| Children Of The Corn: Revelation Released: 2001 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Ghost Nuts And Bolts: Jamie Lowell goes looking for her missing grandmother and finds herself the victim of a horde of murderous silent children. Summary: An old woman named Hattie Soames wakes up in the middle of the night - a victim of a dreadful nightmare. Gripped with terror, she races outside her apartment into the night. A few nights later, Hattie's granddaughter Jamie Lowell drives out to the Hampton Arms apartments to look for her. The building is condemned and barely standing. It is surrounded on all sides by rows and rows of corn. A large billboard proudly boasts the upcoming construction of the Hampton Arms Condominiums. As Jamie gets onto a freight elevator, she finds two pale-faced children standing silently watching her. She gets to room 407 and finds an eviction notice on the door. Finding a key, she goes inside. There's not sign of her grandmother however. Jamie goes to the local police station and speaks with Detective Armbrister. Armbrister tells her however that it is protocol to wait twenty-four hours before filing a missing persons report. Walking back to the Hampton Arms that evening, Jamie is freaked out by the eerie laughter of children coming from all directions. She sees a weird little girl playing hopscotch on a chalk-drawn pentagram. Jamie goes into a sundries store to pick up some groceries when she finds the two weird silent kids she met earlier. The kids are standing eagerly in front of a House of the Dead video game and Jamie gives them quarters to play. The obnoxious little fucks don't even say thank you. Leaving the grocery store, she continues on until she passes the weird chalk pentagram. A creepy looking priest (Michael Ironside) is seen kneeling over it. Kinda freaked out, she hurries back to the apartment. Jamie meets the superintendent of the building, a stoner named Jerry. Jerry doesn't do much except suck down on his bong. And if that's not creepy enough, she starts hearing that weird laughter again, coming at her from a hundred directions. Following the laughter, Jamie goes downstairs to a weird sort of nursery. This is probably where Jerry grows all of his ganja. She finds some potted soil containing corn seeds and blood. Not your standard Orville Redenbacher variety I assure you. Going back upstairs, Jamie meets a few more of the wacky neighbors that frequent the Hampton Arms. The only one that is worth bothering with is a stripper named Tiffany. She visits with Tiffany for a bit, who does a nice little striptease for us. She goes back to her grandma's room just as stoner Jerry arrives to invite her up to the roof for some barbeque. This is the rotten kind of situation that you occasionally find yourself in, where you really want nothing to do with a person, and yet you can't think of a good reason to simply tell them to fuck off. Well…I can do it rather easily actually, but Jamie's a bit nicer than I am, so she agrees to go on up and meet Jerry in a few minutes. Jerry goes up to the roof and fires up the grill. As he's dancing around he picks up an ear of corn and bites into it. The ear of corn is filled with fucking blood! Worse than that though…those two little pasty-faced freaky kids suddenly appear on the roof. They're sitting on the ledge laughing at Jerry. Jerry wanders over to them and the kids grab him and pull him over the ledge where he falls to his death. Jamie finally shows up but finds no sign of him. She sees the freaky kids again but they quickly disappear without a word. She also notices the weirdo priest standing across the street. Later that night, Jamie goes to sleep and has a dream that a train hits her grandmother. Around her corpse, a dozen cornstalks thrust up out of the ground. From the rows of corn, the little girl that she met in the freight elevator earlier walks out. The following day, Jamie goes back to revisit Armbrister. Armbrister had been doing some background checks on Jamie's missing grandma. He learned that sixty years ago, Hattie Soames was a child involved with a children's cult known as the Agents Of Satan. The cult committed mass ritual suicide during a tent revival by setting themselves on fire. Hattie was the only one to survive. Jamie is shocked to hear this, as apparently she never knew about this disturbing event from her family's past. She finds an old picture of her grandmother as a little girl with the cult leader, Abel. Armbrister agrees to accompany Jamie back to the apartment. They share coffee and discuss some of the more interesting details of the cult's history. Meanwhile, the little boy sneaks into Tiffany's apartment while she's taking a bath. Tiffany is one of these goofballs that has to light thirty candles just to take a bath. God, I hate that shit. Anyway, the boy creeps in while she's bathing and