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)

The Shape Of Things To Come

Year: 2018

Director: David Gordon Green

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I've already done some revisiting of previous franchise marathon entries this October, so it's only appropriate that the fun should continue with an actual movie in theaters! What a treat! We haven't seen good ole Michael Myers on this blog since we concluded our marathon with Rob Zombie's Halloween II a year late in 2016 because I could not convince myself to watch that one. And we haven't seen that pale blank face in theaters since the very same film when it was released in 2009, almost a full decade ago.

Well, here we are at a new entry that has already made so much money I wouldn't be surprised if the sequel is being rushed into theaters next weekend. That is unequivocally good, because if there's one thing I love it's a sprawling horror franchise. But as for the movie itself? Well, let's take a look.

At the very least, I'm glad Michael and Laurie are getting in on the ABBA craze.

It's Halloween, 2018. It's the only Halloween that matters other than the one back in 1978, when Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) was stalked by masked murderer Michael Myers (Nick Castle) while she and her friends were babysitting. Nothing else happened in between then and now, we promise.

Laurie Strode is now a reclusive shut-in at her survivalist compound in the sticks of Haddonfield, IL. Her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) has gone ahead and had her own daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak). But having a teenage child in Haddonfield is never a good idea, because Michael escapes imprisonment while being transferred to a different facility (which he's already done twice before, once in this very timeline) and immediately begins stalking around town in his good ol' Shatner mask mowing down as many passersby as he can in the process.

Laurie, Karen, the cops, and Michael's new caretaker Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) run around Haddonfield in a state of general distress while Michael wreaks as much havoc as one might expect after being cooped up for so many years.

Oh, how we've missed the big lug.

So, this is the third film in forty years to be titled Halloween. Those are some big shoes to fill, but at least the presence of Rob Zombie's remake means that it could never be the worst one. Unfortunately, this entry barely rises to the middle of the franchise ranking at large.

Halloween has certain good ideas it's working with, but it doesn't seem to have found its own personality. It's actually a lot like Halloween H20, which is now as old as the original Halloween was when it was released: We finally have Jamie Lee Curtis back to play one of her most iconic roles, but this is still a Halloween movie and we need a slate of nubile teens to be offed in the background while she does her thing. H20 very clearly had two different plot threads like this, but it wove them together with reasonable success and cemented the whole thing with a heavy dose of Kevin Williamson snark. 

In Halloween, unfortunately, the threads just unravel before your eyes. The movie can barely maintain its focus on Allyson, let alone her slate of friends, who exist in disjointed scene fragments usually in pairs but never all together. This slasher movie is really missing a unifying element, and the Halloween dance setpiece they feature early on completely fails to be that. The cast splinters off into a series of stalker vignettes which don't tie together at all, or really make much sense as to how Michael managed to get himself between them. Instead of making a mosaic, these scenes just seem like a bunch of shattered glass littered on the ground at random.

Pictured: The screenwriting process.

Even more unfortunately, none of these fragments are pulled together under a unifyied tone. We get some action hero set pieces with random shards of comic relief sprinkled in (these tend to work, actually, thanks to David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride's familiarity with comedy filmmaking, though one horny teen character in particular gets a monologue that I think is supposed to be funny but it completely odious and made me want him to die all the more), and it occasionally cuts to horror sequences of the most brutal and unrelenting variety.

To that end, I will say that this is certainly the goriest Halloween film ever made, and a lot of the kills are incredibly well-realized. As a bit of a gorehound myself, it was nice to see Michael making a play to join the big boys of gruesome slasher killing (usually he's a bit of a bore, going with a couple swipes of the kitchen knife and not much else), but the murders here seem unusually mean-spirited and difficult to watch. Slasher films are supposed to be fun, especially when the other scenes are as silly or high-octane as they are attempting to be. Halloween is kind of miserable at times, making choices that do up the full-tilt horror, but feel more in tune with Rob Zombie's take on the material. Which I hardly expect anyone was actually asking for.

A la carte, though, I can accept the gore for being a very good example of the form. And John Carpenter's new original score is full of bangers, especially the droning alarm bell of his most frequently used new theme. And I'll never complain when Jamie Lee Curtis or Judy Greer are onscreen, even though the former is stuck in a retread of a character she already pulled off twenty years ago in H20. This is the rare example of a horror movie that actually gets better as it goes along, as it pares down its cast so we can focus on three generations of Strode women, all well-performed, and all kicking ass, fighting for their lives in solidarity with one another. 

And wearing wigs like the dickens.

If the whole movie was just a home invasion with the three of them squaring off against Michael Myers, it might have been the best in the entire franchise, including the first. Unfortunately, there is far too much fat on this one, and the filmmakers - especially in the first act - seem focused on delivering scenes that are quite self-evidently shaky ideas, like tremendously misguided pre-credits sequence. 

It's one I'll almost certainly visit again at some point and re-evaluate, unlike the previous two modern entries in the franchise, but there are a lot of other ones I'd prioritize for a rewatch over it. I will be first in line for any and all sequels that Halloween spawns (and it certainly will, if that record breaking box office weekend has anything to say about it), because I think there's a good movie in there, or even a lot of good movies. This one just doesn't happen to quite hit the nail on the head, and that's fine. Almost is better than nothing, and "nothing" is what we've gotten for too long.

TL;DR: Halloween is a middling entry in the franchise with many decent highs and some tremendous lows.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1211

Reviews In This Series

Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1988)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)