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)

Cardboard Science: The Metamorphosis

Now, we couldn't just let an October go by without our annual crossover event between Popcorn Culture's Census Bloodbath and Kinemalogue's Cardboard Science. My good internet friend Hunter Allen has assigned me three more 50's sci-fi flicks and you should head over there later this month to catch his thoughts on my three 80's slasher picks. All three of his films this time around hail from the grand year of 1958, but we'll be starting with the one that's probably the most famous, thanks to David Cronenberg's body horror remake from three decades later.

Year: 1958
Director: Kurt Neumann
Cast: David Hedison, Patricia Owens, Vincent Price
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

Cardboard Science is a project that really takes me out of my comfort zone. I'm not one to shy away from older films or different genres, but the bulk of my cinema knowledge comes from the 1970's to now, and doesn't really involve science fiction the way that it probably should. But that's why it's important to have friends with different interests from yourself, because it's so important to know where the things that you like came from, and The Fly really gave us a lot more than I would have expected.

It really tested the capacity of human facial expressions, as well.

The Fly begins with a terrible crime being committed in a Montreal factory. Andre Delambre (David Hedison, probably best known as James Bond bestie Felix Leiter) has been crushed to death in an industrial press and his wife Helene (Patricia Owens) freely admits to being the one responsible. Andre's brother François (Vincent Price) begins working with the police to figure out what happened to this poor couple, eventually drawing a lengthy confession from Helene that seems quite impossible.

In a lengthy flashback, we see Andre's attempts to perfect a teleportation machine in his basement and Helene's reactions to his untoward obsession. One day, when a housefly gets into the teleportation tube, Andre reaps what he has sown with his hubris and finds that his cells have been mixed up with that of the fly. Helene and her son Phillipe (Charles Herbert) must attempt to find the fly with his human cells, the only shot at getting the proper parts back in order.

I was trying to avoid too many spoilers, but it's tough for a movie that begins with the end and is literally titled The Fly.

A lot of 1950's movies were remade to great effect in the 80's, including The Thing from Another World and my beloved The Blob. The reason these remakes were so good is that they took the political wiliness of those films and adapted it to modern day fears alongside a heaping helping of top notch special effects. The Fly definitely belongs to this category, but of the source films it's definitely the thinnest. Cronenberg had to add a lot of material to give this film anything resembling meaty subtext, because what we get here is some pretty bog-standard "scientist shouldn't have played in God's sandbox" boilerplate.

That's not to say that this is a bad thing. The Fly might be rather shallow, but it has a lot to show for it. For one thing, much like I Married a Monster from Outer Space, it positions its male lead in the monstrous role, almost incidentally causing the film to have a female protagonist. Even now, that's rather hard to find in science fiction, and I appreciate the opportunity to see one whenever it's given.

For another, The Fly embraces its position as a meat and potatoes shocker, wringing tension almost miraculously out of its charmingly low budget. For one thing, the murder mystery opening plot (as bizarrely structured as it is) doles out hints of just how buck wild this situation has gotten at a brutally steady drip. And before Helene finds out the truth, Andre spends his time with a blanket over his head, grunting in desperation to get his wife to understand. If anything, this is even creepier than the eventual reveal, because something is clearly perilously wrong but everything about the situation seems so mundane and domestic at first glance.

Who knows, this could just be an elaborate sex game or something.

There are really only two special effects sequences of note here: one featuring a rather dodgy fly head that is redeemed by its clever depiction of Helene's scream as viewed through multifaceted insect eyes, and the other... Well, the other is probably the most iconic element of this film and that's for a reason, my friend. I shan't necessarily spoil it, but you know what scene I'm talking about, and even though you can see some of the strings sixty years later, it's still bone-chilling. It's particularly gruesome and nihilistic for a film of this vintage, using its fantastical effects to show how very wrong a path a man's hubris can lead him down.

