Just the Ticket #130: Children Of the Corn

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. He Who Blogs Behind the Times

Happy Halloween, Ticketholders!

Well, I was warned not to subject myself to this series. My co-workers, several YouTube videos, and review aggregation sites all told me that the Children Of the Corn franchise was awful and shouldn't exist. But just like a stubborn, stupid, contrarian road-tripper in...well...a Children Of the Corn movie, I didn't listen because plans are plans, promises are promises, and I occasionally "like" to do this to myself. We'll see how well my will and investment hold up....

Speaking of liking things, please remember to comment at the bottom of this post, Become A Ticketholder because I know you haven't already, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest kernels of news on my corntent.

Because I'm trying to put this off for as long as possible (I'm editing the post five movies in so I can have a break before subjecting myself to any further mental corn-popping), I'd like to explain something very pedantic. This was originally going to be numbered 130 because my brain couldn't tell time and I sequenced the DanMachi movie review (which will release after this, on November 3rd) as Just the Ticket #129. But then I went back and looked at my Dragon Ball Super and Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero reviews from "Dragons' Week," and saw that they were both titled as Anime Spotlight posts, so for the sake of conformity, I went back and changed the DanMachi movie review to an Anime Spotlight post as well. But because 130 has thirteen in it, and I reviewed the short story on the thirteenth, and my weird numerology brain insisted on reminding me that 130 is thirty-one backwards, which is also today's date, I thought it would be "cooler" to ignore the fact that I skipped a number and keep the 130 numbering despite what my OCD brain was telling me.

Yes, I have at least two brains, and they all scream at me.

This is totally normal.

It's also why I blog and watch YouTube!

And now, on to this year's Halloween special, where we take an eleven-movie stroll through this franchise about murderous Children and a supernaturally husky stalker, to see if any of them pop, or if their Age Of Favor has passed.

I couldn't watch or review the first Children Of the Corn without making comparisons to its short story source along the way, so that's what we're starting with.

Using Burt's hypothetical exposition to an imagined Vicky from the original short story as a basis, Children Of the Corn (1984) opens with a depiction of the Children slaughtering and poisoning the adults of Gatlin, Nebraska (filming for which was divided among four towns in Iowa) and provides a blighted crop as the inciting incident for the massacre. The opening also provides a tighter, more believable timeline of events (three years in the film's past, as opposed to the bonkers implications of the short story's thirteen-to-thirty-one-year gap). There is also the introduction of the Seer concept from the story's epilogue, with a movie-original character named Sarah Gilman (played by Full(er) House guest star AnneMarie Conley/McEvoy). The Gilman name is not mentioned in the film, but her brother's name is Job, and he was mentioned in the original story as Job Gilman (born Clayton Gilman).

They serve as the audience-connection Child characters to make the adaptation more accessible than the bickering-heavy original. But more importantly, as a Seer (in the story's epilogue, Isaac was the only Seer), Sarah has a Shine-like precognitive ability, and she draws what she Sees.

So not only is there a possible The Shining connection for the Shared Universe scholars out there, Sarah may also be a similar type of character to people like Patrick Danville from Insomnia and the seventh Dark Tower novel (series review here, and my attempt at the "fixing" style of content here).

Also, we get more of a fear factor out of the eponymous Children here than in the story (though, with 1980s child actors, that doesn't amount to much). They are more visible here, and shown to be in greater numbers than the original, with John Franklin in full, creepy kid mode as Isaac (surnamed Croner here instead of Renfrew)

and character actor Courtney Gains hamming it up as professional Outlander influencer and inventor of the Every Time I Say "Outlander" Drinking Game, Malachai Boardman (same name as in the story, but elevated from willing sacrifice and literal deadbeat father to Isaac's enthusiastic right hand man-turned-generational adversary).

The only other notable exception is voice actress Julia Maddalena as the fanatical Rachel Stigman.

They are physically ineffective villains, and most of the rest are extras ranging from adults-for-teens to obnoxious children who can't take direction and don't want to be there. But at least the movie-original material gives them a reason to exist.

Then we get to (in name only) Burt and Vicky.

Burt is played by Peter Horton, who is best known for his roles in Thirtysomething and Singles, as well as being married to the second sexiest Catwoman and Robocop's forgotten sidekick, Nicole Deputron. Burt is a doctor and his last name is Stanton.

Vicky is played by Linda Hamilton, who would go on to play the iconic Sarah Connor in The Terminator later in 1984, reminding me that while I am not older than the "Children Of the Corn" franchise, I am older than both Terminator and Dragon Ball. Damn....

Anyway, I'm not sure what Vicky is besides Burt's girlfriend/wife (depending on the source, her last name is stated to be either Stanton or Baxter).

Burt takes the alpha male role because doctor complex, but the bickering between himself and Vicky that characterized their source relationship is replaced with subtle, quickly resolved differences and tender, if a bit awkwardly directed, affection that feels kind of real. Things progress more or less the same as in the story, with them running over Japheth (here renamed Joshua because people are dumb and Biblical names are so hard to pronounce) and electing to go to the nearest city for help.

But Vicky is just kind of a blank slate for Burt to sound off of, not even having her youthful religious trauma as a defining characteristic.

By way of some Wile E. Coyote sign-switching shenanigans and Burt being lazy but decisive (and also because neither of them bothered to read very far into that copy of Night Shift that's sitting on their dashboard and raising all manner of existential questions),

they end up in Gatlin because it's closer, and Burt does a lot of walking around to pad the runtime while Vicky stays in the car, or stays with Job and Sarah, or stays silent in the background, or gets kidnapped and then crucified and then un-crucified by Malachai because the producers wanted the film adaptation to have a happy ending and Malachai is impatient and wants to use her as bait to capture Burt, who repeatedly and easily nope's his way out of their custody because they're Children and (deep voice) he's a MAN! A skinny man with almost no personality, but still, a MAN!

Granted, the walking around is boring, but on top of the Children getting to be characters at all, I give major props to the crops because the establishing shots and follow shots of Burt (and occasionally, Vicky) show a Gatlin that is at once decorated (the Children have shoved dried cobs, stalks, and husks into every available orifice of every "blasphemous" edifice and object in town) and overgrown with corn. The corn whispers, bends to allow or block passage, and even goes full Evil Dead tree to protect itself by way of some decent practical effects and selling on part of the actors.

That said, the movie's treatment of He Who Walks Behind the Rows is even more uncertain than it was in print form, but in a bad way that makes it less scary.

