| Children Of The Corn Released: 1984 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Demon / Cult Nuts And Bolts: Every kid in the town of Gatlin spontaneously goes apeshit and kills all of the adults. To make matter worse, they follow the orders of a little shrimp who is the mouthpiece for a demonic shit-kicker known as He-Who-Walks-Behind-The-Rows (Or Mister He-Who-Walks-Behind-The-Rows as he likes to be called). Summary: Three years ago in the Podunk town of Gatlin, Nebraska: Local preacher Isaac Chroner convinces the town’s children that the adults of the community ain’t worth a shit and they should go off and kill them all. On a Sunday morning while everyone is in church, Isaac and his boys take their positions. They wait until church lets out and then systematically slaughter every single adult. Three years later we meet Burton Stanton and his wife (girlfriend?) Vicky. Burt’s a doctor who has just busted his ass to get an internship at a big city hospital. It also happens to be his birthday. His wife Vicky (Linda Hamilton) wakes him up and does some silly ass song and dance routine. Then they hop in their car and head off to the city. In Gatlin, there’s a kid named Joseph who has had enough of listening to preacher Isaac’s bullshit and wants to blow town. His young friends Job and Sarah try to talk him out of it. Mostly because Isaac’s numero uno enforcer Malachai is a buck-toothed horse-faced angry little S.O.B. and he don’t mind taking out his aggressions on some little hick kid by way of a machete. But Joseph says, “Fuck this shit!” and heads out through the cornfields. Horse boy discovers Joseph’s betrayal and takes off after him. Just before Joseph can get to the highway, Malachai slices the kid’s throat with a machete. Joseph is dying but manages to stumble out into the middle of the road. Not the best of moves all things considered. No sooner does he take two steps then Burt plows him over with his car. Burt and Vicky are already frustrated because they’ve been driving through endless miles of nothing but corn. And now some stupid-ass dead kid has to waddle his bleeding ass out onto the highway and fuck up everybody’s afternoon. Naturally Burt stops to check the kid out. He quickly realizes that something isn’t kosher here and he loads the kid and his suitcase into the trunk of their car. They begin driving around desperate to find someplace that may have a telephone to call the police. Later on, Malachi goes to the house formerly occupied by Job and Sarah’s parents. He finds the kids playing Monopoly and playing records –two things that are forbidden by Isaac’s cult (Don’t ask me where they get the electricity to run the damn thing). Malachai takes the kids to Isaac who maintains his little revival in the middle of a cornfield. Mal doesn’t care for Job and Sarah to begin with because he recognizes that they are unbelievers. Now Isaac is a little midget preacher dude with a squeaky little bitch voice who squawks on about how he is the messenger for their God, He-Who-Walks-Behind-The-Rows (whom I shall refer to as HWWBTR for the sake of brevity. Christ…even the acronym is too fucking long. I’ll just call him HW. Y’all know who I’m talking about). Anyway, HW is the type of devil-god sort of dude who forbids anything that could possibly be construed as fun. Through Isaac, he had the Gatlin children destroy all of the TVs and stereos in town. Anyway, Isaac forgives Sarah’s transgression because she has the gift of sight. Sarah has visions of the future and translates that power through her little crayon drawings. Crayon drawings are likewise against the law. But Isaac listens to Sarah’s prophecies and then tells the rest of the kids that HW gave him the visions. Lying little fuckface. Meanwhile, Burt and Vicky are still driving around aimlessly. They come upon a gas station run by some old crusty dude. Now the only reason this guy is even alive, is because Isaac’s cult needs someone to misdirect any curious passerby who may wander into town. Burt wants to use the old man’s phone but he doesn’t have one. The mechanic’s dog Sarge sniffs something funky in the air and tears ass into the cornfields. The mechanic tries to call him back but it doesn’t do any good. Burt and Vicky soon leave. Malachai and the others kill Sarge and then ambush the old fuck in his garage. They think he betrayed them, even though he didn’t. They kill him with a bunch of farming equipment. Burt and Vicky continue driving around lost. Isaac learns of the fate of Joseph and warns the cult that HW is displeased because a proper offering was not given. He tells the cult that two adult interlopers will soon be coming to the town. They’re presence is a sign of HW’s displeasure and they are being sent to Gatlin as a test. Here we see the rotted corpse of a police officer named Hodgkins tied up to a crucifix made of corn. They refer to the dead cop as the Blue Man. Burt and Vicky finally arrive in Gatlin and begin scooping out the town. Every place in town is overrun with leaves of rotted cornhusks. They find Hansen’s diner, which has been overrun by rats. A group of kids try stealing Burt’s car, but he chases them off. They drive around town for a bit until they come upon a farmhouse. Entering the house, they find little Sarah. Vicky asks Sarah where her parents are