While I wouldn't say the whole movie is like this, The Fly does definitely have a rather intense approach to some of its material. The opening murder is pretty brutal and slathered in stage blood, and the hopelessness of the whole situation is certainly not lost on its participants. And there are actual, permanent casualties, including but not limited to the Delambre's poor pet cat.

What it lacks in substance, it makes up for by alternating between being a fun sci-fi romp and pure gut-punch nihilistic horror. It's a shame Vincent Price isn't asked to participate in either of these things, though, because he is well and truly wasted as "guy who eventually gets the story to happen." All the insane acting moments are given to Patricia Owens, who does as well as she can, but she's no Vincent Price.

Nevertheless, The Fly is satisfying in a way that a lot of horror of this vintage kind of isn't. It's not afraid to take certain risks, and it's almost wicked in this fearlessness. It's definitely not my favorite of the movies that Hunter has assigned for me, but I'm glad I gained a reason to see it and that I saw it before viewing the Cronenberg version. Watching those films the other way around seems like a recipe for disappointment, because it's so much more stripped-down and inelegant, but the way I see it, it's just peachy with me.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• The basic science of this is actually pretty credible, in that their understanding of atoms and how they work is pretty consistent with contemporary understanding. 
• That said, the filmmakers seem to think that we'll be so fascinated by flashing lights that we'll want to watch the same sequence of pseudoscientific events thirteen times over, and at length.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• It's harder for the men to comprehend the fact that a woman operated heavy machinery than that she murdered her own husband.
• Helene's six-year-old son talks about how she told him to set the weird-looking fly free then asked him to catch it again an hour later with this little chestnut: "She changed her mind, you know how women are." I guess they started 'em young back then.
• Andre hilariously lounges in his lawn chair while wearing a full suit.

Sensawunda:

• There's an implication that Andre's fly hand might be evil, because... why not, I guess?
• I just want to bring up the sound design, which I forgot to mention. I won't forget about the noise involved when Fly-Andre drinks milk anytime soon.

TL;DR: The Fly is a fun little cheapie shocker with an excellent, showstopping finale.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1269
Reviews In This Series
The Fly (Neumann, 1958)
Return of the Fly (Bernds, 1959)
Curse of the Fly (Sharp, 1965)
The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986)
The Fly II (Walas, 1989)

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend Without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

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)

Kid In The City

Year: 1995

Director: James D.R. Hickox

Cast: Daniel Cerny, Ron Melendez, Jim Metzler 

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's a sign that horror franchises have gone downhill when they transplant their villains to the city (as in Leprechaun in the Hood or Jason Takes Manhattan). It's also a sign of certain doom when they renege on a promise of a Final Chapter, which Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Saw have all done). So, it's without further ado that I present to you Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, which followed The Final Sacrifice by a short three years.

You can never keep a good horror franchise down.

In Urban Harvest, Nebraska values are taking a trip to Chicago when brothers Eli (Daniel Cerny) and Joshua Porter (Ron Melendez) are adopted by an eager young city couple after the mysterious disappearance of their father out of a trailer park just outside Gatlin. However, it's not so mysterious to the audience, who has just seen Eli channel He Who Walks Behind the Rows to sew the man's eyes and mouth shut with corn (don't ask) and turn him into a human scarecrow. 

Anyway, the dad William (Jim Metzler) is obviously a businessman in charge of international corn distribution, because what else would he be? When Eli plants a mysterious, disease-resistant, demon-plagued strain of corn in a nearby abandoned factory (don't ask), Malcom sees dollar signs. His wife Amanda (Nancy Lee Grahn) on the other hand, is living out a Rosemary Woodhouse nightmare where she realizes that something is thoroughly wrong with this kid they adopted, but William refuses to believe her as long as he can make money from it. Meanwhile, Eli seeks to convert the other children at school into his corn cult and wreak some good ole country mayhem on these city folk.

And he's not NOT successful.

