I couldn’t say for sure but I suspect that if time-travel technology did exist and it somehow fell into the hands of best-selling writer Stephen King, one of the first things that he might do with it is go back in time to 1977 and stop himself from writing his short story “Children of the Corn” so as to save himself considerable embarrassment in the years to come. To be fair, the story—which was published that year in Penthouse and turned up the next year in his short story collection Night Shift—isn’t bad, a brief but nasty pastiche of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” The Wicker Man and Logan’s Run in which a bickering couple happen upon a seemingly abandoned Nebraska town that proves to be the home of a murderous cult of children who have killed all the adults and who sacrifice anyone, even themselves, over the age of 19 to a demonic entity living in the nearby cornfield that they worship as He Who Walks Behind the Rows. The trouble came when the film rights to the story were acquired by a low-budget outfit and while King himself wrote the initial screenplay draft, it was rejected and rewritten by someone else, though this allegedly did not prevent the distributors from trying to convince King to allow the use of his name on that script. Anyway, the film came out in 1984 and while it was slammed by most critics (including King) as cheap exploitation junk, it did make a decent amount of money.
Alas, that was not the end of the story as the success of that film would lead to no less than 8 sequels and a remake over the next couple of decades, nearly all of which went straight to video and which had only the most tenuous of connections to either the original story or the first film inspired by it. (Actually the second, as there was an obscure 1983 short film adaptation entitled Disciples of the Crow.) I cannot conclusively say that I have seen all, or any, of these followups—on my cinematic to-do list, they came in just behind catching up with all of the Hellraiser sequels that were coming out in the same time period—but outside of the minor fun of catching a future star doing things that they are probably not too proud of these days (Charlize Theron, Naomi Watts and Eva Mendes are among those who are probably not including their tours of the cornfield in their current filmographies), I can’t easily see any reason to actually sit through any of them and I have never heard an argument suggesting otherwise. Of course, I doubt anyone who has actually sat through these films associates their content with King in any significant way and I assume that King has mentally washed his hands of them long ago but he must still feel a little twinge of embarrassment every time another one crops up.
That twinge is likely going to come back if he ever gets a look at Children of the Corn, a new take on the material by writer-director Kurt Wimmer that serves as both a remake and as a prequel to the original story as a way of offering a massive course correction for the entire franchise. At least I think that this is what the initial idea was supposed to be in theory. In execution, however, it is an absolutely bewildering botch of a film that, as they say, certainly makes some choices along the way but never manages to come up with any that are compelling or even coherent. Based on the results of the earlier films, it can be assumed that the franchise’s fan base is perhaps not the most discerning but this one is so terrible that it might indeed do what so many hapless others have attempted over the decades and finally bring the collective of maize-obsessed brats to a much-deserved end once and for all.
This time around, we are in the small farming community of Rylestone, Nebraska, a town that, based on the evidence supplied here, seems to be populated entirely by slack-jawed yokels who collectively could not determine the difference twixt Shinola and that other stuff, even after the taste-test portion. As the film begins, an ostensibly ordinary adolescent emerges from the nearby cornfield that is the town’s economic base and heads towards the local children’s home, where he proceeds to pick up some of the deadly implements that just happen to be sitting outside before going inside to begin slaughtering all the adults inside. The local brain trust decides that the best way to quell what they see as a hostage situation is to pump a spray used to anesthetize cattle inside—a move that makes no sense whatsoever but which ends up killing all of the kids inside. Oops.
Proving that their idiocy isn’t limited to botched attempts at criminal control, the townspeople also agree to let a chemical conglomerate spray their precious corn fields with a new compound. Perhaps not surprisingly, the compound proves to be wildly toxic and poisons their crops, leaving the town both spiritually and economically devastated. With no other bright ideas on hand, the townspeople call a meeting and vote to plow the now-useless fields under and accept government subsidies as a way to survive. The children of Rylestone, however, are against this but when they try to voice their concerns at the meeting, they are met with jeers, mockery and promises of future beatings. All of the above, which takes up roughly the first third of the film, is alternately ludicrous and deeply tedious. Alas, even though the film is at approximately the same geographical level as Zabriskie Point, it somehow manages to figure out a way to go downhill from there.