Malachai's mounting conflict with the much younger and more entitled Isaac (Isaac is also still a Seer, and as such has a major Chosen One complex) leads him to sacrifice Isaac in place of the elusive Burt and Vicky. So, the corn is alive. But also there's a too-expensive-to-show-onscreen-with-any-quality...something burrowing around the cornfields like a cheap proto-Graboid land shark. And also this bad 80s digital effect eats Isaac off of the cross by covering him in red tentacle static.

And also Isaac comes back later as a demon-possessed zombie.

And also there's a red storm cloud that rolls in over the cornfield in the finale.

So whereas the story builds this horrific sense of "it could be anything of any size with any number of powers," the movie version throws out a mess of poor-to-averagely depicted concepts designed to foster disappointment and apathy. And because production interference said there needed to be a happy ending, Burt, Vicky, Sarah, and Job (but mostly Burt because--deep voice--he's a MAN!) use stockpiled fuel from the gas station (which is not abandoned like it was in the story because these movies need a crazy old man character who dies and no one listens to)

to put Ruth's thoughts from the story's epilogue into action, burning the cornfield and turning the red storm cloud into a pale, opaque, 80s take on the skybeam trope.

And because there needed to be sequel bait, they just assume that even though most of the Children are still alive and fanatical, the threat is over. Rachel does one last jumpscare attack before being knocked out by Burt because it's always Burt in this movie, he and Vicky decide to adopt Job and Sarah, and the...happy?...family?...walk to the next town, nineteen miles away (because nineteen), while the credits fade in.

I gave "Children Of the Corn" a C-, and while Children Of the Corn does enough to improve upon the original (a better timeline, more character, similar atmosphere), it does even more that ends up making things worse (the child acting, the macho favoritism, the bad digital effects, the corporate-mandated happy ending liberties), so let's start the franchise off with a solid

D

Following the horror franchise irony of titling a given sequel as "Final," we have a somewhat direct continuation with Children Of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice. In the wake of Isaac's death at the end of the last movie, Kansas state authorities and the citizens of the nearby town of Hemingford (that's the town nineteen miles away--because nineteen--that Burt, Vicky, Sarah, and Job walked to between films, where it's assumed they convinced the police of what happened to them) step in to investigate the tragedy and make the stupid and dramatically ironic decision of relocating the "survivors" to Hemingford for adoption. Oddly (because I don't really know what kinds of diseases required an en masse "say 'ahh'" level of medical examination in 1983), there is a doctor on hand to check the poorly acted, overly pubescent Children for mouth stuff and give them lolipops before they get on the bus to Hemingford.

The doctor is played by Ed Grady, whose last film role was in The Notebook, and he turns out to be privy to a big Hemingford secret that was put in to give the only theatrical sequel to a below-average movie based on a Stephen King story from an adult magazine a blunt environmental and corporate citizenship message, and his character death is one of the best in the movie.

Leading the not-so-little evil bastards this time is a He Who Walks Behind the Rows-possessed Micah (played by Ryan Bollman, who didn't have many major roles beyond this, but has one of those, "that guy" faces, and has the best villain performance of the series so far--I'm not going to add the "relative to a child actor" qualifier here because he really does do a good job with it), and because the Children are generally taller and more imposing here, they are a more believable threat than the clueless teenagers and randomly selected preschoolers we got last time.

That doesn't prevent them from being utterly hilarious, though.

There is a scene where they crush an old lady beneath her house, with her feet sticking out. She says, "Oh, what a world!" as the house is coming down on her. Her name is Ruby. Her sister's name is Mrs. West. Gee, I wonder if we're in Kansas anymore?

Speaking of threats that have gotten ridiculous already, He Who Walks Behind the Rows still shows up as an unseen Graboid-lite, tentacle corn, and weather phenomena, as well as being able to possess Children. But now, it is also either a sociopathic hallucination brought on by moldy, pesticide-saturated corn

or an ancient, indigenous native (is that redundant?) environmental vengeance spirit because this script is an aimless, jumbled mess, and it gives Micah the ability to nosebleed a man to death with a nondescript, wooden voodoo doll and turn Mrs. West's wheelchair into an upscaled RC car.

Because we need a bickering road trip duo in this tonally inconsistent, heavily coincidence-based cluster of a sequel, there's John Garrett (played by St. Elsewhere's Terrence Knox) and his son, Danny (real estate broker Paul Scherrer--I'm not kidding; he had two forgettable movie roles after this and did some TV guest work before retiring into real estate).

Their intro dialogue is nearly identical to what Burt and Vicky had in the original story, just with the dynamic changed to "angsty 80s child of divorce vs. successful absentee father" because almost every 80s movie did that. But not so much with the success, as John is a struggling tabloid reporter on the way to a big job interview. Working on the assumption that all newspeople know each other personally, the father and son just happen to pass by the reporters who were covering the Gatlin tragedy, and banter is exchanged that references Rock Hudson's sexual orientation and the Jonestown Massacre, though not in relation to each other because this movie is weird enough.

So of course, this fills John's head with dollar signs and April O'Neil memes, and he drags his son along to investigate Gatlin and Hemingford as the bodies start piling up.

And speaking of stacked bodies, we are introduced to two female characters with the most "this sounded really sexy in the 80s" names of all time: B&B owner Angela Casual (SeaQuest: DSV's Rosalind Allen--and yes, her shirt says what you think it does)

and aquatic and motorsports enthusiast, Lacey Hellerstat (A Nightmare On Elm Street 2 and Days Of Our Lives star Christie Clark). I joke because Lacey swims and rides a motorbike for, like, three minutes total in the entire film,

and these two are just there so the male leads can make out with them and rescue them from the Children later, and because the last movie had an even X/Y, young/old balance in its lead quartet, too.

Everything culminates in a sacrifice-in-progress, John and his Indigenous Studies/Anthropology professor associate, Frank Redbear (Ned Romero)

come to the rescue with a literal deus ex machina harvester that grinds up Micah as he goes demon, 

they free their love interests, set the corn on fire, and suddenly it's daytime and they drive away in a car I couldn't recall having seen in the movie before that just happened to be parked in the cornfield, intact.

This crap is story end.

D-

Children Of the Corn III: Urban Harvest is the first direct-to-video sequel in the "Children Of the Corn" franchise, and it may also be the best so far. It's not without its problems, but I didn't find it as annoying as the original story or the previous two films.

Continuing the adoption concept from Final Sacrifice, our leads this time are Joshua and his adopted brother from Gatlin, Eli (Daniel Cerny from Demonic Toys).