It's not often that exactly one person can be held responsible for a dumb horror movie being any good at all, but when there is just one person, they are almost always a special effects artist. Such is the case with Screaming Mad George, the makeup guru who was brought onto this particular sequel. The man had already redeemed a deeply direct-to-video slasher title with Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation, in addition to his work on classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and Predator, but he didn't hesitate to pull out all the stops, even for a dumb Children of the Corn movie.

Urban Harvest is truly disgusting at times, the franchise's supernatural slasher kills reaching new heights with scenes like a woman's face melting clean off or a head splitting open to reveal that it's full of bugs. But even the basic deaths are stunning, including a My Bloody Valentine inflected sequence where a head is impaled on a water pipe (an impact that you feel deep in your bones and won't forget anytime soon).

But all those sequences pale in comparison to three showstopping - and heart-stopping - setpieces that push the envelope of how f**king weird and twisted a 90's horror sequel could possibly be. I will mildly spoil this movie by saying that Eli's followers get massacred at the end of this movie in an orgy of phantasmagoric violence that rivals Evilspeak or Carrie in its unexpected explosion lurid glory (and not to digress, but isn't it so on brand that I've reviewed Evilspeak but not Carrie?). One sequence is so shocking that I hesitate to even spoil its nature, except to say that it involves the severed head of a Body Count Filler hobo that ceases to become filler. 

But what I must spoil a teensy bit by showing you a single still image is what becomes of Malcom (Jon Clair), Joshua's new school chum. He essentially becomes chum on a trip to Gatlin to discover Eli's weakness, when the corn comes alive and rips out his spine, turning him into a horrifying funhouse human monster straight out of The Thing in the process. It's completely stunning, disgusting, unforgettable work that just shouldn't be in a movie of this vintage. And yet it is, and we're all incredibly lucky that somebody let it happen.

Maybe "lucky" is a strong word, but I love me some bonkers special effects.

Unfortunately, outside of the effects (which are prevalent enough to make the movie a must-watch even if the rest of the time it was just a blank screen), Urban Harvest is a pretty bland movie. This is where everything you might reasonably expect from a mid-90's slasher sequel starts to kick in. I wouldn't call the acting "bad," because that would imply that it made any impression at all, but let's just say that Eli is no Isaac in terms of charisma and creepiness, and everybody else might as well be chopped liver. Which, in most cases, the movie quite literally treats them like.

Except my girl Charlize Theron, who shows up as an extra. I'm always happen to unearth a skeleton in a celebrity closet, and this is a great one.

The plot is perfunctory, neither focusing on the conversion of the children or the parents who are threatened by the growing cult. Thus, tension is nearly impossible because we don't really see what's happening on either side. In fact, two of the parents involved we only meet minutes before they are killed. And the potential drama of Joshua realizing his brother is evil is shrugged off; he just treats Eli like a kid he met yesterday and not someone he's spent his entire life with.

There's a weird racist undertone to William Porter that could have been interesting, but it goes nowhere. And that Rosemary's Baby tale of nobody taking Amanda Porter seriously goes nowhere as well. In the non-gore sequences, we just get a heaping burlap sack of 90's horror tropes including truly ridiculous unmotivated zooms, flashback footage from the previous films crudely disguised as nightmares, and an altogether too liberal use of an affected deep demon voice that undermines any sort of slow burn the film might have had.

It's milquetoast at best, with only two moments rising above the thin gruel of a plot. First, there's a sequence about Eli's origin story that rivals the Sinister franchise for true creepiness involving child murderers. And there's one fun match cut between Eli blowing out a candle and the lights going out above his next victim. But beyond that, there's not a lot to recommend Urban Harvest, which doesn't even use its city setting to its advantage, opting to mostly take place in a factory/suburban home set that could have been anywhere.

