“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” claims the tagline of 2002’s Corn, just now seeing a DVD release. It’s also not nice to trick people into thinking they’re going to see a movie about mutant killer sheep, when in reality it’s a paranoid propaganda film warning that the food you’re eating may have been tampered with by an eeeeevil seed company trying to boost productivity through genetic engineering.
The concept is that Emily (Jena Malone) comes to live with her father (Peter McRobbie) after becoming pregnant by the senator she was interning for. Dad’s sheep have been acting strange and having miscarriages and birth defects ever since the farmer on the other side of their ranch started growing an experimental test breed of genetically modified corn. Turns out that the sheep have been eating a weed growing in the cornfield next to the pasture, which is causing the erratic behavior. On the upside, the weed also makes them produce more wool.
Emily is worried that the mutton is also contaminated and has begun causing human miscarriages across the county, so she goes on a one-woman mission to expose the seed company and destroy the year’s mutton supply to prevent further damage. Of course, considering that she’s attempting to cut the legs out from under the area’s major source of income, she’s pegged as crazy and ostracized by everyone she meets.
We’re also treated to a creepy Freudian subplot about her father not being her real father, and how he now wants to be her lover and help her raise the child. Yeah, it made me feel pretty icky too, watching a 40 + year old man awkwardly pawing at his adopted pregnant daughter, to say nothing of the flashback of him leering at her playing in the sprinklers when she was probably no more than EIGHT YEARS OLD! YEEEEEEEEEUCK!
Pedophilia and incest aside, this was one of the most unintentionally funny movies I’ve seen in a long time. Jena Malone is on her way to being a great little b-movie horror/exploitation actress, bless her heart. Corn is like a mixture of Barn of the Blood Llama (yes, that’s a real movie) and Blood Freak (the only killer vampire turkey Christian anti-drug propaganda exploitation gore film in the world, as far as I’m aware), but without all the violence and believability.
Clearly no one involved in the making of Corn has ever been to a farm, or even knows anything about plant life as far as that’s concerned. The characters blame the experimental corn for “giving off a weed” (!?) which makes the sheep aggressive, woollier, and prone to birth defects, yet they can’t make up their minds as to whether the sheep are eating the evil corn or the evil weed, as they say both throughout the movie.
Aside from a few fluffy hand puppets attacking a toddler, and an implication that a ewe ate her lamb (we hear some crunching sounds, but no visual aid), there isn’t much in the way of the rampaging sheep promised by the video box art (which is also a 3-D prismatic affair, the b-movie fan‘s first sign on the checklist of quality). The movie’s crowning achievement of goofiness is Jena Malone’s nightmare of giving birth to a legless sheep on a bed soaked in blood, while her father leers on.
In the end, Emily discovers her father has been harvesting the weed and feeding it to his sheep to increase his wool profits, so she burns down his livestock barn and runs away, carrying what we’re led to assume is a deformed, mutated sheep baby in her belly. The next time you have lamb chops, beware, for this could happen to you…or ewe…or even YOU!
Moral of the Story: Corn is murder!
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