The HWWBtR powers on display are executed with better effects than in the previous movies, but are no less hilarious, with Eli having super-strength and agility, teleportation, hypnotic speech, telekinesis, illusion casting, the ability to transfigure human flesh into corn and hay, bad 90s pyrokinesis effects,

and turning art into reality. The corn itself can regenerate, move on its own (including the standard, tree from Evil Dead tentacle powers), change its density to be stronger than steel, liquefy concrete into quicksand, cause the occasional hallucination or fakeout nightmare (which might have had a focus group effect on the next film, showing that, even in the 80s and 90s, listening to the fandom was a terrible idea), and turn people into plant zombies.

After escaping from their abusive, corn-breeding father (whom Eli turns into a scarecrow in a pretty impressive and unsettling opening scene),

the boys are taken in by William and Amanda Porter,

and begin their new lives as students of a Chicago seminary school. While Joshua acclimates to city life rather well, making friends (and more) with the Elkman siblings next door,

Eli begins using his powers to take advantage of William's (Jim Meltzer, who starred in the Beauty & the Beast TV series with Linda Hamilton, mentioned above) job as a corn commodities trader to turn HWWBtR into a global entity, hypnotize a new chapter of Children's Eponymous (including an uncredited Charlize Theron), 

and creatively kill those who oppose him.

Things slow down considerably somewhere in the middle, but once the mystery of Eli starts to unravel

(it's a retcon of Isaac being important, the Gatlin Massacre only happening once in 1980, the whole Age Of Favor sacrifice thing from the story and the first movie, and the environmental vengeance spirit/pesticide hallucination concept from the sequel, to show that Eli has been instigating harvest moon patricide and matricide events all over the Midwest since 1964--the date of the incident from the original story, but not the same incident, as that was changed to 1980 for the film adaptation--and has not aged in over thirty years) and Joshua locates Eli's "bible,"

the action really kicks in and we get a couple of cool body horror effects leading into the finale.

After getting hit by some pretty bad digital fireballs, Joshua manages to kill Eli and destroy his book, freeing the brainwashed...Children?...from his influence, and we're treated to an entertainingly bad second climax featuring the real (until the sequels re-retcon it) HWWBtR, a massive, stop-motion/CGI/practical root monster that looks like a giant hunk of ginger root with a knockoff Xenomorph tongue that took a bath in leftover Graboid blood.

Because plot armor, the creature eats several people and mutilates many others with harvesting tools, but does almost nothing when Joshua continuously hacks away at its root until it dies(?) and melts into nothing on the ground.

But even though Eli is dead and HWWBtR is probably dead, somehow it's supposed to make sense and be scary that Eli's corn is getting shipped globally.

The nonsense is still nonsense, but looks a bit better thanks to effects provided by Screaming Mad George, Cerny gives a pretty creepy, but still inconsistently acted, performance as Eli, the big city setting is a unique turn for the series, and the main characters were easier to get invested in. Add in the minor debuts of Charlize Theron and Nicholas Brendon (Xander from Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and strong supporting performances by Titanic's Michael Ensign (Father Frank Nolan),

Family Matters' Mari Morrow (Maria Elkman, Joshua's love interest), and General Hospital's Nancy Lee Grahn (Amanda Porter, whose rose garden gets polluted by Eli's corn, throwing in another possible Dark Tower reference),

and I might just dare to grade this above average.

C+

Now for some savagery.

Children Of the Corn IV: The Gathering (a generic subtitle for a boring as bugshit movie) stars Naomi Watts, and that's about all the good I can say about it.

She plays a practicing nurse who returns home to Grand Island, Nebraska (a delusional name for a town that's small and nowhere near water) to take care of her ailing mother, who is having a sitcom episode runtime's worth of nightmare sequences about homicidal demon-Children because the last movie just didn't have enough nightmare fakeouts. Watts' character also has two younger siblings who barely matter in what little plot there is to this film (with the exception of her sister, who turns out to be her daughter because obvious age gaps are obvious and she needs some reason to be emotionally invested in the climax),

and she gets roped back into her old nursing job when this movie's evil preacher kid (whom we barely see or care about) causes the Children in the town to contract a mysterious fever, lose their teeth, and get possessed by the spirits of his followers...or something.

Also, her neighbor of color gets accused of murder and forces her at gunpoint to help him save his hemophiliac son so there can be a ticking clock narrative and black characters are always treated with respect in horror movies.

There isn't really anything connecting this to the other movies so far, other than this young preacher being ageless like Eli from the last movie, and the Children killing adults who get in the way of their goal. And that goal is...to resurrect the evil preacher kid who might have already resurrected on his own. And the reason he doesn't age and he went crazy all those years ago? Mercury. Just mercury. So Naomi Watts learns from some of the town's surviving seniors

that what made him what he is is also his weakness because this movie makes sense, and she kills him by pouring mercury into the water supply and drowning him in it because mercury is totally not poisonous to non-supernatural, non-religious Children or any adults, but my sarcasm is toxic enough to kill any further desire I have to talk about this waste of toilet film.

Oh, and because most of the people who drowned in quicksand or were eaten or impaled in multiple vital regions in the last movie got to survive, our female lead's sister/daughter who was knocked unconscious and offered as a sacrifice and spent twenty minutes of the movie submerged in bloody water gets to live, too, even though Naomi Watts, who is playing a nurse, "saved her life" with improper, pre-2010s CPR.

Remember when these movies had sledgehammer environmental messages? And what was put onscreen was actually important to the plot instead of most of it being fakeout dream sequence jumpscares? And there was a plot? And the plot had a purpose and made sense? And you could see what the fuck was going on? I miss those days....

F-

Despite having more star power behind it (and being a better movie than The Gathering), 1998's Children Of the Corn V: Fields Of Terror managed to degenerate into an "I kept looking at my phone" movie. It goes some pretty weird and potentially interesting directions, but it was such a 180 from the dull characters and psychological thriller wannabe pacing of the previous film that it horseshoed around to being just as boring and nonsensical but for different reasons.

It starts with a hand crushing roses to remind us of the last good movie in this franchise,

and HWWBtR is digital, Halloween-colored fire now, which possesses one of the creepiest, but also least intimidating child hosts in the series so far: Ezekiel, played by Malcolm In the Middle's Adam Wylie (no relation to writer-director Ethan Wiley because spelling, who has also written, directed, produced, or done FX work on quite a few notable films, such as Return Of the Jedi, House and House II, and Gremlins). Also, although they look similar, Adam Wylie did not play Dewey in Malcolm In the Middle. That was Erik Per Sullivan.

The wacky demon powers are back and as seldom seen as they were in the previous entry, but the effects behind them are a mix of 80s absurdism and 90s action with a touch of the body horror and questionable digital work that made Urban Harvest's finale so endearingly off. We get a cool telekinesis effect in the opening kill, but things mellow out for the majority of the runtime in favor of character introduction and a plodding family drama-meets-horror movie stupidity plot before throwing in one or two more feats of pyrotechnic insanity near the end.

