If any horror franchise was begging to be taken round to the back of the nearest barn and be put out of our misery like an R-rated Old Yeller, it’s the Children Of The Corn. Ever since the first movie adapted Stephen King’s short way story back in ’84, a frankly astounding nine sequels have sprouted from the astoundingly fertile soil that King originally laid. However, time and time again, underachieving filmmakers have been turning in constantly ever more rotten crops as the franchise (the utterly gonzo Part 3 notwithstanding) somehow got worse with every new serving.
Some fresh blood and an injection of a half decent budget was desperately needed if the franchise was ever going to haul itself out of direct to streaming Hell and in 2020, it finally happened after King-fever struck producers after the It reboot saw Pennywise being in many pennies – only… it didn’t. Trapped in limbo after its premiere in Sarasota, Florida, it wasn’t released until 2023, hardly something that inspires a growth of confidence.
The town of Rylstone, Nebraska is dying thanks to their big money spinner – the growing of corn – being near obliterated by the use of pesticides and genetically modified foodstuffs pushed on them by farming conglomerates. The rot that’s gotten into the corn has seemingly gotten into the townsfolk too as a series of nightmarish events are kicked off when a child emerges from the corn and starts killing the adults who work in a local orphanage. However, as bad as that is, the police chief’s decision to end the hostage situation by pumping gas into the building makes thing a whole lot worse when they inadvertently end up suffocation the very children they were intending to save.
However, there is one survivor, an orphan by the name of Eden who walked into the corn field herself before it all kicked off and emerged days later only to be taken in by the local priest, but something is obviously “off” with her thanks to the fact that we’ve seen something console her during her time in the fields.
Meanwhile, the town is voting on whether they should cut their losses by choosing to subsidise and give up growing corn for good; something that gives both Eden and local do-gooder Bo William’s cause for concern for very different reasons. Bo is a seventeen year old, Lisa Simpson type who actually has a ticket out of this rustic shithole, but wants to get her father to reverse his decision and try to heal the corn. Eden, on the other hand, has thrown her lot in with He Who Walks, an ancient, earth bound demon that lives within the corn and isn’t about to let a bunch of struggling farmers obliterate his natural habitat for a quick buck.
Both have similar plans to hold a mock trial for all the various, deadbeat adults at the town hall, but each girl goes about it very differently and before Bo knows it, she’s in the middle of a massacre as Eden holds the life of every grownup in town in her little, girlish hands.
In many ways, I’m a little bit confused as to what the makers of Children Of The Corn were trying to achieve. After all, claiming that this new version is a shiny new reboot isn’t much of an incentive considering that all the COTC sequels have essentially been remakes up to now, as none have really bothered to follow on from their predecessors. On top of that, the original movie was already remade as a TV movie back in 2009 and no one even remembers that one, so the decision to give these vegetable obsessed kids is even more confounding.
Still, at least it brings back a modicum of slickness back to a franchise that, at times, looked like it had scraped together barely a buck-fifty to put the effects effects together, so does this face lift for the franchise breathe new life into a series that wasn’t particularly perky in the first place? ‘Fraid not, guys, sorry.
Directed by Kurt Wimmer, the man who gave us the underrated Equilibrium and the borderline unwatchable Ultraviolet, this eleventh punt at Children Of The Corn is watchable in it’s own, empty way, I suppose, but it’s as memorable as… something I can’t quite remember right now.
Dopey characters, moribund story and a complete absence of scares is to expected, but making things extra annoying is that the movie seems to be trying to make some sort of point, yet can’t quite put its finger on what its supposed to be. Is the senseless death of the children in the beginning of the movie a damning indictment of child care in America? Is the increasingly feral behavior of the town’s children somehow a metaphor for the increasing number of massacres perpetrated by young people every year? Is the genetically modified food subplot a call to arms against big corporations smothering small towns? The final answer is regrettably D, all of the above, but none of them manage to stick beyond having Elena Kampouris’ eco-conscious heroine make some really awful decisions.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I truly appreciate what Greta Thunberg is trying to do on the world stage, I just don’t particularly think she’d make a particularly effective final girl in a horror film about killer corn.
Elsewhere, writer/director Wimmer treats subtlety like a four-letter word as he makes the townsfolk of Rylstone so cartoonishly odious, they make the denizens of Springfield seem fairly level-headed. The effect is that even though these kids are decidedly evil, their enthusiastic slaughtering of the adults is muted of much shock value as these exaggerated, slack jawed yokels are practically demanding to be murdered in the name of a leafier Groot who has a penchant for tearing women in half like a wishbone.
The leaden script gives us supposedly cunning leaf characters that would struggle to pull open a door marked push. Why, if she’s already been warned numerous times about how flammable grain dust is, would Eden let her mortal enemy, Bo, light a cigarette when she herself is the one who soaked her with tractor fuel earlier?
With that being said, with all the various actors who has played devotees to whatever the hell is lurking in the corn during their respective movies, Kate Moyer’s malevolent, death-state flinging Eden is by far the most fun. Fans of John Franklin’s highly punchable Isaac may be horrified by this statement, but Eden’s matter of fact cruelty ends up being the main standout of a film that ranks highly within the internal pantheon of the Corn, but withers in the face of almost amy other fright flick you wanna throw at it.
“Nothing Ever Really Dies In The Corn” is a phrase that pops up more than once during the film’s run time. I pray to god that isn’t true.
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