and she tells them they are in the cornfield. Presumably, that’s where all of the adults are buried. Burt leaves Vicky with Sarah and goes off to explore the town. He goes to City Hall, which looks pretty much like the rest of the town. His Spidey-danger sense goes off and he races back to the farmhouse suspecting that Vicky may be in trouble. Well, he happens to be right. Malachai and a few of his brood track down the “interloper” and kidnap Vicky. They bring her back to Isaac’s clearing and string her up to one of those silly looking corn crosses. Burt asks Sarah what has happened to Vicky, but she is too scared to be of any use. Burt continues searching the town until he hears the bells of a nearby church. Inspecting the church, he finds a group of kids celebrating the birthday of a guy named Amos. But this birthday party doesn’t come with cake, clowns or balloons. In Gatlin, once you reach the age of 19, you are sacrificed to He-Who-Walks-Behind-The-Rows. Some weirdo cult priestess named Rachel begins drinking a cup or Amos’ blood when Burt busts in there. Pissed off all to Hell, he disrupts the ritual and tells the kids how stupid they are. Rachel spins around and plants a corncob knife into his shoulder. The other churchgoers begin to descend upon him, but Burt runs from the church. As he’s running around he meets Job, Sarah’s brother. Job hides Burt in the cellar of his father’s home giving Burt enough time to dress his wounds. Back in the corn, Malachai suggests that they release Vicky and use her as bait to get Burt. Isaac is adamant that such an action would be a sacrilege. Malachai is pretty much tired of playing second fiddle to a guy who is half his height. He finds that Isaac has become weak and no longer pursues the cult’s goals as aggressively as he once did. He pushes Isaac to the ground and orders Vicky to be let down. He has Isaac propped up on the cross in her place. HW makes his invisible presence known by sending a charge of mystical energy up Isaac’s body and blasting the little ankle-biter a mile into the sky. Grabbing Vicky by the arm, Malachai goes into town and begins shouting for Burt. A bunch of Malachai’s goons find him and chase him all over the abandoned streets. He eventually doubles around backward through the fields and winds up at the ceremony where the kids plan to offer Amos up as a sacrifice to their god. He gets into a fight with Malachai and beats the living shit out of him. Wrestling him to the ground, he starts slapping the crap out of him until the horse-faced boy is nearly in tears. But at that moment, Isaac is resurrected and it becomes quite clear that he is possessed by He-Who-Walks-Behind-The-Rows. Isaac grabs Malachai about the neck with one hand and crushes his throat. Burt uses this incident as a chance to run away. By now, HW is showing everyone that he is pretty pissed off that these little hicks can’t kill two simple outlanders. The clouds grow dark and ominous and hurricane force winds begin ripping through the fields. Burt grabs Vicky and meets back up at the cellar with Job and Sarah. Job explains to him that the Blue Man was once a police officer who tried to stop Isaac. His plan was to link some connecting hoses from an alcohol distillery to the irrigation plant for the fields and burn the fields down. But Malachai killed him before he got the chance. Burt decides to finish the job that Officer Hodgkins started. As the wind is whipping around everyone, Burt and Job reconnect some fire hoses from the distillery tanks to the sprinkler networks out in the cornfields. They don’t have much time though because a big red cloud of smoke is looming over the horizon. HW begins tunneling through the fields looking to stop Burt and Job. They make all the necessary connections and begin dousing the cornfields in sour mash. Burt makes a molotov cocktail and chucks it into the field setting the whole thing on fire. Apparently fire is the only thing that will really piss HW off. There is a huge explosion in the middle of the field and a column of mystical flame arcs its way straight up into the night. It coalesces into a demonic looking visage and then disappears. The fields are destroyed and the presence of He-Who-Walks-Behind-The-Rows has disappeared. Presumably, he took Isaac and Malachai with him. Burt and Vicky decide to adopt Job and Sarah and the group decides to go to the town of Hemmingford, some twenty miles away. As a last little bit of excitement, that freaky priestess chick Rachel is hiding inside Burt’s car. She tries to stab him again, but Burt slams the door in her face knocking her out. Rather than take the car, the group decides to walk to Hemmingford instead. Acting / Dialogue: The performances by Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton (Burt and Vicky) are decent overall. But Burt bears an uncanny resemblence to action movie director Michael Bay in this film, and that is certainly not a check in the plus column. Most of the kids suck ass, but what do you expect? They’re little kids. The weirdest one of the whole group is John Franklin. I cannot imagine anyone other than Franklin playing the role of Isaac Chroner. When you watch him, its hard to tell if he is an adult male who looks like a little kid, or a little kid pretending to be an adult. The actor himself was only seventeen when he did the film, but as you watch him, you would think that he was actually much older. This is a perfect if odd combination since the Chroner character was meant to be the wizened sage of the group. The dude who plays Malachai is just freaky. He’s an ugly skinny little geek, but despite all that he cuts a pretty intimidating jib. Malachai is a cauldron of rage just begging to boil over and actor Courtney Gains charges his performance up with great energy. He’s like a wild animal just waiting to be let loose. It’s a shame he dies in this film actually, because I think he would make a great re-occurring villain for the 700 ensuing sequels. Gore: Believe it or not, this movie is rated R. