Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
Three youngsters are ready to be served drinks and dancing in 'The Candy Shop'. - Contributed
The Candy Shop, directed by Joel Burke and produced by Paul Bucknor for Firefly Films, is a comedy about growing up; at least, that part of it where three young men (Casper, Mark and Preston) just sprouting facial hair, seek a certain kind of growth at a go-go club on the last day of their high school lives. So central to the tale are a number of asses of the half-covered, gyrating kind.
It is, however, an abbreviated affair, as the three worst words in filmdom come at the end of the short film - "to be continued". Ah well. The good news is that the feature length version is in production and is promised for the 2007 Flashpoint Film Festival, where The Candy Shop should be all grown up.
Despite the cheating attempts and pranks of loafter and trickster Casper (Evraldo Creary), the most recognisable face from a cast includes Kyino Cunningham and Melissa Fearon, who jokes as much with face as voice and ties an uncooperative classmate to a chair at the end of the CXC principles of business exam; as well as the sneaking out antics to head to Club Erotica and the favours of Crystal Peaks; the funny does not really get going until he hears a hiss in the back of Mark's mother's 'borrowed' station wagon.
Highly predictable
Up to that point,The Candy Shop had been highly predictable, a side trip into a mini-lecture to the bespectacled 'Pastor Pressy', as Casper calls him, unnecessary and unrealistic (it ends with "if only your father was here" - yawn). It does not help that as Pressy was heading towards the car where his irate mother is waiting, Casper shouts to him "me a come fi roun' de corner a yu house".
So much for the secrecy of the go-go plot, hatched at the bus stop. But then, there is that hiss in the back of the car, pinched by Mark, a character somewhere between the stiffness of Preston and happy-go-lucky Casper, and the funny meter starts ticking over. It is an iguana (so that explains the glimpse of the 'North St. Andrew Wildlife Conservation' sign on the back of the car) and the fight is on for the front seat.
A lot of fun
The antics to get into Erotica, money passing to a pair of wooden gatemen included, are ho hum, as are the goggle-eyes of the youngsters at the sight of ample, agile, not quite accessible asses. The con for personal attention from Crystal Peaks is predictable; the advice of a man outside the club to the disappointed trio to head to the Candy Shop isn't.
And the funny goes up in more ways than one as they fall victims to a plot to steal their valuables which hinges on an ass of the unexpected and very unwelcome kind, the trio turning the tables with the help of the lizard.
But just as the funny bone is appreciating a happy hammering, there come those three bad words.
There are some incongruous words in The Candy Shop, where the dialogue sometimes swings between standard English and the Jamaican version. So after Mark explains that he got his mother to sleep and hence the car by "I jus' crush up some painkillers and mix it in with her tea" and Casper asks "suppose yu kill yu modda?", his language switches dramatically to "no man, mi Aunty do dat to me when time me young".
And there a couple (literally) editing glitches.
The Candy Shop moves to the dancehall beat of Aidonia, Marlon Binns, Wayne Marshall, Bounty Killer and Tony Matterhorn, with the Bloodfire Posse's rub a dub of the Pink Panther theme giving some good drum and bass. Beyonce and Kellis are also in the mix.
The Candy Shop man, Big Stone, appears as himself.