Of the kids, two voices dominate the proceedings. The first is Bo (Elena Kampouris), a passionate environmentalist who is about to finally get out of Rylestone and go off to college out east but who still shows concern for her hometown by trying to convince them that if they work at it, they can still save their corn crops without having to plow them under. The other is Eden (Kate Moyer), a younger girl who was the lone survivor of the children’s home tragedy and who appears to have formed her own kiddie cult that gathers in the cornfields to worship some kind of deity that they refer to as He Who Walks and do things that go somewhat beyond the bounds of youthful mischief. Weirdly, none of the adults in town have seemed to notice that Eden has created some kind of creepy youth movement that involves painting crops with the blood of a slaughtered pig. Then again, I suspect that many of them were busy trying to solve the mystery of whether there is a little man in their refrigerators who turns the light on and off.
As a last-ditch effort to save the crops, Bo hits upon an idea and enlists the help of Eden and her chums to bring the adults to a late-night town meeting where a mock trial will be held to show them the error of their ways—to sweeten the pot, Bo has even arranged for one of them big city reporter-types to come by as well to report on the goings-on. Suffice it to say, Eden and her pals live up to their end of the pact but before Bo can get there, they elect to go straight to the verdicts, beginning a long massacre of the adults in captivity while Bo tries to figure a way out of the predicament. As if the rising body count (and the commensurate increase in the town’s cumulative IQ) wasn’t enough, it seems that He Who Walks, who only served as a spiritual presence in the original movie, is here an actual living entity that is perhaps using the kids as a way of avenging the crimes against Mother Earth, leading up to an appearance in the late innings that will have roughly the same effect on audiences as the first look at the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters.
As you may have grasped from the subtle approach I have utilized in this review so far, Children of the Corn is such an asinine film that it almost makes me want to go back and apologize to the recent botched reboots of Hellraiser and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—those were terrible movies, to be sure, but they hardly began to approach the “WTF?” sensation that is on hand during nearly every single frame of this mess. From the rock stupidity of nearly every character to the half-assed attempt to work an environmental theme into the proceeding to the clunky way in which it introduces elements in the early going that will pay off later (as Chekov might have said, if you introduce an old car with the keys in the ignition and a leaky gas tank hidden in a cornfield that has been coated with extremely flammable chemicals in the first act, it pretty much has to go off in the last), this is as clumsily written a film as I can rightly remember, one that lurches so awkwardly from one plot point to the next that you get the sense that large chunks were filmed and removed without anyone doing anything to sparkle over the resulting gaps. Wimmer demonstrates absolutely zero ability to generate anything resembling tension or suspense—which makes the slow-burn opening third a total was—and is equally all thumbs when it comes to the big shock moments that are anything but. The keen visual eye that helped make Wimmer’s Ultraviolet into a reasonably entertaining bit of cinematic junk food is nowhere to be seen and the visual effects are plainly embarrassing.
Although I couldn’t quite figure out much of anything that was happening during Children of the Corn, the thing that I really couldn’t figure out is the question of who this could have possibly been made for in the first place. King fans will no doubt savage it on sight, gorehounds will reject it for the cheesiness of the effects and the lack of creative inspiration regarding the kills (when the corn monster began ripping through people, I hoped that it would spear one of its victims with a pair of pitchforks that could serve as the equivalent of corn cob holders), those with an interest in eco-horror will find it somewhat less thoughtful regarding the subject than the likes of Frogs and scouters of future talents will come up with virtually nothing. (The only competent performance comes from Kampouris but that stems largely from her ability to keep a straight face amidst the ludicrousness around her.) Even the people who are genuinely excited by the arrival of a new Children of the Corn film—I guess such people exist, though I fear standing next to any of them while in line at the DMV—will almost certainly be put off by what they have been given here, no doubt feeling that it lacks the nuance of Urban Harvest or Fields of Terror.
Perhaps the only vaguely interesting thing about Children of the Corn, when all is said and done, concerns the odd circumstances surrounding its production and release. The film began shooting in Australia in March of 2020 and was one of the only films to continue production even as movie shoots around the world were shutting down in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak. In October of that year, when the notion of theatrical distribution was still a question mark for studios, theater owners and audiences alike, the film quietly opened in a couple of theaters in Sarasota, Florida for a few days before disappearing into obscurity until the announcement that it would be getting another round in theaters before landing on the Shudder streaming service towards the end of the month. Okay, maybe I am stretching the definition of “interesting” here but for those of you who are convinced that almost everything terrible these days seems to have some connection to the state of Florida, this will serve as one more thing to help bolster that claim.