Corn To Run

Year: 2018

Director: John Gulager

Cast: Marci Miller, Jake Ryan Scott, Sara Moore

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

Well, it happened. We're finally here. The end of the line. Last stop. The tenth and final film in the Children of the Corn franchise. Until seven years from now when Dimension needs to renew the rights and demands somebody cobble one together in three days. Curiously, this is the only time one of these marathons has had its final entry created in the year of writing, proving that the Corn really can't be kept down. It will keep springing up through the cracks like an insidious weed.

That was a bad choice of words. I've gone and reminded myself that I could be watching the Insidious movies instead. And there's only FOUR of those!

Children of the Corn: Runaway, intriguingly enough, follows the story of an actual canonical character from the short story. Ruth (Marci Miller) was a pregnant teen member of the cult of He Who Walks Behind the Rows and escaped by burning down the cornfield and most of her compatriots with it. She has spent the last thirteen years wandering the American South with her son Aaron (Jake Ryan Scott) like a regular Sarah Connor, avoiding an implacable presence she feels is following her (aw damn, I just reminded myself that I could have been watching It Follows instead, too).

When their truck is impounded by police in a remote Oklahoma town, Ruth decides that maybe it's time to try and put down roots. She gets a job as a mechanic, befriends local waitress Sarah (Mary Kathryn Bryant), and attempts to give her son a normal life while experiencing bizarre hallucinations of her murderous past. But when several adults in town turn up dead, she realizes that the evil she is facing might not be only in her head.

But it's the tenth Children of the Corn movie, so what were the odds that she was just imagining things?

John Gulager (who previously did the Feast movies and Piranha 3DD) is probably the most famous director to helm a Children of the Corn movie, which is saying something more about the franchise than anything. But it's still surprising that this movie got so little fanfare, even for a direct-to-video release. The only reason I even knew it existed was because I was bored and scrolled all the way down to the dark corners of my Redbox app one night.

And yet, exist it does. And not much more than that. Even though the concept itself is probably the best in the franchise, it immediately whittles away every last vestige of potential it has by the half hour mark. No, instead of being an interesting exploration on trauma and living with guilt smack dab in the middle of a zeitgeist that just so happens to be conveniently obsessed with cults, it's a shallow slog chock-full of characters it refuses to sketch out in anything but strokes so broad they're visible from space.

Including "Hooker," the most interesting character in the movie by a country mile.

Children of the Corn: Runaway is like looking at a good movie through a car's review mirror. There are tiny slivers of quality and structure that you can make out, but you feel like you're constantly moving away from them at high speed. The cinematography is actually decent, giving the town a sun-bleached feel that drains the energy right out of you (on purpose, I might add), but it also sucks every last bit of tension from potential scare scenes. And the acting is pretty good too, but the dialogue is so inane that every second the performers are forced to speak (and there are a lot of those seconds, because this "talkie" trend seems to be here to stay) you'll cringe so hard you'll end up a half an inch shorter by the time credits roll.

There are also some murders that are creatively staged (albeit with a heaping helping of weightless CGI blood), but they're either drawn-out far past the point of comfort or revealed to be one of Ruth's endless, irritating dream sequences.

In scenes so elliptically associated with the plot, you do begin to wonder if you just dreamed them yourself.

Honestly, I think the biggest problem here is the baggage they brought with them from the franchise's first returning screenwriter Joel Soisson. He wrote (and directed) 2011's Children of the Corn: Genesis and does not seemed to have learned a lot of lessons in the meantime about sticking the landing on an interesting premise. Or even sticking the takeoff to begin with. It perhaps makes more sense than Genesis, but it's much more rote and boring in the process, anchoring itself to characters that don't have the weight to keep the movie on course. It just wanders off in any old direction until a rapid-fire succession of reveals at the end that are just more and more confounding.

On top of everything else, Runaway commits that worst of horror movie sins: it's boring. Almost nothing happens in this movie, and while it skates in at just over 80 minutes, it feels easily thirty or forty longer than that. It just thoroughly fails to find a personality, placing too much stake in a wholly charisma-free child villain, using voiceover at intervals too random to feel consistent, and throwing in a boost of stylish craziness at the exact moment you most want to actually just sit down and follow a straightforward plot.

