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)

Popcorn Kernels: Aw, Screw It (Again)

I always try to give full-length reviews to current movies, because I assume they’re the ones readers will be most invested in. But every December I race to catch up on the flicks I missed during the year and my backlog gets clogged like a yeti’s shower drain. So please forgive me as I knock out a couple of mini reviews for 2016 titles I don’t have particularly strong feelings for and came out long enough ago that I don’t feel guilty about cutting them short.

Demolition

Year: 2016

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A man loses his wife in a car accident, so he starts to take apart everything in his life to figure out what he needs to be happy. It makes sense in the movie, I promise. Sort of.

Imagine, if you will, that the kid from Donnie Darko grew up and got an actual job and a wife. There, you’re about halfway to the anthropomorphic pretention that is Jake Gyllenhaal in Demolition.

Demolition tries so hard to be an Important movie abut grief, life, and truth that it forgets to craft characters who aren’t one-note assholes. It’s like the folks from jackass accidentally stumbled into a Terrence Malick film. Gyllenhaal does a fine job even though his character is one centimeter away from going full American Psycho and the movie doesn’t seem to realize it. Then he hangs out with a terrible woman who threatens to be a love interest until he meets her terrible son and she ceases to exist.

Demolition is almost episodic in its carelessness, forgetting about what came before in pursuit of higher and higher melodrama. But it drowns itself in overwrought narration and a mise-en-scene that shrieks to be noticed with obvious lighting shifts and pointed, almost huffy framing. This is a movie that frequently cuts to slow motion shots of a beach for no reason before it pulls another card out of its Cliché Plot Devices deck.

It’s not terribly made. It’s just frustrating to sit through; a startlingly empty drama that gives the impression that it might be deep. Looking through my notes, I already can’t remember half of what I wrote down because the movie slips through your fingers like uninspired sand. When the most interesting thing in your movie is watching as Jake Gyllenhaal slowly grows a beard, maybe you’re not destined for the Oscar you’re so desperately making a bid for.

Rating: 4/10

Mascots

Year: 2016

Director: Christopher Guest

Cast: Zach Woods, Sarah Baker, Parker Posey

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Various mascots compete to win first prize. One wins.

Christopher Guest is a very funny filmmaker. His ensemble improv comedy films are delightful treasures packed to the brim with genuine talents, but unfortunately he hasn’t made one since 2006. Now, ten years later, that has changed with the Netflix exclusive Mascots. But maybe there was a reason for this decade-long radio silence. If Mascots is any indication, the format has gone stale.

Maybe this is because the comedy genre has shifted so much, folding improvisation into more and more run-of-the-mill movies thanks to the influence of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig. It’s no longer a fresh, exciting style but rather something normalized, almost mundane. Or maybe we just don’t have much need for the slower-paced naturalism of Guest’s filmography that allows his characters to breathe. Or maybe, like all brilliant filmmakers, he just produced a dud, a one-time embarrassment to be swept under the rug as we move on.

Mascots is overstuffed with characters and understuffed with plot. Observe.

The plot: Various mascots compete to win first prize. One wins.

The characters: Unhappily married mascot duo Mike (Zach Woods) and Mindy Murray (Sarah Baker) – take my “take my wife” jokes… Please!; Owen Golly Jr. (Tom Bennett), a British mascot who feels pressured by his father to carry on the family legacy; Cindi Babineaux (Parker Posey), a possibly incestuous crypto-lesbian who performs interpretive dance pieces while dressed as an armadillo; Tommy “Zook” Zucarello (Chris O’Dowd), an Irish-Canadian ice hockey bad boy; and Phil Mayhew (Christopher Moynihan), who plays a mascot plumber. And that’s not even scratching the surface what with the hangers-on, family members, judges, TV executives, and so on that flesh out this hideous, bulging pustule of a cast.

These are very funny actors and thus they produce a handful of funny scenes, but that’s just not enough. There’s a severe lack of focus in this narrative, and when the jokes are mostly in the vein of the tired (nay, exhausted) sitcommy trope of “marriage sucks” or the overdone “stay in the family business” plot line, there’s not a lot to lean on when the movie does touch down on one subject for more than a couple seconds at a time.

Then, for the final half hour, Mascots throws all pretense of plot away for an extended sequence of mascot performances. Some are downright hilarious but by the halfway point of this grueling segment, the movie becomes just as banal as the competition it’s supposed to be skewering. In the end, it’s just difficult to tell why they expected anyone to care.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 878

Popcorn Kernels: Family Movie Night

In which we explore mini-reviews of movies my parents chose for me to watch.

Casablanca

Year: 1942

Director: Michael Curtiz

Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A tavern owner in Morocco discovers that his ex-love has arrived in town with her husband and he has the means to help them escape, should he choose to let her go.

Man, I don’t even wanna touch this one. Casablanca is such a minted classic, even by regular people who think Citizen Kane is boring, that I was nervous about how I would receive it when I finally buckled down and watched it for the first time. And I have a notoriously cold heart when it comes to romance films. It might just be the fact that there tends to be a gulf between me and onscreen couples in terms of both sexuality and approach (if you stand outside my window in the middle of the night with a boom box, I will throw things at you until you go away because I need my sleep, dammit), but love movies need to clear a high bar before they even have a chance of touching my icy heart.

