Like most horror film sequels, Candy-man: Farewell To The Flesh is vastly inferior to the original film: Candy-man. Tony Todd returns as the candy-man again, and Philip Glass' hypnotic score is used, but that's where the similarities end between the two films. Kelly Rowan, currently from The O.C., stars as a descendant of the candy-man clan in this film. She's a school teacher, provoked by her students into invoking the candy-man curse. Shortly afterward, mayhem starts once again. She's drawn in by the candy-man, and we learn much more about his origins than we care to know in gruesome detail. There are several differences between this film and the first one that make it inferior. First, the pacing of this film is much slower and less taut than the original. This is due partly to the direction and partly to the very gradual revelation about the candy-man's origins. Creators of the first film were smart to realize that the audience didn't need all that exposition to make the story work. Second, the film is set in New Orleans during fat Tuesday, but Bill Condon, the director, does not use the locations effectively.<br /><br />Most of the scenes are filmed on obvious set pieces, which greatly limit the ability of the film to build masterfully like the first one. Real locations helped pull viewers into the "myth" in the first film. Here, we are too aware that we are watching set pieces. Third, there are numerous red herring "boo" scenes, even Condon admits this, which greatly limit the fear factor after a while; because, we're just waiting for the next false alarm to "scare" us. This is a sign that there really isn't much here to scare us in the first place. The first film had little, if any of this; the story propelled its scares naturally by good plot development, not loud cue music. Fourth, the biggest reason why this is inferior to the first film is that Tony Todd appears much more frequently in this film than he does in the original. This, of course, demystifies him so much in our eyes that he becomes ineffective as a scary figure. There's so much posing and posturing by Todd that you can almost hear him getting direction. How often have we heard critics say "less is more?" Apparently not enough times. Veronica Cartwright, of Lost In Space fame, appears as Rowan's mother. It's hard to believe Condon went on to direct Gods & Monsters. * of 4 stars.