ain cast: Zach Galligan (Paul), Corey Taylor (Chilly Billy), Brittney Rae (Kat), Haley Leary (Abbie), Derek Russo (Vince), Alexandra Lucchesi (Marie), Kevin Wayne (Greg), Samantha Noel Van Sickle (Vanessa), Michael Aaron Milligan (Chuck), Natalia Nova (Alexandria), Riley Sutton (Kyra), Kenneth Trujillo (Daryl), J Gaven Wilde (Jacob), Dallas T Taylor (The Masked Man), and John Wilkins III (John Smith)
Directors: Scott B Hansen and Desiree Connell
Guess what’s just around the corner. Naturally, more horror stuff is being pushed around this time of the year, and Bad Candy, which came out last year but was quite tough to track down for some reason, is an anthology film that attempts to present several horror segments interwoven around a common character or element. Well, that’s what it seems to try to do anyway, because for the life of me, I have no idea what this thing is about.
The premise seems to be that, on Halloween, radio host Chilly Billy trades horror stories with his engineer Paul, but the first few stories seem to have no relevance to this set up at all. Then later, some caller will start raging about how some story is all wrong, then this masked fellow shows up in several stories but doesn’t really do much to actually tie the stories together despite his presence, and finally, the whole studio burns down with Paul in it, probably a sad metaphor for Zach Gilligan’s career.
Mr Gilligan and that guy from Slipknot—do people still listen to Slipknot?—get the main billing here, which says a lot about the caliber of the cast. Sadly, the acting is exactly what one would typically associate with folks that act for booze or coke, right down to stilted delivery of lines, lost and confused expressions of their faces, and general “I’d like to think I’m too good for Syfy and The Asylum flicks… oh god, I’m so wrong, am I not?” levels of cringe and second-hand embarrassment all around.
Still, things wouldn’t be so bad if the story segments had been good, gory, sleazy, or any combination of these, but no. Some of the segments are just tired old tropes rehashed with barely a cursory warm-over, while others just stumble out the gate and sputter shortly after to an abrupt and anticlimactic end. I can’t make out the chronology of the events taking place, so it’s not like there is an obvious continuity or arc progression taking place here. This movie resembles some people’s idea of throwing together some half-baked stuff that they had captured on reel, and then blackmailing or hypnotizing Zach Gilligan and some bloke from Slipknot to film a few scenes to give a pretense that the anthology has a higher purpose.
The tragedy of Bad Candy, though, is that sometimes it offers an intriguing idea or concept that eventually gets buried by horrible execution. I especially like the premise of a bunch of Uber-like drivers working together to herd their most obnoxious passengers off to be killed by a demon, which is something I don’t come across often, but yeah, the poor execution fails to make that interesting concept take off in any meaningful or entertaining way.
In the end, this one ranks pretty low on the tier list of horror anthology films. On the flip side, this means that there are so many more better movies of this kind to look out for, so hey, let’s just put this one out of its misery.