It's just too complacent in its laziness for a film that sets up so much stuff that could actually be compelling. It's all the more frustrating for giving you the ability to snatch brief glimpses of the - if not awesome - at least decently middling movie it could have been. All I can say is, at least we're not ending with the worst Children of the Corn movie, but it's not that steep an uphill hike to get to Runaway from the likes of Revelation or Isaac's Return.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn: Runaway is reasonably well-made, but that only serves to highlight how empty it is.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1032

Reviews In This Series
Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)
Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)
Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)
Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)
Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)
Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)
Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)
Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)
Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)

Corn Hash

Year: 2011

Director: Joel Soisson

Cast: J.J. Banicki, Diane Peterson, Kai Caster

Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

So here we are, at the penultimate chapter in the Children of the Corn saga. This is the first entry of two to actually be made in the decade that I'm writing this, which is certainly bizarre. When I think of the Children of the Corn franchise, I don't exactly think "contemporary filmmaking." Not to imply that I think of Children of the Corn at all beyond the last word of any of these reviews.

I don't and you can't make me.

So, in Children of the Corn: Genesis, nothing in particular is genesis-ed and there's barely any children. And like one scene involving corn. Yet somehow, this is more related to the franchise than Part IV, so we soldier on. The film kicks off after an unrelated prologue about kids running around with sharp objects in Gatlin, Nebraska. Tim (Tim Rock) and Allie (Kelen Coleman), a young married couple expecting a baby, break down in the middle of the California desert. They're forced to stay overnight in the nearby shack of a hermit known as Preacher (Billy Drago, the only recognizable name in the cast, which is saying something) and his Ukrainian wife Helen (Barbara Nedeljakova).

Things didn't seem particularly kosher in the first place, but things prove to not be what they seem when Allie discovers a child locked in the garden shed. When a supernatural force uses telekinesis(?) to trap them in the house until dawn, they are slowly driven apart by their own suspicions and secrets. Sort of. Mostly. And I guess this force wants her child to help create a new cult to worship He Who Walks Behind the Rows? In cornless California? Or maybe it wants a new mom for the kid it already has? Maybe that's it.

Look, past the first thirty minutes the plot is so far beyond the pale of legibility that you're lucky you're getting a second paragraph at all.

Children of the Corn: Genesis makes no goddamn sense, OK? The plot is piled thick with reveals and twists and what have you, but the more they come the more they contradict one another, until you get to the point that twists are being revealed about characters or situations you didn't realize were in the movie in the first place and for which this change of context means absolutely nothing.

And yet, this is the best one since Part V, which probably says more about the franchise than it does about Genesis. But at any rate, even though you've got to control-alt-delete your brain and force quit it midway through, this movie is surprisingly charming and likable. The plot twists don't really work, per se, but they do keep you engrossed all the way up until they dump you on the cold hard ground with absolutely no payoff.

Plus, the filmmaking is certainly competent. It has that very sheeny-shiny slickness that marked low budget studio filmmaking in the early 2010's, and while I wouldn't say it has a style, it certainly has an oppressively dark atmosphere and claustrophobic set design that aid it in many ways. And while there are almost no gore effects to be found outside of the opening prologue (which has some decent corn-based mayhem), the telekinesis effects are organically integrated and feel entirely plausible within this world, save for the biggest setpiece which looks awesome but hedges its budget in a way that's entirely noticeable. But this isn't so for the best setpiece, which I hesitate to spoil except to say that somebody goes flying like they stumbled upon a glitch in Skyrim.

Full disclosure: I've never played Skyrim, but I want to sound cool. Is it working?

But let's get down to brass tacks. This is a horror movie, ostensibly. Is it scary? Mostly the answer is no. There's literally a scene in an outhouse where Allie has to keep stopping her pee stream to listen for a spooky noise she thinks she heard. And one of the biggest sources of tension as we get into the second act is whether or not Tim can screw a camera onto a tripod in time. It's not exactly The Exorcist.

But those are the times when Billy Drago isn't onscreen, because for every second that he is, the film is plunged into a dark unknowable space by his incredible villainous performance. He's giving a vocal and physical performance that drips with unknowable menace (helped along by the fact that his character is literally unknowable, as the script never really figures out who or what he is). Just the way that he stands in relation to Allie makes your skin crawl; he's like an alligator, seemingly lazy and aloof but coiled to strike at any time. In fact, he's giving what I'd probably call the single best performance in the entire series, giving us the only truly great villain since John Franklin in the very first Children of the Corn.

Although it feels disingenuous that an old man is the only source of fear in a franchise literally and explicitly about children being creepy.

It's hard to tell if I recommend this film or not. I wasn't bored for a second, but it's kind of not a movie. It can't fall apart, because nothing was solid to begin with, but it flows ceaselessly with no particular destination in mind and just seems to end as soon as it runs out of money. It doesn't overstay its welcome, and I bear absolutely no ill will toward it, but I don't think I'd send anybody out to see it specifically. It's a movie you need to stumble upon, say, as an oasis in the middle of a particularly challenging movie marathon.

