USA. 2022.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – John Swab, Producers – Jeremy M. Rosen & John Swab, Photography – Will Stone, Music – David Sardy, Visual Effects – Pxl.House, LLC, Production Design – Cosmos Kindarius. Production Company – Roxwell Films.
Cast
Olivia Luccardi (Remy), Sam Quartin (Sadie), Owen Campbell (Levi), William Baldwin (Sheriff Rex), Guinevere Turner (Nora), Eden Brolin (Riley), Virginia Rand (Liv), Brad Carter (Theo), Bruce Davis (Bruce), Magic Mark (Father Phillip), Laevin Story (Jonah)
Plot
A group of girls work as prostitutes at a desert highway truck stop in the middle of nowhere, while living in an adjoining motel. They have nicknamed the area Candy Land. A travelling group of Christians stop by to preach to them. Afterwards, Sadie finds a girl Remy who has been either left behind or abandoned by the Christian group. The girls give Remy shelter and a room at the motel. At the same time, there are a series of brutal murders around the truck stop. Nora, who acts as madam to the girls, suggests that Remy be put to work as a prostitute to earn her keep. However, this triggers Remy, who is behind the killings, to start killing prostitutes and clients alike.
Candy Land was the fifth film for director/writer John Swab. Swab had previously made the likes of Let Me Make You a Martyr (2016), Run With the Hunted (2019), Body Brokers (2021) and Ida Red (2021) and would subsequently go onto make Little Dixie (2023), One Day as a Lion (2023) and King Ivory (2024), all of which sit within the crime genre and are outside of the material we cover here.
In a 2020s world where most depictions of sex, sexual attraction and nudity has been all but erased from film and tv so as not to be seen as objectifying or to offend somebody, Candy Land holds an undeniable jolt. In the opening scenes alone, we get to no holds barred depiction of life for the hookers at the truck stop with casual nudity from the actresses and assorted sex scenes in trucks and even the rest stop bathroom stalls. On the other hand, it is clear that this is not an erotic film and none of this is designed to titillate.
You are also taken aback by the way that John Swab depicts such a sordid world and often rubs our face in it from bathroom stall encounters to later scenes where the gay male prostitute (Owen Campbell) is beaten up and raped. The motel setting is seedy – the truck stop bathroom is a trashed pit where someone has graffitied ‘Big Hairy Pussy’ on the mirror. Or of William Baldwin as the friendly sheriff taking the male prostitute Owen Campbell out for a drive and then handing him a dildo – with pubic hair still attached! – and expecting him to perform with it. It has the unpleasant and grittily raw feel of being written by someone who has actually lived and worked in such a world.
The characterisations of all the girls are sharp and the actresses strong and worthwhile in the parts. The surprise among these is Guinevere Turner, best known as an actress on tv’s The L Word (2004-9) and as scriptwriter for American Psycho (2000) and Uwe Boll’s Bloodrayne (2005), who plays the middle-aged not so much madam as den mother to the rest of the girls.
Once, the film switches over into its horror element, there is nothing terribly sophisticated to Candy Land on a subtextual level. Simply the old familiar one about sex being abhorrent to fundamentalist Christianity and the trope of the religiously fixated killer who determines to stamp it out – something we have seen in other films such as The Fiend/Beware My Brethren (1971), House of Mortal Sin/The Confessional (1976) and Crimes of Passion (1984).
The only major difference is that here the psycho is played by a girl. In the part, Olivia Luccardi does a decent job of playing a role that moves between a watery harmless innocence and then erupting into a disturbingly intense and fixated violence – there is a particular jolt scene where she gets to entertain a client, stabs him in the neck with a pencil and then lies back with him on top covered in blood. I think Saint Maud (2019) did a far better depiction of a murderously woman with a religious obsession, but Candy Land does fairly solidly in that department. The film arrives at a climax that offers an entertainingly nasty bloodbath.
Trailer here