young bully wanders into a home haunt made to look like a circus tent. Bad Candy captures the boy and transforms him into a small figure that the clown adds to a demented diorama.

Because she unleashed Bad Candy the previous year, Kyra’s abusive stepfather forbids her from trick-or-treating with her friends. Locked in her bedroom, Kyra uses her magic sketchpad to draw a fairy and a goblin that come to life. Kyra’s stepfather angrily smashes the creatures. Distraught, Kyra draws her dead mother, who then appears as a vengeful ghost to suck out her evil ex-husband’s soul.

Mr. Grimsley puts razor blades into treats he passes out to children. Bad Candy possesses Grimsley and forces the old man to mutilate himself with the blades.

A supernatural killer in a devil mask murders drug dealer Charlie in a gas station bathroom.

After her boyfriend Matt dumps her via text, Abbie leaves a costume party when her boss Kyle summons her to work the graveyard shift at a morgue. Abbie gets drunk and high and starts having sex with a male corpse. The corpse comes to life. Additional corpses rise and threateningly surround Abbie.

Marie comes home from a costume party to find Jimmy, a troublemaker she’s been dealing with since their school days together, robbing her house. Marie and Jimmy engage in a violent physical confrontation that spills outside. After Marie falls unconscious, Bad Candy appears and dismembers Jimmy.

Dressed as Dracula, rideshare driver Daryl picks up a prostitute as his latest fare. The prostitute agrees to introduce Daryl to her pimp. Daryl’s friend Vince, who served with Daryl in the military, joins Daryl at the location. Daryl and Vince kill several of the pimp’s criminal associates and capture the rest. The men then take the captives to a forest where they are joined by Scotty and Lenny, two other ex-soldiers also suffering from PTSD. Lenny transforms into a vampiric bat-creature. The other three men throw spears as the former squadmates release the captives to be hunted and killed.

Judy leads a team of television ghost hunters on an investigation of a haunted house where a young boy, Jacob, tragically became trapped and died after setting a fire. Psychic visions reveal that a bully named Paul could have saved Jacob, but he cruelly prevented Jacob from escaping.

The bully responsible for Jacob’s death turns out to be radio DJ Paul. A frightening vision causes Paul to become trapped in a burning room similarly to how Jacob died. Chilly Billy flees as the radio station goes up in flames.

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Review:

Are you in the mood for a fun, fright-filled horror anthology themed around Halloween? Well then, you’ll probably have to rent “Tales of Halloween” or “Trick ‘r Treat” or something, because you’ll only find rocks in “Bad Candy’s” bag. It’s a low-budget woof leaning heavily on one of the words in its title, and I’m sure you can guess it’s not “Candy.”

“Bad Candy” starts strong by opening on a nifty little stop-motion sequence of a skeleton rising from a grave while classic monster movie music plays in the background. Whoops. Turns out this is only an animated company logo, and not part of the movie at all.

That mirthfully macabre tone gets reset two minutes later when a careless trucker runs over a man in the road. I hate to be the one who apparently has to tell indie filmmakers this. But you can’t film a hit-and-run with just a close-up of an actor cartoonishly bugging out his eyes followed by a cut to a bloody bumper with a Wilhelm Scream in between. If it can’t be convincing, throw the scene away. “Bad Candy” doesn’t need this insert anyway. Leaving it in simply sends an early signal that this is going to be a cheaply-shot, not-so-serious production.

The film’s first story isn’t really a story at all. There’s a boy some kids call a bully, although all we see him do is smash several pumpkins while trick-or-treating around town. Hardly an offense deserving an attack from a supernatural killer clown, but that’s what happens. The End.

I can say something nice about the second segment, and it’s definitely not kudos for being the 1,976,458th film to put “Night of the Living Dead” on someone’s TV. “Bad Candy’s” digital effects, the ones involving otherworldly lights and flying fairy trails anyway, actually look pretty good for this level of DTV filmmaking. We’re not talking Marvel blockbuster quality, of course. But someone who knows their way around halfway-decent software generated visuals more vividly detailed than expected. The digital blood on the other hand, is a far different story.

Speaking of stories, this segment doesn’t have much of one. A little girl whose magic sketchbook inexplicably brings drawings to life uses her anthropomorphic artwork to get revenge on an abusive stepfather. At least an attempt is made at creating characters with distinct traits and a bit of backstory, even if they are merely slaves to a setup for another bad guy to get his comeuppance.

The third segment follows the same well-trod road. A cranky coot spends a half-minute montage putting razor blades into candy and cupcakes for handing out to kids. The killer clown comes to his door and predictably turns the tables just as he did on the first chapter’s pint-sized villain.

“Bad Candy” stays four for four with the next segment, where a nasty drug dealer meets his violent end in a gas station bathroom. For some weird reason though, he gets killed by someone or something in a devil costume, not the killer clown who features in the rest of the film. Regardless, once again this isn’t a story. It’s just a “thing” that happens and it’s the same thing we’ve seen happen three times already.

We’re not quite at the halfway mark in “Bad Candy” at this point, yet we finally arrive at a segment that looks like it might have a plot for a change. A woman named Abbie gets dumped by her boyfriend before being called to work the graveyard shift at a morgue. After drowning her sorrows with drinks and drugs, one thing leads to another and Abbie starts having sex with a male corpse. All these bits of character development mean diddlysquat once the corpse comes to life, strangely setting off a chain reaction where more bodies rise to threateningly surround Abbie. Once again, that’s it. The lead-in is one more time-killing ruse to get to another sting where creatures kill a problematic person.

I don’t need to go on, do I? There’s still another 55 minutes of the movie to cover, and it’s all pretty much like this.

Zach Galligan of “Gremlins” fame and Slipknot’s Corey Taylor are the big “gets” for “Bad Candy,” assuming you consider them to be big gets. The film’s frame features Galligan and Taylor as two radio DJs telling these stories, except they don’t even get involved until two of the guys have already been killed. These are throwaway cameos where the actors only had to sit in chairs in a single room and probably knocked out their brief wraparound scenes in less time than it takes to boil a pot of water.

“Bad Candy” isn’t the sloppiest indie horror anthology I’ve ever seen. On the contrary, apart from a few outright ugly shots, plentiful passion exists in energetic production design. Lively sets are dressed with colorful props instead of being nondescript rooms in the director’s aunt’s friend’s house. A little more attention to technical details like consistent color timing and “Bad Candy” could hit for par on an average homespun indie course. Unfortunately for that effort, a tragically underfed script loaded with nearly nothing but redundantly empty deaths never stood a chance of plopping out anything other than a flop.

Review Score: 35

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