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why. The blood is pretty minimal. We see a couple of sliced throats in the beginning of the flick and that’s just about it. The gore in this movie wouldn’t even warrant a parental discretion advisory on a prime time WB program. No gore, no titties and only one curse word throughout the entire thing. I’ve seen more blood-n-guts in the Swedish Chef skit on the Muppet Show. Guilty Pleasures: My favorite scene in the whole movie is when Burt smears Joseph with his car. Sure, it may not be as classic as the bicycle boy scene from Toxic Avenger, but its still good nonetheless. Now some of you are probably thinking, “What kind of sick fuck gets off watching a little kid get plastered by a car?” But I choose to look at it like this. Children are the last great sacrilege. As each new generation passes, movies become racier and racier and we push the envelope each year in our efforts to bastardize that which was once sacrosanct. Female characters are no longer creatures of virtue. They are now presented to us as objects of titillation. We dashed racial sensitivity upon the rocks decades ago. And even cute and fuzzy animals are no longer protected from the gruesome vagaries of a horror movie psycho. But for some reason, there’s always been this hands-off policy when it comes to killing kids in movies. Sure, kids die…but never in any kind of graphic detail. It’s always some somber off-screen affair. So when I see some kid receive a gruesome gory comeuppance in a horror film, my reaction is not one of total glee at watching some young weak, fragile thing get desecrated – but its more about the satisfaction of seeing a movie take that extra step towards tarnishing that which was once untouchable. Now that may not make a whole helluva lot of sense to some people – and truthfully, I’m having trouble digesting it myself. But this is HORROR we are talking about here. It’s not supposed to be safe and sanitized. Children are not exempt from the terrors of the real world, so I don’t see why an exception should be made for them in movies as well. That being said, Joseph’s death is not overly graphic. No more so, than any other death in any other movie. But it warms my heart to know that the producers of this movie had the balls to even tackle such a thing. In many ways, I find it therapeutic as well. Watching greedy little fucks getting plastered on screen allows me the ability to vent my aggressions. I satisfy my baser primordial desires by laughing my head off as a set of whitewalls squashes little Joey’s head into the tarmac. By engaging these dark perversions, I do not feel the need to take my aggressions out on others. This makes it a little safer for the cutesy little girl-scout who wants to come knocking on my door on a Sunday armed with a box of stale overpriced cookies. Because of movies like this, that little girl-scout gets to breathe fresh air for another day. Who knows how I might behave if I didn’t have violent movies as a channel for my anxieties? I think the cookie-pimping little bitch should be fucking grateful. But that’s just me. The Good: I remember really digging this flick when I was a kid, and surprisingly I still like it. There’s a perfect chemistry flowing between all of the major elements. The music is really kick-ass. It’s a subtle version of that creepy chamber music opera shit like in the Omen movies. This kind of music can be tricky at times, and can easily be mishandled and turn your movie into a melodramatic overture of pretentiousness (Kinda like that last statement). But composer Jonathan Elias uses his material in the most effective ways without being cheesy or overbearing. For a movie like Children Of The Corn, you need this gothic style music or else it would be difficult to illustrate the true villainy of these little kids. Let’s face it…kids aren’t really that scary. They’re messy, they’re irritating and they’re noisy…but hardly scary. So director Fritz Kiersch had quite a challenge on his hands when it came to handling the little crumb-grinders corn crunchers. Keirsch is careful not to give us a bunch of blank expressionless silent little bastards ala Village Of The Damned. It’s easy to believe that these kids are genuinely part of a cult and are being manipulated. A few of the kids are even wise enough to challenge Isaac’s law, including Malachai himself. Isaac and Malachai make great villains. They’re as creepy as they are weird. Although they’re snotty little punks, they don’t come off as laughable. Now as many of you may know, Children Of The Corn was based on a short