Our cast of potential victims this time consists of six friends on a road trip to scatter their friend's ashes: Lazlo (Ahmet Zappa, whose sister, Diva Muffin Zappa--yes, I'm serious--plays one of the Children), Greg (the late Alexis Arquette), Kir (Eva Mendes in her first role), Alison (Knots Landing star and jeweler Stacy Galina, continuing the trend of soap actors and Hollywood retirees in this franchise), Tyrus (Greg Vaughan, another soap opera regular, including Days Of Our Lives because that's going to be a thing going forward) and Charlotte (Angela Jones).

Clockwise from top left: Alison, Greg, Tyrus, and Kyr.

When the two most entertaining characters (Lazlo and Charlotte, shown below) are killed near the town of Divinity Falls (because ignored foreshadowing in horror movies is subtle),

the other four find themselves conveniently stranded in said town where Alison's brother is conveniently a member of a HWWBtR cult run by Luke (David Carradine),

the sheriff is Fred "the Hammer" Williamson,

and the bartender is Kane Hodder (best known as Jason Voorhees in the later Friday the 13th films, Victor Crowley in the Hatchet films, and is a prolific stuntman and stunt coordinator in the horror genre, including Fields Of Terror). 

The usual, "group is stranded and killed in a small town" plotting progresses, with some of the series' more subtly handled commentary on religious cults, and even attempts to address the feelings of hopelessness, emptiness, desperation, and lack of control that come from grief (though it's not handled that well because Kir ends up reading the cult's "bible" and joins it so she can offer herself as a sacrifice--read: don't commit suicide when someone you love dies!).

And to undercut the thematic significance of this moment, it is prefaced by this guy looking up her dress with approval as she climbs to her death:

But once the four leads break into an abandoned house, they do a lot of sitting around and talking, while the cult does what the cult does (the Age Of Favor is a thing again, because reasons, even though the Children in this movie are mostly played by adults-for-teens, in an effort to establish an intimidation factor),

until it's time for Alison to rescue her brother (it doesn't work)

at the expense of all of her friends and most of the town's legal and emergency response infrastructure.

This would have been so much better if, instead of contrived coincidence, it turned out that Alison was also a cult member, and had been luring her "friends" to Divinity Falls to sacrifice them, but no; she's just a selfish bitch who happens to be in a horror movie.

In the end, she kills the CGI supernatural Halloween fire monster (that Luke decided to name after the JFK memorial--or The Bangles' song) with a man-sized bag of fertilizer because bullshit (literally this time) weaknesses still totally make sense.

Oh, and speaking of not making sense, even though he got possessed three years ago, Ezekiel was the real mastermind all along, Luke has been dead for years, and he's just a host body for the fleshy flamethrower creature inside his head that has no explained identity or purpose other than being the right shape to further sodomize the barely existent continuity of this franchise.

Getting back to Alison, she then rescues the surviving cultists (who are probably still evil, but we need the appearance of a happy ending in these things) and adopts her brother's possibly under-aged widow's baby. 

And there's sequel bait that will probably amount to nothing because the baby has Halloween fire in his eyes, so maybe he's the new HWWBtR? Or not?

Like I said, I started looking at my phone when there was two thirds of a movie left, so I don't care.

F

From what I remember, 1999 was the year that the film industry went, "LOL there are three nines this year and 9 is a rotated 6 so we can make a bunch of demon movies!" This is how we got the Arnold Schwarzenegger "classic," End Of Days, The Blair Witch Project, Idle Hands, Stigmata, Warlock III, Wishmaster 2, Witchouse, and the super-obvious Children Of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return.

For equally super-obvious reasons, we're talking about the latter today.

Children Of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return is the first film in the franchise since The Final Sacrifice to have any clear continuity with the original. It seems that Isaac survived his crucifixion and demonic possession at the end of Children Of the Corn, and has been in a coma for nineteen years (because nineteen again).

As I have been watching a lot of Horror Timelines videos on YouTube lately, this sticks out as being wrong. I mean, I of course want to keep that nineteen year gap intact because I'm also a Stephen King fan, but it raises a lot of continuity problems. If we place the first movie firmly in 1983 with the Gatlin Massacre having taken place in 1980, then either Isaac's Return is set in 1999 and Isaac was just a child preacher who was possessed by HWWBtR in 1980, in a similar manner to how Micah and Ezekiel (or Eli's and Jedediah's followers) were in previous films (his memory loss from being possessed is counted as part of his coma state, which makes as much sense as anything else in this franchise), or it is set in 2002, and there is no other supernatural component to Isaac's coma state.

John Franklin (who also co-wrote the script for this film) reprises his role as Isaac, bringing the same level of creepiness and entitled grandeur to the character that he did nearly a generation prior.

The character of Rachel, who was an unofficial third to Isaac and Malachi in the first movie and jumpscared Burt at the end, also returns with a few changes that I feel I must explain. First, between watching and reviewing the original Children Of the Corn and now, there seems to be a credits change to her last name. In the ledger fragments in the short story, and in the movie's Wikipedia entry when I started writing this megapost, it was listed as Stigman. But in Isaac's Return, it is documented as Colby,

and it seems the Wikipedia entry for the first film has been changed to reflect that as well. Second, Julia Maddalena had since moved on to a prolific voice acting career, so Rachel was recast with Nancy Allen (which is unintentionally funny because of the crack I made earlier about Peter Horton being married to "Robocop's forgotten sidekick, Nicole Deputron," and because Nancy Allen's best known role was as Robocop's actual sidekick),

and offscreen events (like a possibly miscarried daughter with fellow Child, Amos Deigan, whom Isaac had given the Age Of Favor treatment at some point) turned her into a completely different character (she's pretty much just Ruth Clawson from the end of the story now). And aside from Stacy Keach playing a subtly unhinged doctor in Gatlin,

that's pretty much all the draw that this movie has. The plot and style here are just an amalgamation of the worst of every previous sequel, starting with the "so-called heroine is secretly a former Child Of the Corn" plot point from Fields Of Terror.

Our female lead is Hannah (played by Natalie Ramsay because it wouldn't be a Children Of the Corn sequel without someone who was on Days Of Our Lives), who makes every possible driving mistake--multiple times--that gets murder victims stranded in a small town in this genre.