dumps some corn seeds into the tub. The seeds instantly grow into vines and wrap around Jamie, drowning her. Pretty sadistic huh? At least the kid caught a peek at her boobs before the cornhusk vine thingies pull her down. While the little boy is drowning the whore, the other little kids decide to kill one of the other tenants. They find a cranky wheel chair bound prick and push his fat ass off the landing down the steps. Then they go ripping around the hallways playing in his wheelchair. But suddenly an older boy named Abel appears and the kids snap to attention. He shoots them a look and they stop laughing and begin marching to his silent commands. Jamie is oblivious to all of this and goes back down to the grocery store. The lights are out and nobody seems to be around. She thinks she sees a little girl wearing her grandmother's hat and begins chasing her. Too bad too…because if she had stayed around she might have noticed the store proprietor's severed head in the refrigerator. I typically like to keep MY disembodied heads in the freezer personally…but they're young. They probably don't know any better. Jamie returns to the apartment and begins to get freaked out because she can't find anyone. She doesn't realize that everyone is dead, but on each of their doors is a strange wreath made of corn. The last surviving tenant Stan finds Jamie and warns her to get the fuck out of town. Stan then goes down to the basement where he finds himself surrounded by the Oshkosh gang. Despite the fact that he has a gun, the kids freak him out so much that he falls over dead from a heart attack. Meanwhile, Jamie finally meets up with that ugly old priest. This is not the type of guy that I would like to see performing midnight mass either. The priest tells Jamie of He-Who-Walks-Behind-The-Rows, a latter day name for the Devil. He makes a passing reference to the events from the first Children Of The Corn. He informs Jamie that her grandmother is dead. These kids are the ghosts of those who died in the Hampton Arms fire. They seek to kill Hattie and all children who sprung from her. By doing this, they are in some way correcting their own mistake by not having Hattie die in the original fire. The priest warns Jamie to leave town and then walks out the door. Jamie goes to chase off after him, but she has to wrestle past the little boy and girl first. As she leaves, the little girl sets off the gas stove in Jamie's apartment. The kids catch up with her and take her down to the basement to that weird nursery. The preacher child Abel and the rest of the brood come out to confront Jamie. The ghosts are now seen with various burn marks and scars. One of the ghostly little girls is that of grandma Hattie (The way she would have looked had she died in the fire). Jamie runs away and goes back upstairs. Abel and the boys chase her upstairs until they get to her apartment. Jamie realizes that the gas is on and lights a huge fire to cover her escape. She hits the freight elevator and goes outside into the front courtyard. But the cornstalks try to block her escape. Everywhere she goes, they spring up and start slapping the shit out of her. But in comes the gallant hero Detective Armbrister. He chops her free of the deadly cornhusks and the two escape before the entire building explodes. In the flames, the spirit faces of the children can be seen. Acting / Dialogue: A hot little redhead named Claudette Mink plays the part of Jamie. She's not what I would consider an A-quality actress, but she isn't God awful either. She infuses a bit of charm into her character and is actually pretty likeable. Which is a lot more than I can say for the rest of the cast. Michael Ironside doesn't have a lot to do in this movie, but his performances are always golden. Michael has one personality trait - mean! Seriously. He's the meanest looking sonofabitch in all of Hollywood. It's no bloody wonder he always plays prick characters. Unfortunately, his presence here lends absolutely nothing to the movie whatsoever. The child actors are pretty much useless. All they do is stand around doing nothing. Gore: We've got ourselves a freeze-dried head in the refrigerator. Big deal right? EVERYBODY'S got at least one severed head in the fridge from time to time. Guilty Pleasures: Tiffany shows off her gonzo bazonzos just before taking a bath. I bet she has names for them too. She strikes me as the type of kinky bitch that would name her tits. Maybe I should name my nuts, what do you think? I could name them Bart and Hidalgo. Pretty cool eh? The Good: I like the overall idea behind this story, even if the execution is kind of weak. The plot reminds me of Final Destination where the very concept of fate attempts to correct itself. But here, it is the ghosts of the cult trying to eradicate a family that should have never existed. Ghosts are kind of persnickety