Shudder Saturday: Children Of The Corn (2020)

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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Netflix And Chill: Our House (2018)

Science is great. If applied correctly. We could eradicate every major world problem. Alternatively, science can also provide some very unexpected results. It’s never the best day at the lab when you end up accidentally creating ghosts while putting the finishing touches on a device that is supposed to generate electricity from nothing. Unfortunately, that is what happens to Ethan (Thomas Mann), the lead character in Our House.

When we first meet Ethan, he is so busy trying to finish his important experiment that he is unable to spend much time with his parents and siblings. That soon changes when he receives a phone call to inform him that his parents have died in an automobile accident. He now has to be the main carer for Matt (Percy Hynes White) and Becca (Kate Moyer). It's not long until some of them start to sense another presence in the house, which they suspect could be their deceased parents trying to communicate with them. And they seem to grow more powerful when Ethan turns his "failed experiment" back on.

Based on a film that was itself less than a decade old (Ghost From The Machine, by Matt Osterman), Our House is a film with plenty of potential for good atmosphere and scares. To be fair, there are some good moments here and there, and the visual representation of the spirits, as black smoke trying to solidify themselves into a humanoid form, works well. Director Anthony Scott Burns had been honing his craft for a number of years before making this his feature debut (including delivering "Father's Day", one of the better segments in the anthology horror Holidays) and he handles things well enough. He just doesn't seize the opportunity to fill up every space with growing tension and creepiness.

Writer Nathan Parker doesn't help. The central idea is a very easy one to communicate to viewers, freeing everyone up to focus on scares, but he decides to give an equal amount of time to the day-to-day problems that our lead experiences while moving from the role of brother to that of main guardian. I understand why he would want to do that, but it's never as engaging as the developing spookiness. Like many films, this sits in a middle ground. It would either need to be streamlined into a fantastic frightfest, paring down the family drama to something minimal, or the runtime could be expanded slightly to allow more time spent showing the strain and tension affecting everyone while the spirits start to push their way into their plane.

Mann is a decent lead, and both White and Moyer are believable in their respective roles. Nicola Peltz plays Hannah and Robert B. Kennedy is a neighbour named Tom. Both do fine, but they can't overcome the fact that their characters feel superfluous to requirements. The same can be said for Marie, a different neighbour played by Marcia Bennett. I may be wrong, but the film could have been greatly improved if the main characters felt isolated and trapped in their house as things began to get worse and worse.

Although it's perfectly okay for most of the runtime, things are dragged down by an ending that feels horribly rote and unengaging. It's enough to drag the whole thing just below average, and leaves it being something that I wouldn't recommend to others.

4/10

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