Because she is a Seer and Natalie Ramsay can't draw (or do convincing voiceover work) and they couldn't afford a stunt artist, Hannah has numerous fakeout jumpscare visions throughout the film, bringing back the psychological horror bullshit from The Gathering. And so the psychological horror bullshit doesn't get lonely and because this is a movie from the late 90s, there are several...interesting...stylistic choices in the editing (quick cuts and unnecessarily prolonged slow motion with distorted audio and extreme lighting)

as well as some poorly lit, highly contrasted scenes where, also like The Gathering, you can't tell what the fuck is going on. There are at least two dark-haired male characters who fall a pinch short of qualifying as love interests for Hannah, which, again, was a big dose of "who cares?" with a sloppy second side of "what the fuck is going on?" during my first watch. As in the original story, there aren't any prominent Children in this Children Of the Corn movie. Hell, there's not much corn, either. Not even the tentacle corn gimmick makes an appearance.

Most of the attention is focused on Hannah finding her mother (surprise, it's Rachel), interacting with the two semi-important male characters, and freaking out at her many visions while Isaac and his double-handful of genre cliché accomplices (the doctor, the cop who might be Isaac's borderline incestuous sister,

Isaac's son and his girlfriend,

the nerd with a machete to remind us that Kane Hodder was in the last one,

and the stealth sidekick who's also sort of Hannah's main love interest but also might be secretly behind the whole thing because that twist worked so well in Fields Of Terror and the only real continuity to this franchise is my persistent, toxic sarcasm...and Days Of Our Lives).

I ranted myself off the rails again.

But, yeah, Hannah and Rachel on one side doing the "foreshadowing that no one listens to" thing with each other while Isaac and his Chroner cronies do the "blah blah Prophecy blah blah" thing.

And what is this prophecy, you might ask if you still care?

Well, apparently, because Hannah is "secretly" Rachel's daughter and this franchise loves retconning sequel bait out of existence, the prophecy is that she has to learn her parentage and have sex with one of the other Children Of the Children Of the Corn before midnight on her birthday (Halloween, because of course it is), of her own free will, so she can later give birth to a new HWWBtR.

So, of course, Isaac has her drugged, kidnapped, branded, and forced to share blood with his son because these movies still love making sense.

Speaking of lovemaking and nonsense, there's actually a glimmer of intelligent writing when this movie reveals itself to be a take on the "Prodigal Son"/Oedipus Complex narrative, as all attempts to avoid or hasten the prophecy prove to be in vain, and Hannah ends up having sex with Gabriel (who is not only a legacy Child, but later reveals himself to be possessed by HWWBtR), fully consummating the prophecy at midnight on Halloween. 

I was genuinely impressed by this adaptation effort for a brief moment. Gabriel and Isaac even do a little callback to the Malachi conflict dynamic from the first movie, with actor Paul Popowich channeling a mix of Jim Carrey and Tom Cruise turned to his interpretation of eleven when the possession reveal hits, accompanied by some decent-for-the-time levitation effects.

But then I was reminded en masse of the worst of Urban Harvest, The Gathering, and Fields Of Terror because surprise! The prophecy was Gabriel's plan all along for HWWBtR to redundantly resurrect itself into a baby, and Isaac retroactively doesn't matter.

In the end, Rachel stabs Gabriel (who can regenerate because he's possessed, even though that wasn't a thing in any of the other movies) and she and Hannah leave him for dead while everything explodes,

and mother and daughter walk off into the sunset with little regard for future sequel consequences.

I guess there could be a hint that Gabriel was the baby that Luke mentioned finding in Fields Of Terror, but this franchise hates me and the feeling is mutual so far.

However, I must give credit to Franklin, Popowich, and Allen for their performances, and partial extra credit to Franklin for the Classical- and Biblical-inspired writing, and to the film itself for not boring me.

F+

I have learned many things from horror movies, from mundane stuff like, movies with "final" in the title are almost never the last one and movies with "revelation" in the title never revelate anything, to highly specific survival tips like, don't get on elevators with creepy children, don't fall asleep in a bathtub, stay away from child-sized killers if you are a blonde named Tiffany, don't move into buildings where murder happened, don't do drugs on top of tall buildings, and if your name is Jamie, your family was part of a pagan death cult, and you keep running into a crazy old man whose sole focus is stopping a specific evil, you are fucked.

2001's Children Of the Corn: Revelation is a derivative mashup of "stop me if you've heard this one" from across the horror genre, including past Children Of the Corn sequels, the Halloween "Thorn Trilogy," Bride Of Chucky, J-Ho "mysteries" like The Ring and The Grudge, and a little bit of The Exorcist and Poltergeist thrown in for good(?) measure.

Like Urban Harvest, it takes place in a (duh) urban setting, and like my sarcastic-fantastic favorite sequel, The Gathering, it starts with Jamie, granddaughter of a HWWBtR cultist plagued by visions and traumatic memories (yes, the psychological thriller bullshit is back), who has traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, to check on her grandmother, and finds that she has gone missing.

Or has she? This is an easy enough twist to figure out, even before you know the mechanics of what's going on in grandma's soon-to-be-condemned apartment building, 

but it also might sort of give an ass-backward explanation for why Isaac was a nine-year-old thirty-something in the original story. Not that I'm trying to go all canon detective on this series; I've given up on that for the time being.

After some encounters with a pair of creepy children on an old elevator that I'm half disappointed wasn't used to kill anyone, as well as a sympathetic stripper named Tiffany, 

the stoner landlord, 

the building's requisite crazy guy in a wheelchair who complains about everything and serves as a human jumpscare, 

the paranoid militant drug farmer who also serves as a human jumpscare, 

a local store owner who serves as the "black guy dies first" cliche, 

some "subtle" House Of the Dead shilling, 

and Michael Ironside pulling red herring duty as a mysterious preacher with a vendetta against HWWBtR and knowledge of the Gatlin massacre (he's pretty much a Loomis/Karras amalgamation). 

Oh, and there's Detective Armbrister, who is there to look direct-to-video-Children Of the Corn-sequel-attractive, 

be an ineffective love interest, provide Jamie with all of the exposition that she doesn't get from The Priest (yes, they got Michael Ironside to appear as the only known name in this movie, and he's credited as "The Priest"), 

and rescue the damsel in distress from exploding CGI corn.

The exposition: Jamie's grandmother was part of the Abel faction of the HWWBtR cult (proving for the fifth-and-a-half movie in a row--though it could be argued as far back as the first movie--that as iconic to the series as he has become, Isaac was never that important), and she survived a sermon tent fire as a Child when Abel had his followers partake in mass suicide to avoid apprehension by the authorities. The cornfield survived, and the apartment was later built on the site of the incident.

So now, the ghosts of Abel and his followers are marking and killing the building's residents one-by-one and assimilating their youthful spirits into his group.

Even taking the finale of Urban Harvest into account, Revelation has a surprisingly high body count. As a result, most of the aforementioned tenants (with Tiffany being the exception and receiving one of the more creative deaths) are boiled down to their base characteristics.