Oh, but Screaming Mad George. His work is so delectable and shocking that even if the film was actively terrible instead of just bland, it would be a hidden gem. I'm incredibly surprised that, this deep into the franchise, these movies have anything to offer, especially something of this superior caliber. So far, the trilogy of these films I have seen all bring something unique and worthwhile to the table, even if none of them are exactly scraping greatness. Not bad for one of my marathons!

TL;DR: Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest is a relatively weak storyline (in a franchise pretty much known for those), but features an excellent display of showstopping special effects.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1234
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)

Field of Screams

Year: 1992

Director: David F. Price

Cast: Terence Knox, Paul Scherrer, Ryan Bollman 

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I don't like the original Children of the Corn all that much, but of course I assumed that it has to be the peak of the franchise (Why, under this assumption, did I choose to watch all ten of these movies? Only time and an intense psychological evaluation will tell). Considering that Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice received an inauspicious debut nearly a full decade later (already boasting that telltale "final" tag that horror sequels sometimes get and always fail to hold themselves to), I had every right to expect the franchise to scrape the bottom of the barrel, right out of the gate.

All I can say is, don't pull out your barrel repair kit just yet, there ain't no scrapes today.

Always keeping in mind that we grade these things on a curve.

Probably the single most shocking thing about Children of the Corn II is that it actually exists in direct continuity to the first film. Shortly after the murders in Gatlin are discovered (making this film a period piece, I guess?), the surviving children are shipped off to the neighboring town of Hemingford and adopted into new families. Of course they also convert the Hemingford children into worshiping He Who Walks Behind the Rows and slowly begin a reign of terror by murdering the adults one by one. Incidentally, this film is much more of a slasher than the previous entry, which might have a speck or two to do with why I dug it so much.

Anyway, reporter John Garrett (Terence Knox) and his estranged son Danny (Paul Scherrer) are driving across Nebraska for... I don't know, college? That sounds plausible. They stop over in Hemingford to chase down this whole adult-murder story and find themselves smack dab in the middle of everything, with teen leader Micah (Ryan Bollman) - a dime store version of Isaac if there ever was one - attempting to turn Danny against his dad, which he sorta cops to although he mostly just wants to chase after the local hottie Lacey (Christie Clark of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2).

And who WOULDN'T want to hang out with this super chill fun dude?

Certainly, there are areas where The Final Sacrifice is not an active improvement on the original. This is practically a direct-to-video film after all (it received a cursory theatrical release many months after its premiere in Germany of all places). The acting, which was hardly a strong feature in the '84 film, slips down to right around the dotted line of competence. The kids especially, rather than being the best part of the film, are kind of a milquetoast presence. Micah is no Isaac, and Malachai's replacement is some poor chump named Mortdecai who makes literally no impression. 

But maybe the acting could never be great because the characters are weaker too. There are weirdly a lot of moving parts in this film (Danny has his daddy issues and his love interest, but John himself has a love interest in the form of the B&B owner with the Paget Brewster haircut, a burgeoning friendship with a Native American exposition professor, and eventually uses the skills of a reporter - dumb luck - to discover the town's evil corn secret), but it's a movie that will sacrifice everything to better serve its kill sequences. The film's best emotional chess piece, Danny potentially being turned against his dad, is completely forgotten by the end in favor of a heaping ladle of special effects sequences.

Who needs character drama when we've got whatever this is?

However, these types of loose ends would probably be more disappointing if the special effects weren't so freaking great. This is where The Final Sacrifice massively improves upon Children of the Corn. There are no vague ketchup smears here, no sir. The plot is structured more like a slasher, and the kills are beefed up to prove it. Things get weirdly supernatural in the middle, muddying the already weak mythology around He Who Walks Behind the Rows, but if you give a crap about the characterization around the electric corn demon in these movies, you're probably watching the wrong franchise.

