Another week, another movie. This time it’s Children of the Corn!

For this week, our seventh in the seemingly never-ending quest to see every theatrical Stephen King movie ever made (according to our original guidelines, see here for details), we got to see the inestimable classic, Children of the Corn.

Ahh, Children of the Corn. What can I say about this movie?

No, really. I mean, it’s about what you’d expect. Ok, let’s see, a summary, ok: The movie opens with an expository sequence showing how the children of small Gatlin, Nebraska, three years ago. It seems that, under the leadership of Isaac, the CREEPIEST KID IN THE HISTORY OF FILM*, they rose up en masse and slaughtered all the adults in a bloody spree, then settled down to an odd Luddite/Amish lifestyle, where modern entertainments and conveniences are forbidden; so is leaving their little utopia. There are only two kids who initially aren’t involved in the killing, our narrator-child, a little boy named Job, and his sister Sarah, who is home sick with a high fever. Job and Sarah, the opening mentions, are the only children uninvolved because they were absent from the cornfields when the God that Isaac and the others serve appeared before them… ‘He Who Walks Behind the Rows’.

Then we cut to Linda Hamilton and some guy I never saw before in my life (imdb sez Peter Horton) who play a young couple on their way to Seattle so Horton’s character, by the name of Burt, can take up an internship; he just got out of med school, I guess. Hamilton’s character, Vicky.. is his girlfriend/common law wife. Yes. (That’s all we get about her)

For some reason they’re driving the whole way, and are currently making their way through Nebraska, Eris or Cthulhu or whoever help them. It didn’t bother me much at the time, but writing this review, I have to wonder why. They’re not *moving* in that car. They’re not even packed for a long, cross-country drive. There’s nothing much in the trunk or the cabin. These people travel light.

That’s ok though, because they’re going to have a stopover in Horror Country. Guess what? It’s NOT MAINE. Two in a row!

A kid whose name I forget has come to his senses and realizes a life spent hand-planting corn and wearing burlap isn’t actually as much fun as Atari, so he’s making a break for it. Job and Sarah (whose high fever has given her precognitive visions, btw) warn him off trying to flee, as Malachai will get him. Malachai obviously being bad news.

This little apostate doesn’t care, and heads off through the presumably evil cornfields to freedom, carrying a suitcase. Unfortunately Job and Sarah prove to be accurate, and Malachai, a scrawny red-haired boy you saw in the intro, catches up to him and cuts his throat. This leads him to stumble out into the road and due to Burt and Vicky being distracted, they run him down. Oops.

One note about some weirdness here: these events take place three years after the introduction, yet the same child actors play everyone. That makes no sense, it’s actually jarring, and of course looks really cheap. They could have just said it was six months ago, if they’d felt like it, and it would have been the same basic story. As it stands, you’re left wondering why nobody seems to have aged. Eh.

Burt quickly deduces that, while his car may have turned the boy’s bones into powder, it didn’t slit him neatly from ear to ear, and he’s not responsible for a vehicular homicide. He then follows the trail of blood back into the cornfield and finds the suitcase Victim Kid dropped, and noting the fresh blood, deduces it was a very recent assault. CSI: Nebraska.

From there, Burt and Vicky try to get help regarding this murder, are lured into Gatlin, and thus into the trap of a cult of little killers. It works surprisingly well because the boy who plays Isaac, the cult leader, is the creepiest child I’ve ever seen. He looks like the Antichrist and sounds like a demon possessed Estelle Getty, it’s really unsettling.

Eventually, the cult gets Vicky and puts her up on a cross; Malachai double-crosses Isaac, starting the He Who Walks Reformation, and forms a plan to snare Burt using Vicky as bait. Burt meets Job and Sarah and they help him attempt to get Vicky back, all leading up to the climactic confrontation in the cornfields at night, a sort of three-way standoff between Burt, Malachai and Isaac’s loyalists, plus, oh yeah, He Who Walks Etc.

The movie has some decent weirdness, but it’s fairly low on tension and has, save Isaac, a non-existent helping of scares. I’m not sure it qualifies as a horror movie, but if not horror, I’m at a loss to describe it. If Christine was cotton candy, thus using up that metaphor, then this is something equally fleeting but even less impressive.. perhaps a sno-cone.

In fact, the only thing I really want to comment on is Burt’s little speech about the Nature of Religion, where he tells the group of He-Who-Whatever worshippers that their religion is ‘false’ because it lacks compassion and so forth. No, Burt, that word doesn’t mean what you think it does. Their religion is cruel. It’s evil. It’s inhumane. But false? Because, as we see in the film, their little corn God is REAL.

He really does speak through Isaac, He really does demand human sacrifice, and He really does get nasty when upset. The movie links this with a Bible passage to suggest that, in fact, the children worship a demon from hell; who cares. Their religion, in a 90 minute picture, has more evidence than the top five major world religions have ever been able to present, in the last 6 thousand years of recorded human history, combined. Corn religion, false? I don’t think so. Burt is a sanctimonious blowhard.

Anyway, there’s a doofy little climax involving ethanol, an anticlimax that is painfully stupid, roll credits. Whoo-hoo. Another one bites the dust, as they say.

I had higher hopes for this movie. Sure, it’s a full length picture taken from a short story, which is always alarm bell territory because by definition this means added writing. But Linda Hamilton in a low-rent slasher pic? There was potential here!

Feh. Not enough slashing, not enough creepy, not enough Evil Corn God. On the other hand, it didn’t make me retch, like Cujo, so that’s something at least. Mediocrity all around.

I just wish they’d farmed out the kid who played Isaac, made an entire generation of creepy-ass killer child movies. Apparently when he grew up he lost the touch, as he’s been in nothing much, and was a minor character in an episode of Star Trek Voyager. I think I’d remember anyone THIS inherently scary. (Yes I watched Voyager. No I’m not proud).

Damn you puberty, ruiner of youth choruses, destroyer of weird child actors!

*Update: Hmm. Ok, I blame myself for not noticing this, but John Franklin, the actor who played Isaac? He was 25 at the time, according to IMDB. It seems he suffers from a growth hormone condition that makes him appear considerably younger than he is, or at least, did at the time.

Honestly, I thought he was the age he appears on film, and just good at acting spooky/blessed with a weird voice during puberty. I had a whole thing in my head, imagining what it would be like to be the Creepiest Kid In the History of Film, sitting at home around the dinner table, and every time you ask someone to pass the salt they break into tears.

So… yeah. Hmm. I’m not sure how to feel. Bad that I found the child cult leader creepy? Good?

Heh. I thought about going back and editing some of the comments I wrote, seeing as how they’re potentially impolitic in light of this information, but that’d be dishonest. I didn’t know when I watched the film, and I recorded my honest reaction. After all, when this movie came out, there was no such thing as IMDB. If I had gotten to see it as a kid, long denied the joys of those horror VHS tapes from the local rental store, I’d have never known. Well, not until years later at least.

*shrug*

Sundays with Stephen is built on a foundation of honesty. Honesty and Netflix. So the comments stay.

My good friend Andrew Leal, master of IMDB, pointed this whole thing out to me. So… props to him for being observant. My roomie too, she had some inkling while watching the film but assumed she was imagining it, since I didn’t say anything. Everyone’s more observant than me, heh.

I’m officially removing my foot from my mouth now.

Last Week: Demon Car Christine!
Next Week: Drew Barrymore with a Zippo, aka Firestarter!