Maybe I'm just addled after the hat trick of Isaac resurrecting himself to shout nonsense at Nancy Allen, some random grandma in an apartment complex, and a remake that is 85% screeching. But hey! I'll take what I can get!

TL;DR: Children of the Corn: Genesis is stupid and it makes no sense, but it's at least competent and watchable compared to some of the other ones I've had to sit through.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1048

Reviews In This Series
Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)
Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)
Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)
Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)
Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)
Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)
Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)
Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)
Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)

Take Me Home, Corntry Roads

Year: 2009

Director: Donald P. Borchers

Cast: David Anders, Kandyse McClure, Daniel Newman

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: TV-14

As seems to happen every time we reach this far into a horror marathon, we've reached a natural stopping point. Children of the Corn: Revelation was so achingly crappy that it put a stake in the franchise's heart, seemingly forever. What's a studio to do with a franchise that has fallen flat on its face after seven increasingly cheap films, the most recent three of which were abominable failures? If your answer was "just find another movie to make," you are not a studio executive. A mere eight years later, they vigorously slammed that reset button like a child's NES on a snow day. Thus was begat Children of the Corn '09, a remake directed by the original film's producer and released on the SyFy channel, a mere 25 years after the original film kicked off this long and winding series.

This picture features one child for every film in the franchise.

In many ways, remaking Children of the Corn was the best idea possible at the time. The only things that anybody remembered about the original film were Isaac and Malachai. A middle-aged Courtney Gains just wasn't gonna do the trick, and you saw what happened last time John Franklin got involved in one of these projects. So why not just recast and see what happens by transplanting the story into a modern context? Oh wait, you mean to tell me that this film is set in 1975, a full decade earlier than even the original film? Well, dammit.

Anyway, this film resurrects Burt (David Anders) and Vicky (Kandyse McClure), the bickering married couple on a road trip across the cornfields of middle America. And when I say "bickering" I mean "hollering at each other at the top of their lungs for the better part of an hour." Not only has this movie brought back the characters we knew and loved, it has added a dash of spice in the form of the original short story's severe misanthropy. Hooray. Anyway, they hit a kid with their car, which brings them to the town of Gatlin, which seems to be empty except for a bunch of bloodthirsty kids dressed like they're running rehearsals for the town's Thanksgiving pageant.

The leader of this cult is Isaac (Preston Bailey), a two-gallon boy in a ten-gallon hat, who communes directly with He Who Walks Behind the Rows. His right-hand man is Malachai (Daniel Newman, and I mean man because he was fully twenty-seven years of age at the time of filming). Bad bing bada boom they try to kill the adults. I won't say whether or not they succeed, but remember that this one is more faithful to the original Stephen King material, so you tell me what you think happens.

John Franklin might not be present, but the orange filters from Isaac's Return couldn't help but stick around.

The thing about remakes is that, while I have my defenses for a handful of them, they usually suck because they are a pale imitation of a movie that was already great. Children of the Corn '84 is far from great, so a remake wasn't actually a terrible idea. And there are definitely things that this incarnation gets right.

For one thing, Donald P. Borchers is a damn sight better as a director than anonymous craftsman Fritz Kiersch. That's a bar so low even Isaac could clear it, and he doesn't do so with what I would call "aplomb," but you can tell he's at least awake behind the camera. I was especially taken with the opening credits sequence (am I reaching for compliments? Maaaaybe), which introduces its characters in voiceover as the camera serenely delivers close-ups of the interior of the car and the items Burt and Vicky have brought with them on their journey. It's a fun, elliptical way to get to know the characters and situation that actually allows for the audience to pay attention and put together the pieces for themselves.

And though nothing else in the film is as gentle or elegant as this (read: "hollering for fifty straight minutes"), there are still moments that sing. Even the completely pointless PTSD war flashback that lets us into Burt's character not even one inch is a visual marvel, swerving between the wicked reality of cornfields filled with kids bearing sharp implements and rice paddies filled with soldiers and gunfire. That he remembers from serving in Nam, because this movie is a period piece for no reason, might I remind you.

The visual effects are also miles better here. Nothing matches the nutsoid splendor of Screaming Mad George's effects from Urban Harvest, but these are definitely some of the more sophisticated gore gags of the franchise, with realistic blood spurting and dribbling to the point of being almost nauseating. At least in the infrequent moments when there is carnage and mayhem rather than road squabbling. But I digress. Again. Visually, this Children of the Corn isn't a pile of shit, which really makes it a franchise high in that regard.

