Candyman: Farewell to Flesh

The return of Candyman (Tony Todd), the tall, black, hook-handed slasher who looks like a depressed Eurotrash model. He's supposed to be a messianic assassin of white people, and this slow, cloddish sequel offers grisly flashbacks to his previous incarnation as a slave who was tortured and killed. But in its contemporary schlock-horror scenes, the film undermines its revenge-of-the-repressed premise with racist scare tactics: Whenever it wants to fake the audience into thinking the killer's around, it simply cuts to a shot of another black man.