All that matters is that the gore is on point. Blood is splattering all over this movie, from the showstopping double death that marks the beginning of this new reign of terror (a throat-slashing-via-corn that is both stupid and disgusting, and a stalk of corn being impaled through a man's neck, which sprays blood like a firehose). Even the non-bloody kills are reminiscent of the creatively bizarre murders in late 80's slashers, back when creativity had to trump blood in order to appease the MPAA. We get old women crushed by their own houses (Toto, we're not in Nebraska anymore), other old women thrown through the windows of bingo parlors, and... well, I guess old women don't fare very well in this movie.

The single freakiest sequence in this whole affair is set during a church service, where Micah employs a voodoo doll against a man in the front row. Every orifice on his face begins to gush blood of its own volition, splashing all over his wife's face Evil Dead 2 style before he stumbles blindly toward the pulpit and crumples in a heap. It's both extremely silly and horribly gut-wrenching stuff, but any way you slice it its an effective bit of slasher movie mayhem.

I don't have a high quality picture of that scene, so here's some assorted creepy kids.

As far as actual filmmaking quality goes, everywhere but the special effects suffers in comparison to the original. But as far as creating a vibe for the audience, The Final Sacrifice is the film I'd most itch to revisit. It's a kooky, twisted, good time that's just begging to build a stronger cult audience. I'll take a heavy dose of gross and weird over a meandering, rudderless narrative that wastes Linda Hamilton any day.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice is a chintzy effort, but has plenty of charm to back it up.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1039
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)

Writing for Other People: September 2018

Here are all the articles I've written elsewhere in the past month or so!

Ghastly Grinning: Horror Sommelier

On the web site dedicated to positivity in horror, I'm using my Fright Flashback sensibilities every month to pair the big theatrical releases with the perfect horror movie double feature.

Check out my article for September right here.

Dread Central: Brennan Went to Film School

In this column, I use film school analysis techniques to find the deeper meaning in horror movies, while still being as pithy and immature as always. Here are my articles from the past two months:

In BAIT, Purgatory Means Atoning for Your Sins Via Great White Shark

An Ode to the Kevin Williamson Teen

Also, it's Back to School month at Dread Central and you know I can't resist me a nice chat about college horror movies, so I also wrote an article ranking the Best Bang-for-Your-Buck slasher movie universities.

Check it out here!

Alternate Ending: Diversifying My Interests

Over at Alternate Ending, I get to prove that I have interests other than horror movies. But I still write about horror movies, because come on. Halloween is coming up!

Five Times the Muppets Made Me, a Grown Man, Cry

The Metanarrative Genius of the Muppets

Are Shared Universes Really That Bad?

The Top Five Slashers of the Decade (So Far)

Word Count: 223

An A-Maize-Ing Journey

Year: 1984

Director: Fritz Kiersch

Cast: Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, R.G. Armstrong

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Happy Halloween month, everybody! You know I can't resist me a good franchise marathon when the spooky season rolls around, but what's a boy to do when he's already covered Freddy, Jason, Michael, Leatherface, Chucky, Pazuzu, and 112 Ocean Avenue? Well, luckily (or probably unluckily) for me, the horror genre can't resist pumping out a coterie of sequels for any old random title that makes money, which brings us to Children of the Corn and its legendary, decades-spanning run of 10 films. That's the franchise that'll be providing my suffering for your entertainment this year, so let's start with good ol' number one and see if it's gonna be a trick or a treat to kick off the season.

Trick question. Linda Hamilton is always a treat.

Loosely based on the Stephen King short story of the same name, Children of the Corn tells the tale of young med school graduate Burt (Peter Horton) and his girlfriend Vicky (Linda Hamilton, ever-so slightly pre-Terminator). They are traveling to a small Nebraska town where he has gotten a job, but through a series of increasingly eerie circumstances, they wind up stopped over in the ghost town of Gatlin, where the children have murdered all the adults and worship the mysterious entity known as He Who Walks Behind the Rows. The cult of tykes is led by the charismatic despot Isaac (John Franklin) and his right-hand man, pubescent enforcer Malachai (Courtney Gains).