Also I'm pretty sure they're adding an inch to the brim of that hat every time I look away, like a Naked Gun gag.

Two more good things before we dive into the moldy bottom of this corn silo. And in fact, these are two things that I unequivocally love about this movie. First, the children's choir theme that plays over the end credits is a hilarious dubstep remix that's on par with the disco theme from Friday the 13th Part 3D for most misguidedly trendy horror music cue. Second, this movie is not afraid to murder the hell out of a bunch of kids. Hear me out. That shows that the filmmakers were willing to push the envelope in any sort of way, rather than just content themselves with making a middle-of-the-road milquetoast nothing. Mind you that's still what they ended up with, but they tried! It's the thought that counts.

So far the movie I'm describing sounds kind of great. But you didn't have to sit through the entire thing. The acting is uniformly atrocious, featuring the most "3rd grade drama class" performances in a franchise marked by mediocre child performers. The adults hardly fare better, pounding the script's one note so deep into the ground they strike oil. 

Visually, this movie might have the chops to earn its keep as a solid entry in the franchise, but the script is thin as tissue paper, relying entirely on your familiarity with the material to keep it afloat. There's nothing about any dynamic here that is more than the most surface-level retread of the short story. The plot limply bats around these hollow Dixie cups called characters with no rhyme or reason. Plus, we get an awful obligatory sex scene that couldn't possibly be more ill-advised. 

It's certainly a step up from the last couple legs of this marathon, but it exemplifies a lot of the worst impulses of horror remakes: everything is the same, only bigger and shriller and more unbearable.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn is a remake that doesn't violate the sanctity of the original, but it also doesn't really offer anything worth seeing.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1223
Reviews In This Series
Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)
Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)
Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)
Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)
Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)
Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)
Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)
Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)
Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)

Corn This Way

Year: 2001

Director: Guy Magar

Cast: Claudette Mink, Kyle Cassie, Michael Ironside 

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I'm starting to think that the period of me liking the Children of the Corn movies, which lasted much longer than anyone could have possibly anticipated or hoped for, is well and truly over. The general response I get when I tell people I've set out to watch all ten of these movies is "ugh, why?" and now at part seven, "ugh, why?" is unfortunately kind of becoming my mantra. 

My face as the credits have rolled on the past two movies.

Children of the Corn: Revelation is one of those ever-unpopular Dimension cash-in sequels where they presumably took a script for some unproduced movie, spruced it up with some corn and a passing mention to He Who Walks Behind the Rows, and passed it off as an entry in a franchise nobody had any reason to care about anyway. Hooray!

So here we have Jamie (Claudette Mink), a young woman with so little inner life that even the corn husks are more engaging presences. She has arrived at the Hampton Arms condominium in Omaha to search for her missing grandmother. The building was recently condemned, and for good reason. It's a rotting mess filled with "eccentric" characters who are also rotting messes. 

Her most friendly and likable new neighbor is Tiffany (Crystal Lowe of Final Destination 3), the stripper whose character trait is "takes off her shirt later." But we also have Jerry (Troy Yorke), the stoner building manager; a hilariously awful paraplegic who rolls around in his wheelchair cursing at the top of his lungs and is billed as Cranky Man (John Destry); and the truly mystifying Stan (Michael Rogers), who is a mostly shirtless paranoiac and is illegally growing tomatoes in the basement for unexplained reasons. Not that I asked.

While Jamie enlists the help of local detective Armbrister (Kyle Cassie) to dig up dirt on her grandma, she keeps seeing creepy blonde children wander around the complex and as the residents begin to be murdered one by one after receiving corn husk wreaths on their doors, she... well, she doesn't really notice for a very long time, but it might just be connected to her grandmother's disappearance. Spoiler alert: It is.

Also Michael Ironside is in approximately 22.3 seconds of the film as a priest who does exactly nothing. Honestly, I'd take Karen Allen doing nothing any day, because at least her hair was great.

It's really difficult to pinpoint what exactly is the worst thing about Revelation (and oh, how telling it is that they've finally stopped numbering these movies), but I think I'd like to start with Jamie. Her complete lack of interiority is endemic to every aspect of the film. We know nothing about where she has come from, what she did or how she lived before this moment where we get to watch her be creeped out by ten-year-olds with bags under their eyes. Everyone in the movie is like this, from the lazily archetypical boy preacher Abel (Sean Smith) to the detective who is so weakly positioned as a love interest that you might be mistaken for thinking he's just an extra. It's damning that the character who gets the most backstory is Tiffany, who gets two scenes and one of them is a bubble bath where she gets murdered by stalks of corn.