The Children are genuinely creepy for once (the boy and girl, especially), and the lighting and setting create a tense, claustrophobic, yet eerily empty atmosphere. Despite being highly derivative, Revelation has a lot going for it: an actual supernatural mystery plot (even if it is the "Baby Game For Babies Edition"), good cinematography, and a decent kill count with a smattering of creativity.

But then Jamie starts screaming at CGI corn 

and has to be rescued by the guy who's been hinting heavily that he wants to bang her for the duration of every scene they share, and Stop Me If You've Heard This One: the building explodes, the corn burns, and our leads with dated amounts of non-chemistry assume that everything will be fine as the credits roll.

But wait...there's no sequel bait this time?

D+

That lack of sequel bait (not that much of it ever mattered from one film to the next) was fitting because eight years later, someone thought the franchise was flagging and it was time for a remake. So we got Children Of the Corn (2009).

I picked out a lot of screenshots for this one, but I don't have much to say about it because it's an almost perfectly faithful adaptation of the source material, and most of the negatives have already been covered in multiple review videos online. But I will do my best.

It seems like the script might be from King's own initial draft for the 1984 film, before the producers fought for a happy ending and for a new script that fits an "external medium" (read: people watching movies are stupid and don't need to use their imaginations).

As such, this SyFy Channel remake features almost line-for-line recreations of the original, bickering Burt and Vicky Stanton (now played by the highly recognizable David Anders and Kandyse McClure, respectively), 

which is one of those much-discussed negatives, but I appreciate the source accuracy despite this aspect making the couple unlikable as leads. The few deviations from the source dialogue, paired with Anders' acting, bring subtle dimension to their relationship that the story version was lacking. This does make some later source-accurate exchanges between the couple feel incongruous, and makes it hard for me to buy Burt as a third act action hero (even before he starts slapping Vicky and crippling and murdering Children).

Speaking of the Children, they are fleshed out as characters like they were in the 1984 version, but with a miscast Isaac (Preston Bailey, best known as little Cody Bennett on Dexter)

and a story-accurate Malachi (Daniel Newman; Daniel on The Walking Dead) 

leading them, they aren't creepy or intimidating in the slightest (also because *deep breath* once again, Burt is a MAN!), and that generational conflict that characterized their dynamic in the first movie is non-existent here. Also like the original movie, Japheth is renamed to Joshua because people are stupid and Bible names are hard.

The corn doesn't do much, either. There's a bit of the old, Evil Dead tree stuff near the end that I think is mostly practical and looks slightly better than it did twenty-five years ago.

But most of the effects budget went to the (admittedly unsettling) gore effects

and Malachi's walk-away-from-an-explosion scene.

Apparently, there was going to be this cool, giant CGI monster to kill Burt at the end, but it was scrapped for reasons and they just went with a screaming POV throat colonoscopy instead (more Evil Dead influences?).

The editing has a late-2000s vibe (literal over-use of vibra-zoom and snapshotting), and aside from doing a decent job weaving depictions of Burt's Vietnam PTSD into the cornfield chase sequence (because hallucinations of heavily armed foreigners are literally more terrifying than a clumsy, poorly acted group of real murder-Children),

the last thirty minutes or so of the movie are painful to watch for two reasons.

First of all, watching Burt run through a day-for-night cornfield with the hallucination filter turned to nineteen (because nineteen) made my eyes voluntarily bleed vomit. Just picture this with the camera circling him at ten miles per hour:

And then there's the "Fertilization Ritual" to desperately not want to think about because "Fertilization Ritual" means single-digit-aged Children are gonna watch these two fuck:

I'm sorry I brought it up.

If you should dare to watch through the credits, you will find that the story's epilogue has also been adapted, including Ruth's (Zoey 101 star Alexa Nikolas, who gives an emotionally subtle and powerful performance in this brief role) thoughts of revenge against HWWBtR for taking Malachi from her.

I'd also like to point out that the nearest-but-too-far-away town from Gatlin is Grand Island instead of Hemingford in this version, possibly putting The Gathering in continuity with this remake.

"Drop in anytime! Or Anywhere Else!"

Ticketmaster's Note (10/3/2023): I was going to grade this as a D- because there are many elements of the 1984 version that work better, despite the 2009 version being more faithful to the story. However, another bout of marathon fatigue set in, making my progress through the next two movies (Genesis and especially Runaway) rather hesitant. I don't go much into covering the production side of things when writing these reviews because that knowledge can curve my opinion (as you are about to see), so I had no knowledge of the Dimension Films label's affiliations prior to seeing Bob Weinstein's name in Runaway's opening production credits. I knew about Miramax, and The Weinstein Company is pretty obvious, but yeah; Today I Learned that Dimension was one of their companies, too.

So combine Children Of the Corn (2009) possibly being connected with The Gathering, my recent discovery that most of this franchise has the Weinstein name on it, and my brain persistently reminding me that this movie is edited to make it look like single-digit-aged Children are excited to watch two YAs fuck,

and this falls all the way down to

F--- (those can remain as minus signs, or be replaced with any letters of your choice)

That said, Children Of the Corn: Genesis is proof that Billy Drago makes everything better.

So does a solid Rick Roll:

Not to be hypocritical, but in previous reviews in this post, I've spoken negatively about how some sequels in this franchise make the Children and or corn feel like an afterthought (almost like they were originally scripted to not be Children Of the Corn movies?). Children Of the Corn: Genesis

feels like one of those, too. But the plot is so classic that I was able to overlook that fact and enjoy it.

Genesis has some pacing issues that made it hard to get through in one sitting (especially nine movies into this franchise), and the opening scene of a soldier returning home to somewhere twenty miles from Gatlin (so based on given information in the franchise, it's either Hemingford or Grand Island, but seeing as how Grand Island looked like shit and Hemingford looked like an actual town, it's probably Hemingford) in 1973, only to get Rick Rolled by a skipping record player and murdered by Children has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

But that aside, I ultimately enjoyed it.

Much like Revelation, it is another entry in the Children Of the Corn franchise that was subtitled after a book in the Bible (because religious and social commentary disguised as horror movies co-produced and distributed by a convicted institutional rapist), and features a notable character actor as an "and" credit that is also a religious title. But where Michael Ironside was one of many "fill an assigned plot mechanic trope" characters in Revelation, I was surprised at how early in Genesis' runtime Drago appeared, and how much screen time his Preacher character was given; he's practically a main character.

Our "real" "main characters" are Tim (Tim Rock) and Ally (Big Little Lies' Kelen Coleman), an expecting couple who are unlucky enough to have car trouble in a California desert in a horror movie because the male driver wanted to take "the scenic route" to wherever they were going instead of traveling through the parts of California that look like California. By which I mean major cities that aren't on fire or falling into the ocean.

