Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Kurt Wimmer
Starring: Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey, Bruce Spence
When it comes to the Children of the Corn franchise we've
all got our rankings: do we prioritise the road trip gone wrong couples'
nightmare of the first, the urban Chicago setting of part three, or
6(66)'s attempt at overarching narrative cohesion..? Only joking of course, as
even within the niche loyalties and wide-ranging personal passions of the
horror community it is rare to find anyone who really cares about
Children of the Corn, and instead the ongoing series seems to abide as an in-joke among fans,
who use the constant permutations of this, the most unlikely of enduring
franchises (12 films and counting) with its disparate central elements and
unlinked narratives, as a genre punchline. Let's see if we're still
laughing at the end of this one, yeah?
The first Children of the Corn film was released in 1984,
the era where Stephen King's name was first used as a marketing
device. The five initial cinematic adaptations of King's work were and
are, of course, imperial; not just the best King adaptations, nor yet some
of the better horror films, either: for some people,
Carrie, The Shining et al are among the greatest films ever. And
so, the poster for 1983's
Cujo
boasted that it was from a Stephen King story, while
The Dead Zone later that year graduated to being "Stephen
King's The Dead Zone." King's name was business, a pre-sold seal of creepy
quality, and production companies scrambled to pick up his properties with
Children of the Corn being the first full length adaptation
of one (in a start-as-we-mean-to-go-on barrel scrape) of the master's
short stories (following Creepshow of a couple of years
earlier portmanteauing a few). Out went the careful curation of auteur
product (I love it when a serious filmmaker understands and, within their
own characteristic style, explores King's deeply felt characters, which
was always the main draw) and in came quickie "moron films" (I'm not being
bitchy -for once, etc- as that was King's own sobriquet for the subgenre
of film he placed his self-directed Maximum Overdrive (1985) within).
This heralded the Dino De Laurentis era of King (which, as a Constant
Reader forever and always, means just as much to me as the Corman/Poe
cycle does to others), characterised by smaller outfits
making/distributing product quick and fast, with New World Pictures
(Corman again) picking up Children of the Corn (later
selling the rights to New Line). On close reflection it makes a business
sense that of all the King properties,
Children of the Corn is the one that continues to walk among
the rows (of low budget streaming content). Production costs are
ostensibly cheap, with the in-built Americana spectacle of corn fields an
abiding, available franchise location (although not always), and the
otherwise rudiments of the film are permissively nebulous and
inconsistent: something about a pagan god, cults, kids with scythes
(although, again, not always). It's not like, say,
The Shining, where remakes have to involve a hotel and a mad man with an axe, or the
prohibitive budgets of The Stand: the only consistencies are the title, with its poetic connotations of
rural threat and religion gone wrong, and the tenuous link to King. The
loosely defined nature of Children of the Corn means that
rights holders can apply the elusive tropes and recognised branding to any
old slasher style script...
And so perhaps these films are unloved because they are made with such a
lack of love. Hollywood veteran Kurt Wimmer's
Children of the Corn (a do-over entry) initially shucks the
lacklustre trend, however. This 2020 version at least has a coherence and
a seeming ambition to tap into the unsettling group mentality of alienated
adolescence, along with a sense of enthusiasm for its archetypes, with
some passable effects work to boot. Ultimately, though, any corn heads
hoping for bumper produce after years of desultory yield may well be
disappointed. It all goes tits up from the start really, where we see an
angel-with-dirtied-face lad emerge from the ominous sway of the cornfield
(mmmmm, always so cinematic: imagine if Terrence Malick did a "Corn"...),
pick up a dirk and...well...it's not really clear what happens tbh, I had
to rewind the scene twice to figure out that kid enacts some sort of
hostage situation at the local children's home (?- in a rural area, where
everyone is family? I jest) which the authorities decide to deal with by
pumping the orphanage full of animal anaesthetic (?) promptly killing all
15 kids inside (double ?). Rather than actually seeing this happen, all of
it is instead confusingly communicated to us in voiceover via laconic
police dispatch and by characters holding their phones up to camera to
communicate expository, after-the-fact news reports. We do, however,
witness the poignant upshot of the kids lying dead on the home's floor:
mystifyingly, in the melee, one has somehow nonetheless managed to grab
her soft toy which she clings to in death because she is innocent.
"There goes my re-election," the good ol' boy sheriff intones, feet up on
the desk and establishing the adult/child, innocence/exploitation dynamics
which power the franchise. The clichés continue (not necessarily a bad
thing in films of this ilk, as they can contribute to the genre comforts)
with protagonist Boleyn (Elena Kampouris - this entry's future
Charlize Theron, Naomi Watts?) being a late teen suddenly about to leave
town to do a university degree (just like that) with her father having to
sell the family farm due to lack of funds. There is another girl who is
the sole survivor of the kids' home massacre, Eden (Kate Moyer),
who is mental and, in one of the film's sole concessions to idiosyncrasy,
models herself on the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll. The film establishes
her in a Lord of the Flies scenario wherein her and her kiddie cronies
enact a kangaroo court walk-the-plank scenario, involving a water tower, a
bale of hay and a quivering victim. It's a standout sequence, weird and
quite beautifully filmed (although the town burnout, annoyed at Eden
dancing on his car, interrupts the proceedings with a barrage of inane
pre-watershed profanity - frick, effing, dumbass- which just sounds
bizarre). Make the most of it, though, because despite the dreamy
allusions to Who Can Kill a Child style jejune strangeness,
what happens over the next hour is about as much fun as babysitting...
Buoyed by the malign, supernatural influence of He Who Walks (and possibly
Greta Thunberg), the eco kids take on the town people whom they blame for
ruining crops with ill-advised chemical fertiliser, and who (in another
absurdist moment) laugh at the kids in an especially OTT manner for
interrupting a town meeting. The kids pick them off in broadly spaced out,
suspense-free CGI splatters, until the film ends. Along the way we meet a
reasonably effective computer generated He Who Walks (to which the wag you
are watching with will quip, "He Who Groots, more like") and there are
moments of deliciously creepy horror such as some little tots painting
corn stalks with the blood of a stuck hog - yikes. But it is flashes like
this which disappoint more, because they hint at a better, more reliably
interesting film, not the same old. As established by the news flashes at
the start, the area has internet - is there scope to examine its
centrality to youth/influencer culture, juxtaposing technology and The Old
Ways? The town is economically disadvantaged, surely there is room for an
exploration of the misguided MAGA support which proliferates in the
so-called flyover states? It's not so outlandish: screenwriter George
Goldsmith maintains that the story of his 1984 original was "a metaphor
for the Iranian Revolution," after all... In a franchise in which
attention to established details are not a priority, costs are low and
marketing is built around a vague familiarity with the pedigree, and where
anything could conceivably go, why just harvest the same old crop?
Children of the Corn is on UK/ROI
VOD from July 31st.