The whole movie is just empty, wandering aimlessly through a mystery that solves itself via a dream sequence before the halfway mark and then wandering aimlessly through a spate of murders that feature not one wisp of the fun special effects that have marked at least one scene in every previous entry (most deaths involve dummies falling from high places, and the aforementioned Tiffany death - which is by far the most interesting - is much too dark and poorly edited to have any sense of what's actually happening). It doesn't even pull in very many markers of the mythology of the previous films, not that any of these movies have been particularly consistent or good about that. But any link to those entries that I kinda sorta occasionally liked would have been more satisfying than this unmoored wreck that drifts off into infinity for 82 minutes.

At the very very infinitesimally least, they remembered that these kids MUST have weird hats.

There are only two reasons that I haven't consigned this movie to the purgatory of evacuating every single detail of it from my brain immediately, much like I have done with the previous entry Isaac's Return. First, there are a couple non sequitur gags that would have been satisfying in a movie that took its "killer kid" concept to a campy fun extreme (a game of pattycake with a severed hand, and a girl playing hopscotch on a Pentagram). Second, there at least is an attempt at atmosphere here. The crumbling apartment complex is in all honesty not a bad setting to have around, and the flashing green light in the emergency stairwell gives it a bit of character that shows at least one person was attempting to do something with this movie.

Mind you, that's the only attempt at style that actually succeeds in any way. Two late sequences where characters discover a herd of evil children in the hallway as presented via alternately a swim fisheye lens and night vision goggles cut incessantly back and forth and drill their attempt at spooky imagery so far into your skull that it shoots right out the back.

And as much as the effects have been dodgy in this franchise from the beginning, nobody should have told this team about CGI. We're treated to a million useless shots of CGI corn rising from the ground that have zero weight or physicality and could have just used actual corn. It's corn! It's not expensive! 

It's ironic that so little effort was put into the movie, because it takes such a Herculean effort to sit through the entire thing without drifting right to sleep. If you see this movie in your local Walmart discount barrel, walk the other way immediately and don't look back.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn: Revelation is not as much of an abomination as the previous entry, but that's the only thing keeping it going.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1064

Reviews In This Series

Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)

Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)

Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)

Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)

Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)

Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)

Yellow Fever

Year: 1999

Director: Kari Skogland

Cast: Natalie Ramsey, Gary Bullock, Alix Koromzay 

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Alright, alright. I know I was asking for too much by hoping that Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return would be good. But against all odds I've been having a good time with these movies, including the objectively crappy previous entry Fields of Terror. But I maintain that John Franklin was one of the few shreds of a justification for people remembering the original film with any sort of fondness. And this one was even directed by a woman, only the second time in Popcorn Culture franchise marathon history that this has happened (Rachel Talalay scored a more prominent entry with Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare).

I wasn't wrong to hope, was I?

Let me answer that by telling you that this is the most dynamic shot I could find from the film.

In Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return, we follow Hannah Martin (Natalie Ramsey) as she arrives in Gatlin, Nebraska several days before her 19th birthday, which also happens to be Halloween. It's the town where she was born, but she was adopted and kept away from it her entire life. She has come to seek her birth mother, but her presence also brings the spark that resurrects former child preacher Isaac (John Franklin, who also co-wrote this film), who has been in a coma for 19 years.

The town now seems populated exclusively by people too old to be there, a couple grown up children of the corn - including Rachel (Nancy Allen, the sole famous face slumming it in this one), the child priestess who provides the jump scare at the end of the first film - and a bunch of teen boys, one of whom is the firstborn child of the children, who Isaac wants to mate with Hannah and birth a master race of children, who presumably will rise up and destroy him and everyone else, because that's how this works, right?

It's a whole thing, I don't pretend to know the inner workings of He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

The fact that I could barely get through the plot synopsis without tripping over myself and breaking a leg should give you some insight into how deeply incomprehensible this entire experience was. Not a lick of it makes sense, down to the timeline and everyone's relative ages (one teen mentions his genetic line can be traced all the way back to Isaac, which shouldn't be too hard, considering they're exactly one generation apart). When Texas Chainsaw 3D has a more legible timeline, you've got a serious problem.

Plus, this film attempts to have a bunch of creepy children scuttling around in the background, even though the cult has clearly gone dormant so they're not murderous or even especially rude. The entire film is replete with decision-making like this that values what might be coolest [sic] in the moment, and thinks about the big picture so infrequently that it shrinks into microscopic dust.

