Children Of The Corn

My thoughts on Clown in a Cornfield and Fight or Flight

Based on the YA novel of the same name by Adam Cesare, the bluntly-titled slasher goof Clown in a Cornfield begins, following the requisite prologue chronicling a past gory murder, as lightly rebellious teen Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her father (Aaron Abrams) arrive in the small town of Kettle Springs, Missouri, the home of the once-successful Baypen corn syrup concern and the company mascot, Frendo the Clown. She soon falls in with a group of teens who amuse themselves by filming and posting short videos in which they are brutally murdered by Frendo himself—the filming of one of the videos is blamed by many of the locals for a fire that took down the Baypen factory and plunged the town into economic ruin. Before long, it seems as if Frendo himself is going around bumping them off one by one in spectacularly gruesome fashion. Things come to a head during the requisite illicit teen party that turns into a bloodbath, sparking a night of brutal murders, endless chases, a seemingly endless supply of homicidal clowns in pursuit of Quinn and her friends and the uncovering of secrets old and new, pretty much all of which most viewers will have figured out for themselves long before their big reveals.

I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that Clown in a Cornfield is the crappiest excuse for a horror movie that I have seen this year but there is a good argument to make that it could end up being the most singularly irritating of them all. Although he demonstrated a reasonable flair for spoofing the conventions of slasher cinema with his Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, director/co-writer Eli Craig proves to be all thumbs here in his attempts to simultaneously make an old school gore fest and a meta-movie in which virtually every scene seems to commenting on itself in post-modern fashion. The problem is that to be able to effectively comment on the genre with a film, you need to demonstrate some facility with it and Craig fails miserably here. Aside from Douglas, who makes for a reasonably engaging Final Girl, the victim are such a colorless lot that you don’t care what happens to them, Frendo is nothing more than a third-rate variation on the likes of Pennywise and Art the Clown, the filmmaking is startlingly clunky (when you watch a scene and realize that Eli Roth pulled off a similar one with more cinematic grace, you know you are in trouble) and while lucid plotting is not necessarily a hallmark for the genre, what passes for a narrative here in the screenplay by Craig, Cesare and Carter Blanchard is a mostly embarrassing collecting of trite dialogue, limp storytelling, annoying references to other and inevitably better movies and plot holes that one could drive the proverbial truck through. If all you want is nothing more than 90 minutes of indiscriminate bloodletting, Clown in a Cornfield might briefly satisfy but for anyone else, it will prove to be less entertains than actually being stuck in a cornfield

.Another unsuccessful blend of weirdo comedy and over-the-top gore comes in the form of James Madigan’s Fight or Flight. Josh Hartnett stars as Lucas Reyes, a former American Secret Service agent who has been boozing it up in exile in Thailand after being betrayed by his former boss/girlfriend (Katee Sackhoff). Now she has contacted him and offers to clear his name if he will do something for her—get on a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco, find an extremely high-value target, a master computer hacker known only as The Ghost and bring them in safely. Making the job more difficult are the fact that no one knows what The Ghost looks like (other than the fact that they may have a bullet wound) and that since the Ghost’s work has caused so many problems for so many people in power, the plane is filled with assassins determined to eliminate them and collect the $10 million bounty. With the aid of a flight attendant (Charithara Chandran), Lucas tries to pinpoint which of the passengers is the Ghost but things quickly go sideways, requiring him to fight off a seemingly endless array of killers (all of whom seemed to have no problem getting their tools through security) while not giving up the Ghost, as it were.

Although Fight or Flight at least sounds like it could works as pulpy B-movie nonsense, it fails for a number of reasons. The biggest problem by far is the tonal inconsistencies that plague the screenplay by D.J. Cotrona and Brooks McLaren throughout—one minute, we are watching wild bits of splatstick in which eyeballs are gouged out with wineglasses and a stoned Lucas decimates some opponents with a chainsaw (don’t ask) and the next, we are asked to listen to a number of deadly serious discussions about the evils of corporate greed and child slave labor that wind up ringing false. As for the action beats, they are amusing at first but for the most part, Madigan is unable to use the spatial limitations that he is working under in any particularly novel way and they all blend together after a while. (The film does itself no favors by taking one genuinely inspired bit of mayhem from the climax and putting it right up front, thereby giving viewers the best bit before they have hardly settled into their seats.) Surprisingly for a film dedicated to cartoonish carnage, it has a couple of decent performances amid all the flying body parts—having been the only redeeming element of the insipid Trap, Hartnett brings just the right degree of crazy to the role to show that he is in on the joke without going overboard and Chandran is also quite good as the flight attendant who proves her mettle as things get weird. For the most part, however, Fight or Flight is just a poorly constructed and executed exercise in nutso mayhem and while I wouldn’t dream of telling you if the plane sticks the ending when all is said and done, I can assure that the movie itself certainly doesn’t.