So our happy-on-the-surface, horror-movie-mean-and-stupid couple make their way to a nearby...let's call it a house...with crosses on all the doors and boards on all the windows ("even the light coming through the cracks is crosses," Tim notes at one point),

where Billy Drago's Preacher (a self-described former resident of Gatlin, Nebraska) and his Ukrainian mail-order bride, Helen (a.k.a. Oksana, played by Hostel's Barbara Nedeljáková)

offer to let them stay the night until their regular delivery driver (Duane Whitaker, who has a number of these kinds of roles and films to his credit, including Rob Zombie's Firefly Family Trilogy, Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Feast, Bad Ass, and as Maynard in Pulp Fiction)

comes in the morning so they can save money on a long-distance tow because Tim the Master Of Tourism is also a cheapskate.
All the highly non-suspicious couple ask in return is that Tim and Ally not wander where they're not invited.

So, yeah, this is one of those Bluebeard, curiosity killed the cat-type stories, and yeah, Ally ends up getting the metaphorical cat absolutely jellicled when her curiosity leads her to Preacher's creepy, makeshift Sunday school

and the boy whom Preacher has locked up in a supply shed.

Casting choices and the fact that Preacher is a (duh) preacher from Gatlin kind of give away the twist of what's really going on and who's behind it, but the movie otherwise does a decent job of casting doubt and creating tension along the way to a crazy and (unique for this franchise) definitively hopeless finale.

I'm doing my best to not overtly spoil this one because it's the only entry in the franchise so far (aside from Urban Harvest, and backhandedly, the first one) that I would recommend you see. 

RIP Billy Drago, 2019.

You are missed.

B+

Children Of the Corn: Runaway unfortunately did not present much hope for a trend of increasing quality, and managed to squander even that by the end.

As evidenced by the above title card, Runaway has a distinctive Gulager feel to it (director John and his brother and frequent collaborator, Clu Gulager, brought similar stylistic choices to their Feast trilogy in the mid-to-late 2000s), and much like Genesis (which was also written by Joel Soisson) its ending hinges on several twists and a feeling of hopelessness. Also to its credit, Runaway has some continuity to it.

Our titular lead is none other than Ruth Clawson (Marci Miller, Days Of Our Lives...again?),

who went into hiding after following through on her plan to burn the corn (placing it in continuity with the 2009 remake, and possibly The Gathering), and is now living on the road with her son, Aaron (Jake Ryan Scott, Bunnyman--there are at least three of these, so...Easter 2024 special?).

They become stranded in a small town when Ruth's drifter status and lack of identification cause their vehicle to be impounded, and a "character with a checkered past struggles with redemption and fitting in with society" plot ensues, with Ruth beginning a racially and professionally challenging relationship with local mechanic, Carl (Carter High's Lynn Andrews III),

and befriending a waitress named Sarah (True Detective's Mary Kathryn Bryant).

But the psychological thriller bullshit complicates her new life because she has near-constant PTSD flashbacks to the Gatlin Massacre (now with Snyder-meets-Gulager slo-mo and CGI Kool-Aid blood),

and this creepy little girl (Sarah Moore) starts following her everywhere and adhering to the "Critters Guide to Dealing With Assholes."

The kills are bloody and creative enough, but disappointingly few in number, and if you've seen enough of these movies (Revelation and The Gathering, in particular), it's mind-numbingly, Prometheotically, neonatally simple to figure out who the little girl is (it's Ruth), who the twist villains are (it's Ruth, but also the waitress because Sarah is a Biblical name, too, and the Gatlin cult really had been following Ruth the whole time), and how everything ends up for Ruth (Aaron kills her and becomes a Child preacher under Sarah's control because nondescript voodoo dolls work again or something).

Runaway is the only movie in the franchise to not have a Wikipedia entry, it's boring with a cesspool-shallow, unholy trinity of twists built on psychological thriller bullshit, and even before I realized that it was co-produced by the domestically abusive brother of a convicted and culturally canceled institutional rapist, it pissed me off by squandering its very premise and existence after the opening scene. I'd say, "fuck this movie," but I don't want to be responsible for what you'd catch.

F-

If you're looking to watch every Children Of the Corn movie, keep in mind that there are only eleven of them. It may look like there are twelve, but that’s only because Children Of the Corn (2020) and Children Of the Corn (2023) are the same movie. The reason? Obvious, if you are Vicky enough to acknowledge and fear the empirical evidence of a certain mass casualty event that hit its population-culling peak in the film's initial year of release.

The reboot of Children Of the Corn saw a limited theatrical release in Sarasota, FL (where my late grandparents lived for many years), on October 23, 2020, and was pulled in lieu of COVID-19 before being re-released on Shudder earlier this year.

So, yeah; don't watch this movie twice. For multiple reasons.

It's the first movie in the franchise since the original to not be produced or distributed by a Weinstein corporation, and the first since The Final Sacrifice to be released theatrically, so it has that much going for it, at least. But that aside, Children Of the Corn (2020/23) can best be described as an average reboot with an above-average number of problems.

It does some of the same things you would expect from a recent reboot, such as gender-flipping a character, changing place and character names and plot points, and engaging in "this reminds you of that thing" tactics of varying degrees of subtlety.

But on the whole, it feels less like a traditional Children Of the Corn movie (not that I have any verbally expressible idea what that means after watching ten movies with almost no continuity among them) than a cheaply expensive supervillain origin story with Children Of the Corn branding.

After watching her older brother emerge from a nearby corn field, stab their abusive (?) father (?),

and go on an offscreen rampage against the staff of the Rylstone Children's Home (leading to the death-by-Halothane of the children inside, at the hands of the local sheriff and his redneck friends),

young Eden (because Bible names and she's a gender-flipped Isaac, but coming off as more flatly chaotic than authoritative and creepy, played by Holly Hobbie's Kate Moyer)

develops a fixation with the Red Queen from Alice's Adventures In Wonderland (an idea that she repeatedly drives home in the early part of the movie because, if you remember what I said earlier, Hollywood thinks people are too stupid to use their imaginations or be creative, even though there are plenty of franchise fanbases with talented fans who can generate better ideas than what ends up on screen...but MONEY! And showing respect for the SAG/AFTRA strikers...), and starts making more references to Lewis Carroll than she does Stephen King. These include wearing a red costume wig and riding a horse to jumpscare people,

digging Chekov's Mass Grave so she and her group of highly impressionable followers (whom she convinced to listen to her every word offscreen) can paint the cornfield's root system with animal (?) blood,

and hold public (even though they are out in a soon-to-be-destroyed cornfield in the middle of Butthole, Nebr-ass-ka) executions that are just thinly disguised enough as hazing pranks to keep our one-to-three easily distracted leads from putting up much of a fuss about it.