It's an illegible mash of things I wouldn't even deign to call clichés because it's stuff nobody has ever included or would want to include in a horror film, like a random rap song during a suicide scene or a killer reveal where the character goes full Robin Williams in Aladdin. And anything that might have even been a little scary is constantly deflated by Ramsey, whose performance would seem to indicate that she's mildly irritated by everything that's happening, as if it were a mosquito bite, or a fridge that doesn't have her favorite flavor of La Croix.

"Ugh, this dead body is really gonna interfere with my brunch."

And as much as the film is stuffed with a billion tiny details that don't make sense, the plot moves like tar being blown through a twenty-foot hose. The Children of the Corn franchise has only ever had an on-and-off relationship with the slasher genre, but there are a paltry handful of infrequent kills here, which only start to happen 40 minutes into an 82 minute movie. 

Fortunately, one of those kills is worthy of the impressive effects that mark at least a couple scenes in all of these sequels. A young woman gets her face split open with a scythe in an effect that's terrifyingly brutal and in-your-face. It's like Lucio Fulci stepped in to direct thirty seconds of this otherwise Z-grade paranormal flick. But that's not to say the director is really the problem here. Skogland does land some attempts at atmosphere that thwarted the previous film's director, including a quite pretty shot from beneath the bars of an EEG machine that starts to come to life, or a Raimi-esque moment of an imaginary body spraying blood all over Hannah from a tree.

Although I must say, whoever decided that the entire film needed to be shot through an orange filter should have to write a personal letter of apology to every single person who has ever sat down to watch this film. I have a photosensitivity and use a blue-light-blocking program called Flux on my computer that turns the screen orange to help reduce eye strain, and I was halfway through checking to make sure that function was turned off when I realized my computer wasn't even in the room because I was watching this movie on DVD. It's just that orange.

This isn't a student film set in the Old West, as far as I can tell. What's even happening here?

Other than the head-splitting scene, I have exactly one good thing to say about Children of the Corn 666: There's a scene where two men kiss. It's completely unjustified by anything set up in the script [sic] or the characters [sic], but I'll take whatever representation I can get in my 90's horror cinema.

OK OK, and there are a couple scenes that are sort of creepy completely by accident, because the way the dialogue completely fails to match what's happening onscreen is a little off-putting and the aggressively liberal application of slow motion makes you feel trapped. So that's nice, I guess?

Look, I always celebrate women who managed to fight through the trenches of 80's and 90's horrordom to earn such a prominent director's spot, and I'm so glad Skogland has gotten herself a thriving TV career thanks to this opportunity, but I'm not progressive enough to pretend I liked this movie, nor recommend that anyone ever turn their eyes toward even a frame of its unholy existence. OK, maybe the gay kiss scene, but that's it! Promise me that.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return has exactly two scenes that are watchable, let alone comprehensible.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1129

Reviews In This Series

Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)

Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)
Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)
Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)
Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)
Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)

Nothing's Fine, I'm Corn

Year: 1998

Director: Ethan Wiley

Cast: Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Eva Mendes

Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I always knew we'd hit the quality valley at some point in our Children of the Corn marathon. For a franchise with only one and a half entries that got released theatrically, something had to give eventually. The only surprising thing about the fact that it finally happened is how long it took to get here and how short the fall was. Granted, no Corn movie is, like, a masterpiece, but the dip from "surprisingly watchable" to "mostly watchable" isn't as steep as I've been fearing.

I'm just really scared that the longer we wait, the more it's gonna sting when the other shoe finally drops.

In Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, after we see two different couples murdered by possessed child Ezeekial [sic] (Adam Wylie of Child's Play 2) and his gang of corn kids, a group of four college  kids (although one of them is explicitly 17, so she must be one of those Young Sheldons) on a road trip to spread their dead friend's ashes break down in the middle of a corn field just outside of the town of Divinity Falls (lol geddit?). This is the most blatant slasher movie setup we've seen from any of these movies, so the only shocking thing about this structure is how very very long it takes for the murders to kick in after this.

Luckily, we do get our share of shocking plot twists along the way involving the main girl Allison (Stacy Galina), who realizes that her long lost younger brother may have been inducted into the cult of children who worship He Who Walks Behind the Rows (he's back, by the way!) at a local farm run by Luke Enright (David Carradine, who sits down for this entire performance). The other kids have their own sort of drama, but we all know they're just here for body count: we have Greg (Alexis Arquette, rocking a Jamie Kennedy look pre-transition), the nerdy annoying guy whose presence in this group can probably be attributed to the fact that he owns a car; Tyrus (Greg Vaughan), the requisite horndog asshole; and Kir (Eva Mendes, the third recognizable name in the credits, and by far the famous at the time of writing), the girlfriend of the deceased who's a shallow Clueless-esque princess with a rambling pile of hair that you just long to get lost in.

