Oh, not just for the fact that they put out a rather dreary, needlessly gory "horror" movie, not for the fact that director Bill Condon overused every cliché device in the book for modern schlock shockers, not for the horrible misuse of Phillip Glass' music, slathered through nearly every scene and cranked up to uncomfortable volume in the movie's soundtrack, not just for the fact that not enough was done to truly develop Tony Todd's character in this movie and wasted his potential as an actor (and Todd is the only really good thing in this silly film).
No, if all that were the whole of this movie's calendar of sins, it would be nothing but another rather forgettable and excessively bloody two-hour waste of time that goes nowhere. No, rather, it is this film's cartoon depiction of New Orleans, its people, its culture, even its geography for which atonement has yet to be tendered.
It's not as if other movies set in New Orleans haven't been guilty of their own clichés about our beloved city. The Big Easy (1986) springs immediately to mind, especially with the cornpone accents spouted by the actors in that one. Most movies depicting Orleanians seem to have us all either speaking French or just like Foghorn Leghorn. And of course, we all eat gumbo every day and drink like fish.
Well, somehow, this movie managed to skip that one —after a fashion; instead having every character with a French name. Because, you know, New Orleans was founded by the French back in 1718, so of course every white person in the city is French-descendent. No Italians, Irish, Germans or Scandanavians. Nope, not in this New Orleans. No Mexicans or other Hispanics live in this movie's New Orleans either.
It's Mardi Gras at the time of the film. OK, that's also pretty much by the book, I suppose. Mardi Gras is one of the signature aspects of New Orleans culture and it makes some sense for a movie to exploit that, especially if the producers can stage a Carnival with a small army of extras in costume and enhanced by props and 'Quarter-scale authentic style floats designed by Henri Schindler, long time local carnival art director and consultant. As a producer, you'd be a fool not to take advantage of that.
For a New Orleans that's in the thick of the carnival season (which bizarrely seems to be falling sometime in mid-April, to judge from the weather), it seems unusually sparse on the streets, to go by what we see in this movie. In fact, except for the odd person or small group of revelers in costume passing through, except in the 'Quarter, the New Orleans of this movie seems almost deserted. Especially St. Charles Ave. running past a Gallier Hall which doesn't have the mayor's reviewing stand on the front steps but does, despite it's apparently having been converted into police headquarters, have a half-naked drunk stretched out in front who the police and everybody else just steps over.
And no, you're not going to see a naked couple on a balcony or up against a building having sex out in the open. Even New Orleans cops at carnival time won't turn a blind eye to that one. Nor would people be parading in a torrential downpour as seen in the last fifteen minutes of the film. Orleanians may party hardy, but we've also got the good sense to come in out of the rain.
Another movie cliché in New Orleans is that the bayou country is maybe only a ten minute drive from downtown and the Vieux Carre. Candyman II takes that one better and has a bayou running behind a house on Esplanade Ave. While geography may be a matter of opinion in New Orleans, there definitely is no bayou cutting through the middle of the Seventh Ward and never has been in the entire time I've ever lived there since birth.
You have to wonder if any of the people connected with the production even bothered to read a book about New Orleans, much less ever actually visited the city, before shooting one frame of film on this misbegotten project. But we're supposed to be the City That Care Forgot. This movie's producers and writers apparently couldn't be bothered to try.
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