They investigate the town, and over the next 45 minutes Burt conclusively proves that you don't need to have a brain to graduate med school. 

And you don't need a hat to be a creepy child cult leader. But it helps.

The thing that boggles the mind about Children of the Corn is exactly how it became a classic in the first place. I think the name "Stephen King" has the a lot to do with it, and eventually the name "Linda Hamilton," but by all measures CotC is a very slight film. It's split roughly into halves: First we see the origin of the mayhem in Gatlin and establish the relationship between Vicki and Burt. Then they arrive in the town, discover its secret, and set out to vanquish a demon, all over the course of a single eventful day. When the credits roll, it feels like you've watched about 70 minutes of a movie that was supposed to be quite a bit longer. Now, being brisk is hardly a sin for a movie (especially in my eyes), but the narrative is malnourished in a few important ways.

For one thing, the central relationship is unusually well-established for a movie of this ilk, but only in the first twenty minutes or so. Hamilton and Horton have a warm, lived-in chemistry that is satisfying to bask in, and they feint at subplots about Burt being afraid of commitment and both of them maybe being resentful of having to move to such a small town, but all of this is forgotten by the time they reach Gatlin. There, our heroes are split up for pretty much the rest of the movie and never get any actual conflict resolved beyond the immediate physical threat to their persons. 

We also don't get to see enough of the inner workings of the cult of children to really understand how dreadful life has been for them since the change. This is largely because we spend the most time with Joby (Robby Kiger) and Sarah (Anne Marie McEvoy), two children who are specifically separate from the rest of the pack. There are occasional cuts to dissension brewing between Isaac and Malachai, but this subplot is painted in strokes so broad you could fly a crop-duster through them.

Curse these little moppets for getting their Spielberg all over my King!

But speaking of Isaac and Malachai, therein lies my biggest theory why this film has made any sort of lasting impression on the culture at large. Isaac is played by John Franklin, who was in his early twenties at the time of filming, although he retained a childlike appearance due to a growth hormone deficiency. His performance is incredibly satisfying, physically highlighting Isaac's childlike features, but retaining every nanosecond of his adulthood in the boy's eyes and voice. Isaac is a character that seems wise beyond his years (for good reason), haunted by a look that no child should ever have. Franklin's performance is incredibly creepy, and iconic for good reason.

Malachai is iconic in his own way, too, though probably because he reminds everyone of their childhood bully. His pubescent squeak and gangly limbs combined with his physical menace are another rough juxtaposition, this time of a child clearly trying to act beyond his years, instead of the other way around.

Beyond that, Children of the Corn is truly valuable for one scene alone, and it is the introductory sequence where we get to see the children murdering all the adults in a diner. It's the goriest moment in the film (later, most of the blood is tempera paint red and thrown in splashes from offscreen) and by far the most brutal and creepy. It's also the Stephen Kingiest, not shying away from the taboo, stomach-churning topics like, oh... children murdering the sh*t out of their parents.

That's not ALL strawberry milkshake.

Everything else in the movie is just kind of... fine, or at least good thing that is undercut by something slightly nefarious and - is it hacky to use the word "corny?" For example, the creepiness of the children being interrupted by Joby's weirdly chipper, entirely unnecessary voiceover narration. I do like the score, which utilizes a choir of children to good effect, but it's counterbalanced by the hilariously low-grade effect that bring to life [sic] He Who Walks Behind the Rows. It looks like somebody drew a demon in an Etch-a-Sketch and shook it up halfway, which in turn undermines the actually almost creepy effect of the entity moving under the soil like the groundhog from Caddyshack.

All in all, I enjoy myself during Children of the Corn, and it might not always be for the best reasons, but who's to turn down a movie that's enjoyable? It doesn't have a whole lot of meat on its bones, but I suppose that's what you can expect from a corn-based diet anyway.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn is a classic for no real reason I can discern, but there is some stuff that is at least halfway worthy of longevity.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1109
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)