I desperately hope that she and Ryan Gosling have gotten drunk and watched this movie together.

Probably the most interesting thing about Fields of Terror is just how un-interesting it is. This was a slasher film released in 1998, two years after Scream done changed the game and made it a requirement for the genre to be laden with in-jokes and meta humor. This is the year that gave us Bride of Chucky, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween: H20, and Urban Legend, for crying out loud, and this franchise has the audacity to give us a straightforward rural breakdown slasher as if we were still deep in the trenches of 1986. There's something almost wholesome and charming about how unpretentious and standard this whole concept is. Almost.

But let's not forget that the bog-standard DTV slasher flick is exactly my comfort zone, so I'm not pretending that a movie being a mediocre entry in the subgenre brings me anything but joy. I think it's pretty objectively the worst film in the Corn franchise thus far, but it operates at a low simmer that renders it at least mildly entertaining for the bulk of its run time. It doesn't hurt that the cast still features a surprising cadre of reasonably famous actors (Kane Hodder also has a cameo as a bartender in town). Nobody here is saving the movie like Karen Black or Naomi Watts in the previous one, but the sheer act of recognizing a face in one of these movies is satisfying in its own way.

And even the faces you don't recognize are VERY pretty.

And at the very (very) least, director Ethan Wiley (whose previous feature was the infamously titled House II: The Second Story)  is trying his best to spice up the proceedings. Sometimes this means some harsh blue lighting intercut with lightning flashes that creates a pretty sinister mood in an early murder sequence. Sometimes this means turning the camera sideways for no apparent reason other than to have the camera be sideways. It's on and off, but the first shot (a rather elegant slow motion image of a rose being plucked from a corn field) is a pretty solid exemplar of what Wiley is going for an intermittently achieves.

Unfortunately, while no Children of the Corn has been bursting at the seams with cash, the budget seems to have truly strangled this one. There is exactly one showstopping effects sequence that recalls the terrific work accomplished in Urban Harvest, but the way it's shot and edited is too muddy and garbled to really make it worth the effort, and nothing else in terms of effects or kills is especially memorable. There is a silly moment involving dumping a severed foot into a body bag that's fun, I suppose. It's just not really bringing it in terms of the kills, which are oh-so important to the slasher format and oh-so absent from the larger part of this movie.

And it's far too much to ask this film to be scary in the least, but I will say that Adam Wylie easily plays the best child cult leader since John Franklin's Isaac four long movies ago. He doesn't quite manage "creepy," but the flinty command in his voice makes the power he holds over the other kids (especially those older and taller than him) completely believable. It's a potent performance without much nuance, but it's certainly the best in the film, and we all need something to latch onto in a movie like this where creepy subplots constantly crop up and slither away from reach before they can resolve themselves (there's literally a line about a bungee jumping accident maybe being an elaborate suicide that is completely forgotten, when the whole movie could have just been about that).

It's certainly the most frustrating and least appealing of these movies, but a meat-and-potatoes supernatural slasher sequel at least fills you up. I won't be revisiting this one for any reason other than to gaze in wonder at Eva Mendes' hair, but I'm not upset that I've seen it, which is more than I can say for a lot of films in, say, that Amityville marathon from last year.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror is a mediocre direct-to-video effort, but it certainly has its share of corny charms.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1151
Reviews In This Series
Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)
Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)
Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)
Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)
Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)
Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)
Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)
Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)
Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)

Corntagion

Year: 1996

Director: Greg Spence

Cast: Naomi Watts, Jamie Renée Smith, Karen Black 

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I've already admitted to the mostly guilty pleasure of enjoying the first three Children of the Corn movies on some level or other, but I saw no way that trend could possibly continue. Urban Harvest was the franchise's first dip into direct-to-video sequeldom, and the quality threshold is very shallow once you hit that point. Well, astonishingly we don't seem to have reached that yet. I would please like everyone to remember that we grade these things on a curve before they peep at the numerical score down below, but Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering is maybe my favorite entry in the franchise so far?

I don't even know anymore.

Grand Island, Nebraska. Ever heard of it? I don't imagine you would have, because it's never been mentioned in the franchise before. In fact, nothing that's been mentioned in the franchise before will be present here, so hold onto your butts. Except corn. There's some corn, I guess, but not as much as seems necessary. Anyway, it turns out that The Gathering is only a Children of the Corn movie by name and not really by any tether to a single scrap of the mythology of the first three films. As someone who has been pretty inoculated against horror sequels lying about what they are (we've gotten a Halloween without Michael Myers, a Silent Night, Deadly Night sequel that forgets about being a slasher and barely mentions Christmas, two Exorcist prequels that are literally the exact same movie... I could go on), this didn't bother me a tremendous amount, but buyer beware.

