Candy Land probably doesn’t have much to offer you, despite some excellent talent, because the moments of tension are propelled by a patently ridiculous villain and some even stupider crimes. It’s impossible to talk about this movie without talking spoilers, so let’s get that out of the gate right now. Remy, played by It Follows alum Olivia Luccardi (along with Maika Monroe from Watcher fame not too long ago, which was the degree of separation that led me to this movie in the first place), is a member of a doomsday cult which descends on the last truck stop at the foot of the Rockies before the entering the “Bible Belt”. When she’s abandoned by her cult for being too radical, she takes the matter of “cleansing” the world of sin into her own hands–just like her mother, we learn later? Even though it doesn’t really seem like it matters?
Candy Land isn’t a meditation on teenage sex like It Follows, and it certainly doesn’t have anything to say about religion. It’s… more of a slasher flick? And you’re just supposed to enjoy watching scream queens (and one excellently gallant and brilliant scream king, played by Owen Campbell of X) get sliced. If you can do that you’re already about 60% of the way there to enjoying what this movie has to offer.
The game of the first act is watching as Remy makes impulsive decisions that seemingly box her into a corner and then watching her get out of them. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. She kills people in broad daylight. No one ever asks her why she’s covered in blood. Like in It Follows, no one really has cell phones as an aesthetic. It would be a lot harder for Remy to do what she does if there were even motel phones in the rooms, and despite the fact that we hear about the radios multiple times, they never come in handy as a plot device. There’s also no such thing as DNA evidence or any police work, really, because the only policeman on hand is too dicknotized by a lot lizard to really do any investigating. Murders at truck stops don’t merit closing down the stop, by the way. Commerce must be allowed to flow unfettered. The publicness of Remy’s killings stretch credulity. At one point she murders a creepy guy, who does this thing where he breathes like a snake whenever he’s over-excited about touching Remy, and then stuffs his body under her bed before hosting a slumber party for all the other girls. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. Looks pretty scary. So, you just kind of have to roll with it.
As far as slashers go, I don’t know that much. What I do have some grasp of is the fact that there isn’t really much of a Final Girl, which makes the final act of this movie a little bit limp. Once she runs out of victims at the truck stop, she goes home for the–twist?–her cult has left her and she belatedly kills herself to follow them?
The cast of sex workers all have their moments of brilliance and it’s easy to imagine a different movie where they all got slashed but had more interesting things to say about sex as a commodity and the way that young people’s relationship to sex is so utterly altered by the internet or social media or just to distinguish their relationship to sex as women outside of the narrow confines of the upper middle class, or maybe for some commentary about how this movie really succeeds in representing a couple of different slices of the queer community while also mostly being white women of a certain body type. But if you’re thinking any of this you probably didn’t come to this slasher flick to see someone get slashed. It’s not all stupid: there’s a certain brilliance to the way Luccardi’s face flips through emotions at such lightning speed, the double-ness of her emotions in any given moment, pleasure and guilt, anticipation and anxiety, ecstasy and horror. The two sex scenes she has are surprising and interesting from an aesthetic perspective. Especially the ambivalence of her expressions as she seems to give in to her girlhood crush’s enthusiasm after a particularly dark day.
Sex in general is portrayed as transactional. Intimacy among the lot lizards lies in simple gestures, a V-day cupcake, sharing a snowball, a bed, dancing to music. Beyond that, Candy Land has little to say about its villains motives and even less to say about the ways in which this movie finds itself situated in its cultural moment. It feels like a throwback but there’s not enough original to merit it as genre nostalgia.