Casablanca almost gets there. The romance thrums and thrives in the chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, but it’s far more present in the performance than its actualization. In their interplay, you get a perfect sense of a past Great love gone dark, but when they actually show flashback scenes of this supposed Great Love, frankly I’m not convinced. Perhaps it’s the toothless, Code-neutered interaction that dampens their physical attraction or the rather bland staging of their France apartment, but this romance only flourishes wen it’s dead.

But beyond that, Casablanca is, obviously, fantastic. Boasting a surprisingly funny script for a film – especially a drama – of its vintage, it’s a very layered piece that combines a patriotic wartime morality play with one man’s romantic struggles, played out over the various dives and skeevy locales of the border town Casablanca. It drops iconic lines like Liza Minnelli sheds boa feathers, which is even more remarkable considering that it was just a cookie cutter studio picture with a script being constantly rewritten as they shot it.

It’s incessantly remarkable how well this film works, and especially how well it still holds up today. Its dynamic lighting scheme forgives even its most ludicrously stagey setpieces, and the actors imbue their characters with personalities that stretch far beyond the scope of the screen. I’m going to leave it at that, because nobody needs another film blogger yammering about Casablanca, but I’m definitely glad I watched it.

Rating: 8/10

Unfaithfully Yours

Year: 1984

Director: Howard Zieff

Cast: Dudley Moore, Nastassja Kinski, Armand Assante 

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

When a famous conductor suspects his much-younger wife of cheating, he hatches a plot to murder her and her supposed lover that goes wackily awry.

The 80’s were a weird time for comedy movies. Despite an abundance of classic teen movies and high concept comic gems, there was also a massive vein of throwaway flicks to beef up video store shelves. One of these is Unfaithfully Yours, which takes a sheaf of fairly well-respected actors and applies them to a sitcom premise stretched to an unfathomable length. While Unfaithfully Yours could have been a good Halloween episode of Three’s Company, the endless padding it requires to reach feature length makes the tone of the dark comedy go haywire.

This is a movie that couldn’t be made today, at least to its exact dimensions. It leans so heavily on chauvinism and misogyny to drive its main character’s motivations that hopefully anybody in 2016 would see right through Dudley Moore like they have X-ray eyes to find the spiteful goblin he really is. It is massively unpleasant to spend time with this character, who is willing to straight-up exterminate his wife over a series of misunderstandings. This type of storyline could be played for laughs if the tone was managed properly, as it is in the opening monologue of the film, but the script seems unwilling to admit that its protagonist is a genuinely awful person.

Instead of harnessing It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s type of misanthropic comedy, Unfaithfully Yours takes a stab at Two and a Half Men by way of Alfred Hitchcock. Dudley Moore does a fine job of drawing physical humor from his character’s incompetence, but there’s only so much time I can spend with him before the film’s cheery attitude drives me to madness.

This scenario that has already run long endlessly unspools with an extended dream sequences that is then slavishly repeated in “reality.” It’s a tiresome tactic, but the really frustrating thing is that Unfaithfully Yours could have been truly great if it was a little less hammy and tipped more toward the darker, Death Becomes Her side of things.

Rating: 5/10

While We're Young

Year: 2014

Director: Noah Baumbach

Cast: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver 

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A bored middle-aged couple befriends a young hipster couple who give them a new lease on life, but not everything is as happy as it seems.

Don’t you just love comedy movies that don’t really have any jokes? Aren’t they just the best? Noah Baumbach certainly seems to think so. I suppose you might call While We’re Young a “dramedy,” but the drama half is so navel-gazey and the comedy half appears so infrequently that it’s just a “…” 

A too-obvious attempt at satirizing aging dreamers too afraid to commit to their goals and the self-conscious hipness of youth culture, While We’re Young undermines itself by constantly pointing out what it’s doing. Whether it’s a pointed, inauthentic echo plastered over a key dramatic line that made me laugh out loud or the endless epigraph that opens the film using practically an entire scene from a play (this also showcases Baumbach’s lack of control over his visuals), While We’re Young is so exuberantly excited to share its trite ideas that it smothers them.

It’s a shame, because when While We’re Young is funny, it can be damn hilarious. A potential investor played by Ryan Serhant is one of the best broad comedy characters in years, with the snappy line deliveries of a young man with too much confidence and too few brain cells. A lot of side characters and little moments shine here, at least justifying the “-edy” ahlf of the portmanteau after much effort. The most consistent comic element is probably Adam Driver, whose performance precisely captures the physicality of a twee, hopelessly pretentious hipster douche. Maybe the character isn’t too far form his wheelhouse, but it’s a genius bit of over-the-top nonverbal acting that goes a long way.

But other than that, While Were Young is a bit of a dud. Stiller and Watts, as the older couple, are appropriately bristly, but nobody outside of Driver and Serhant is doing standout work here. The nuggets of comedy buried in the film make slogging through the drama worth it, but I’ll be happy if I never even have to think about watching this film again.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1211