I say one to three because Boleyn Williams' (Elena Kampouris from Jupiter's Legacy and the Big Fat Greek Wedding sequels) brother, Cecil (Jayden McGinlay) pulls a Danny Garrett from The Final Sacrifice and decides to jump on the Eden bandwagon because...he's mad at Bo for going to college without him.

That may be the lamest reason for anyone to turn evil in the history of cinema. But, oh, yeah: there's also Calder Colvington (Joe Klocek), the bad boy character who might have been Bo's love interest in a better movie, but I forgot him and it seemed like this movie did, too.

So, yeah; I guess this movie is trying to feel like a Children Of the Corn movie. Just not the one it's supposed to feel like. Between Eden's adoption by Pastor Penny (character actor Bruce Spence), Cecil's abrupt character turn, the overt literary references, and the heavy-handed environmental preaching, it's more of a reboot of The Final Sacrifice than anything else.

Before I forget, it also makes overt reference to The Twilight Zone episode, "It's A Good Life," which the Williams family are watching at one point. I don't know if King drew any inspiration from it, but the parallels are pretty obvious, and the reference here feels just blatant and forced enough to cancel itself out. You're becoming a bad movie! Now go into the corn and think about what you did!

About that environmental preaching, the fictional town of Rylstone, Nebraska (it's actually Rylstone, Australia), is in a state of economic decline and social toxicity because they relied on herbicides and GMO corn (which were topical about twenty years ago) to recover from their crop deficit, and now the government is offering a subsidy on the condition that they destroy their environmentally unsafe crops, which involves padding runtime with a town hall meeting and the aforementioned rednecks being savagely, cartoonishly ageist towards Eden and her group.

Meanwhile to this...fun..., Bo spends most of the blood-free runtime expositing about the psychological and physical health problems that can come from herbicide-dusted corn (including madness, to keep things in Wonderland parlance) and planning a viral protest movement against the subsidy vote.

When it comes time to stream her mock trial thingy (complete with a Special Celebrity Guest reporter), Bo discovers that Eden and the rest of the Children have already imprisoned the adults and set up the Special Celebrity Guest to be "sent into the corn."

How did the kids get their parents into a jail cell with no resistance? Why did Bo even ask Eden to assemble the adults, knowing full well that she was forcing a kid to jump to his death and painting corn roots with blood earlier in the movie? Why, after somehow getting the adults into the cell unopposed, did Eden then knock them out with Halothane to take them to yet another location? Why, upon finding themselves in the aforementioned Chekov's Mass Grave, did the adults not simply climb out of the shoulder-deep hole? Who the fuck knows? I mean, the Halothane callback was good use of poetic justice for what Eden witnessed in the opening scene, but the cast and crew could have just skipped the jail and gone straight to the hole in the ground. And had the kids dig a deeper hole offscreen. And not focused so much on the corn politics bullshit. And not written Bo to be such a preachy idiot.

Also, there is some effort put toward making the "the Children are crazy because of herbicide-induced hallucinations" angle ambiguous; arguably moreso than in The Final Sacrifice, because the reboot's script isn't as cluttered with extraneous lore like native environmental vengeance spirits and precognitive rock paintings. That said, the twist reveal of a barely distinguishable, wholly CGI, "He Who Walks" (because this is the age of brevity, and six words is too many, I say near the end of a post that has way more than six words in it) in Act III falls flat because we already saw He Who Walks with Eden earlier in the movie.

And the CGI isn't that good, which is probably why we only see him in nighttime scenes with similarly-colored corn behind him.

I'd almost rather it was done with forced perspective and a guy in a tokusatsu monster suit; hell, I'd rather watch a Japanese Children Of the Corn, or a Children Of the Corn anime with Junji Ito visuals.

But stop me if you've heard this one (again): in the end, Bo burns the corn and everything explodes because her monologuing about flammable corn dust and herbicide particulates was the real Chekov's Gun all along,

and like the mercury-tainted water at the end of The Gathering, sending acres of burning toxins into the air will have no effect on anything because Return Of the Living Dead isn't a movie franchise that exists in this universe and I'm an ascerbically sarcastic prick who has wasted nearly a day worth of hours watching these movies, plus who knows how many more days of hours composing reviews of them. Also, Eden and He Who Walks disappear into the burning cornfields so we can assume a happy ending.

Except a burning cornfield is apparently a Polymerization card from YuGiOh because that thing about aerosolizing toxic, sentient, mutant corn (or whatever is going on, and I don't really care because I'm pushing forty and this franchise sucks) brings Eden back as a CGI/mo-cap He Who Walks zombie that eats Bo as the credits cut in.

Let this franchise die in the corn as it began.

D

So, I discovered this while perusing Wikipedia and Google for information on the franchise. In 1983, there was a short film adaptation of "Children Of the Corn," titled Disciples Of the Crow. The A/V quality isn't great (one reason to not provide screenshot visuals), but it's available to watch on YouTube.

I won't go into much detail about it because it's a pretty faithful adaptation of King's story in terms of plot and dialogue, with the only changes being that the Children worship crows (it's in the title!) instead of the corn itself, and Burt and Vicky get away at the end (with some subtle ambiguity to the contrary). There's little to no padding or further liberties taken with this sub-20-minute production, and the story's unsettling atmosphere is preserved.

My opinion on the story itself and on faithful adaptations are two different things. So while I didn't care for the short story that much, Disciples Of the Crow does just enough to enhance the material for a visual medium while staying faithful to its spirit. Even the unintentional hilarity of the Children feeding corn, animal blood, and water to novelty drinking birds had that disturbing, 80s charm to it. Best "Children Of the Corn" adaptation, hands down.

A

Stephen King himself said that he "could have done without" the sequels, and had I not promised to stick to my goals, I would have also done without most of the sequels, the remake, and the reboot, if not the entire film franchise. There were a few that I liked (cut off two of my fingers, and I'll count them on one hand for you), and there's something to be said for the series' lore infidelity as a form of guerrilla commentary on the dangers of organized religion and interpretive fanaticism, but I am ready to set this toxic, moldy, blighted crop of films ablaze, wash my hands of it, and put the towns of Gatlin, Grand Island, Hemingford, and Rylstone in my rearview.

Next stop, RWBY Tuesday, and Stay Tuned to find out if I'm getting too old for this shit when I re-watch the Lethal Weapon films for Christmas!

Until then, please remember to comment at the bottom of this post, Become A Ticketholder because I know you haven't already, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and get the latest news on my content.

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