For many of my age, Children Of The Corn feels like another of those fun little movies that everyone saw as soon as it hit VHS. I'm not sure how well it did in cinemas, if it did well at all, but it was a film that felt like a popular choice for us horror kids . . . perhaps because it allowed us to watch some actual "horror kids" onscreen. Everything should have ended with that one film though, allowing us to view it as a cherished cult classic that was too weird to turn into a franchise. But no, now we have a franchise. And I've seen all but one of the damn things. Missing that one wasn't a deliberate decision. I just lost track of how many bloody instalments there are in the series.
This is the second remake, using the word quite loosely. It has corn. It has some killer kids. It also has writing and direction from Kurt Wimmer. And it's not good.
Kate Moyer plays Eden Edwards, the main child at the heart of all the nastiness this time around. It's all to do with the power of the corn, of course, and action is spurred on by the adults in a small community making the decision to get rid of their crop and use the fields in a different way. The main adults to feel the wrath of the children are Robert Williams (Callan Mulvey) and Pastor Penney (Bruce Spence). Robert might have a route to safety though, being supported and assisted by his daughter, Boleyn (Elena Kampouris).
The longer it has been since I last saw the 1984 Children Of The Corn, the more fondly I remember it. I know that I'm being unfair when I compare any remakes or sequels to something I am viewing with some nostalgia filters firmly in place. But that feels like less of a problem when other attempts to adapt the material seem to step further and further away from the simple joy of it. All you need is a small town, a lot of corn, and evil kids killing off the adults. While this film has those elements in place, the ratio feels all wrong, leading to the end result feeling completely fumbled.
Wimmer isn't exactly a sign of quality, considering the wildly varying quality of his filmography, and he seems to spend his time here making every wrong decision possible, from poor pacing and a lack of real scares/tension to a disappointing scarcity of memorable characters. And don't even get me started on how ridiculous the ending is, even in comparison to the silliness of the original movie.
At least Moyer is great fun, doing her best to make the whole thing watchable as she toys with the adults around her. She's the only real highlight though. Kampouris isn't a good lead, and not helped by her character being so poorly written, and Mulvey and Spence play people you actually just want to see meet a nasty end. Not because they're necessarily evil, although it's certainly suggested that one is more deserving of death than the other, but because they're main characters who feel designated for some kind of special fate.
Bad writing, bad effects (although they remain better than most of the eye-hurting CGI from the many other films in this series), and bad performances make this a sadly wasted opportunity, considering it looks to have secured a relatively decent budget for being such a late entry into a cornfield that should have been razed many years ago.
3/10
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