What The Gathering is actually about is a young med student named Grace Rhodes (Naomi Watts, still paying her dues at the beginning of her career) returning to her hometown in order to care for her agoraphobic mother June (Karen Black, who was in the opposite end of her career, the only other valid reason to appear in a Children of the Corn sequel) and her two much younger siblings Margaret (Jamie Renée Smith) and James (Mark Salling, no comment).

She returns to her old job helping out the town's kindly physician Doc Larson (William Windom) in the place of her best friend Mary Ann (Samaria Graham), who has now become the local school nurse. Unfortunately, this coincides with the resurrection of charismatic youth preacher Josiah (Brandon Kleyla), whose soul has been released from its eternal resting place - a well (Naomi Watts must have nightmares about wells between this and The Ring). Josiah channels evil spirits to spread a strange disease around all the children in town, slowly possessing their souls with the spirits of dead children from the town's past and kill the parents and something something, Satan is probably involved at some point. He Who Walks Behind the Rows is conspicuously absent.

He must have asked for a pay raise or something.

This may not be a Children of the Corn movie, but what it is is an outbreak thriller crossbred with a town-with-a-secret thriller, and both of those are things I like very much. As a card-carrying hypochondriac, a story about a doctor dealing with a mysterious flare-up of a widespread, powerful disease is something that gets under my skin, even if I already know that the source of said disease is some dumb kid in a hat he stole off a Brooklyn gentrifier. 

In fact, the scariest scene in the entire franchise so far (and there are at least one or two strong contenders for that title, truth be told) has to be the scene that cross-cuts across a dozen homes as all the children across town simultaneously have their fevers rise perilously high, calling out to their parents in woozy anguish. The tension ratchets up even higher than their temperatures as Naomi Watts and various adults around town rush to fill baths with ice and protect the young from something deadly and inexplicable. This sequence also ends with a bit of wirework straight out of The Exorcist (shout-out to that previous October marathon!) that could have been silly but struck my already weakened nerves in just the right way.

There's actually quite a bit of Exorcist-y paranormal mayhem going on around the outskirts of this movie, and the slow development of the mystery surrounding Josiah and who exactly is inhabiting the bodies of these kids is doled out carefully, even if it doesn't reach an entirely satisfying conclusion (the movie reverts to dumb supernatural horror in the third act, when Naomi Watts exploits the ghost's obvious weakness like it's a video game boss). The only place where the horror doesn't quite land is in Josiah himself, who is just as milquetoast as every faux-Isaac the franchise has attempted to position as antagonist.

The other kids get their moments to be creepy one and all, though. Margaret turns from sweet to chilling on a dime, the twins who are the most heavily featured of the townsfolk are clearly twisted, and the gaggle of too-pale tots that watch various deaths cut a creepy silhouette. And shockingly, those deaths are just as plumb fun as every sequel has been so far. We're already starting to see a bit of wear and tear with some perfunctory tempera paint blood at points, but the two scythe impalations are impressive (one in the chest and one in the f**king face in the best effects setpiece of the movie).

I couldn't find any screengrabs of the kills, so here are them creepy twins I mentioned.

And for once in this franchise, the non-horror elements are actually almost kind of interesting. Again, the third act kind of obliterates any nuance (as happens all too often in these types of movies), but there's a bit of a family drama playing out between Grace and her mother that's actually - dare I say it - compelling to watch. It's almost entirely interesting because the people playing these roles are Naomi Watts and Karen Black, certainly two of the best actors to ever stoop to the level of a Corn movie, but I'll take what I can get.

The small town vibe of this film is actually quite nice as well, capturing the essence of the quiet rural life in a charming, warm-hearted way before it all goes to seed (if you'll allow a truly execrable corn pun). Of course, nevertheless the silly 90's DTV horror elements will run rampant, as they are wont to do: there is a truly mystifying amount of slow motion at play here, and a death involving a gurney is laugh-out-loud ridiculous. But all in all, The Gathering is a truly great thing for what it is, going above and beyond the call of duty in a way that I never would have dreamed of after a thousand peyote trips.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering has nothing to do with the franchise at large, but is a remarkably creepy small town tale in its own right.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1187
Reviews In This Series
Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)
Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)
Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)
Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)
Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)
Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)
Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)
Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)
Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)