that way. The ghost children themselves look a little creepy but aren't very scary. They're more obnoxious than anything else. The apartment helps to highlight the kids' innate eeriness. The hallways are dark and slimy looking. The rest of the building looks like a giant dead gray skeleton. The place has got a real Shining feel to it. I think the lighting effects help this out. The apartment's presence is off putting when placed against the backdrop of the lush green cornfields. In total, the production is pretty impressive and there's a nice sinister feel flowing throughout the entire picture. The Bad: When I first saw this movie, I thought it was halfway decent. But upon a second viewing I realized that it is actually pretty stupid. The movie could have been cool if they had just done a few things differently and maybe offered a little bit of explanation for some of the more questionable aspects. First off…what the FUCK does this have to do with Children Of The Corn? Preacher boy makes a quick reference to it, but it's obviously sledge hammered into the movie as a desperate attempt to string along some continuity. It's the only reason I can even think as to why he even brings it up. They could have dropped the reference entirely and it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference. But my biggest gripe with the flick is that lack of common sense. The ghosts are so hot and heavy to bring Hattie back into the fold, yet they go off and kill a bunch of people that had nothing to do with their goal. What's the point in killing off all the other tenants? They certainly weren't a threat to the kids. And what was with decapitating the grocery clerk? Although I always welcome a nice severed head, this is simply another needless death. This is where it becomes obvious that the director has no real idea what the fuck he is doing. After reading the first draft of the script, he realized that what he was holding in his hands was pure shit. So he probably decided to doctor it up a bit, by throwing in some pointless murder scenes regardless of the fact that the deaths only serve to harm the movie's plot - not enhance it. This kind of moviemaker is what I, and many others, like to refer to as a HACK. Then of course, there's the ridiculous ending. These Children Of The Corn flicks have some good vibes going most of the time, but they always seem to peter out in the last five minutes. Once again, we have a movie that end-caps itself with a pointless giant explosion. The first COTC established that fire can harm He-Who-Walks-Behind-The-Rows…but this is a totally different situation. This time around, the antagonists are ghosts as opposed to flammable flesh and bone corporeal creatures. You don't need an arsonist - you need a goddamn exorcist! But for some pathetic reason, this stupid trick appears to work. The explosion actually kills the ghosts. At first, I thought, "Okay, this ain't so bad. Maybe the ghosts can only find peace if they are destroyed in the same manner in which they were originally killed." After all, it worked for Tommy Jarvis when he drowned Jason in Friday The 13th Part VI right? But then I realized that I was giving this hack director way too much fucking credit. I'm sure the idea never even cropped up into his little idgit mind. I bet the script writers were struggling to come up with an ending that they could execute under a flimsy budget and pyrotechnics served as the most economically feasible send-off. They likely realized that nobody was going to stick around to watch the entire movie anyway, so it really didn't matter. The lame ending is made even more pathetic by virtue of the fact that they had the means to provide a REAL ending. They had that creepy badass priest skulking about. Michael Ironside is one tough heavy-duty ass-kicker! I thought he was going to serve up some righteous penance on these little motherfuckers. But he did NOTHING! Not a God damned thing! Michael Ironside could have been completely nixed from the script, and it still would have proven to be just as lame. However, if they had the priest go in there and start spraying shit with holy water and an Uzi, that would have at least been impressive. In fact, it probably would have been cheaper to have him run in there flailing his arms around reciting the rites of exorcism rather than just detonating some firecrackers that were probably left over from the last Vin Diesel flick. So while Children of the Corn: Revelation doesn't completely suck, it's a fairly easy movie to ignore. This movie is kind of like an open can of Pepsi that has been left sitting out in the sun. It has all of the trappings of a great satisfying product, but very little fizzle. Great Lines: "Where exactly do you guys live…and when do you live there?" -Jamie to the freaky pale kids. Overall Rating: 5 out of 10 severed heads. |
 |
|
|
|
|
 |