story written by horror maestro Stephen King. It can be found in the Night Shift collection, although I hardly recommend it. It’s one of King’s earliest stories and it shows. It’s pretty fucking weak actually. But King’s early work is usually chock full of potential. Even as I read it, it was easy to see how some imaginative screen writer could take this ball and run with it. I think the setting goes a long way towards making this film as well. As intended, the cornfields are actually the dominant character in the movie. Kiersch orchestrates a vibrant persona towards the set that literally makes it come alive. He places key pieces of music at certain scenes where the corn is present. We watch it infecting not only the town, but the diseased minds of the children as well. Early on we catch a whiff of the supernatural as we find sprouts of cornhusks growing out of Burt’s car after only a couple of minutes. The sinister nature of the corn becomes more evident later on when several rows of the stuff actually part like the Red Sea luring Burt into a potential trap. The end result is a nice creepy vibe that remains steady throughout the course of the film. I detest using a cliché like “leave you sitting on the edge of your seat”, but if any movie is deserving of hat overused hyperbole, I think it’s definatley Children Of The Corn. The Bad: It’s time to call the Logic Police! When dealing with films like this, there are always going to be occasions when you have to take anything resembling common sense and flush it down the fucking toilet along with last night’s meatloaf. Experienced Horror fans routinely do this so often, that its damn near rote. But those who like to over-analyze movies to the point of ludicrousness will never be able to understand nor appreciate logistical anomalies such as: sending up a team of deep-core drillers to blow up an asteroid. If you are one of those types, then stay away from Children Of The Corn and bore yourself to tears watching self-important artsy shit like Lost In Translation. The biggest slap to the forehead that this movie presents is the fact that we are dealing with a cult that has acted independently in this town without discovery for three years. This is to further suggest that every single adult who lived in Gatlin was related to every other adult in Gatlin. Obviously they had no relatives who lived out of state. Don’t you think somebody’s son or daughter would get suspicious when their grandma fails to take their phone calls? Wouldn’t the Power Company think it kind of odd that every client in the entire town forgot to pay their electric bill? We are further led to believe that this berg drops off the face of the map, and only ONE cop goes in to investigate? And how come nobody followed up when he failed to report in? Did his boss just say, “Fuck it, Charlie’s prolly off cornholing a drunk somewhere”? I don’t care how small your little Podunk town seems to be; you simply can’t kill everybody and NOT expect to get caught – even in Nebraska. The other lamoid aspect to this movie is the lack of any serviceable monster. For an hour and a half we listen to these dirty little brats whine on endlessly about He-Who-Walks-Behind-The-Rows. But when it comes to crunch time, all we get is evidence of an over-sized mole! That’s it! A giant fucking MOLE that we don’t even get to see! We see his little dirt trails bubbling up all throughout the field. And we also see some silly looking cartoon face forming in the cloud of exploding corn. Christ, at least the loser from Jeepers Creepers turned out to be a real monster. But this guy isn’t even as impressive as a psychopathic garden gnome. I also think the death of Isaac was pretty fucking pathetic. We see this shitty energy trail spiraling up his body to consume him. Super weak. The animation is so crappy that it looks like something some kid did on his Commodore 64. I suppose I should excuse it because it’s the 80s, but fuck that. If George Lucas can have an 80-foot Rancor running around trying to smear Luke Skywalker with his own fecal matter, then I expect this guy can come up with something a bit more impressive than some crappy gay energy sparkles. Despite the anti-climatic ending, Children Of The Corn is still a pretty enjoyable flick. If you can get past these lame elements, I think you’ll find a movie that is heavy on intensity and atmosphere and stands the test of time. Great Lines: “Behold, a dream did come to me in the night and the lord did show all this to me. In the dream the lord did come to me he was a shape, it was He Who Walks Behind the Rows, and I did fall on my knees in terror, and hide my eyes that the fearfullness of his face strike me dead, and he told me all that has since happened, he said Joseph has taken his things and fled this happy place because the worship of me is no longer upon him, so take you his life and spill his blood. I brought you upon this earth, but let not the flesh pollute the corn, cast him instead upon the rows!” –Isaac preachifying. Sadly, the dialogue here is not nearly as corny as half the shit we hear Morpheus babbling about in the Matrix movies. “He wants you too, Malachai! He wants you too!” –Demonic Isaac speaking to Malachai Overall Rating: 7 out of 10 severed heads. |
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