Children of the Corn – Film Review

Possessed by a spirit in a dying cornfield, twelve-year-old Eden recruits the other children in her small town to rise up and take control. Tired of having to pay the price for their parents’ mistakes, Eden leads the kids on a bloody rampage, killing the adults and anyone who opposes her. With all the adults jailed or dead, it comes down to one high schooler who won’t go along with the plan and becomes the town’s only hope of survival.

There is always a special quality to each and every single one of Stephen King‘s stories that makes them so incredibly gripping and creepy. Even some of his lesser works such as Elevation still present us with interesting ideas and manage to make you think about your life and how horror is all around us even in our day-to-day lives. IT may star a deranged killer clown but it feels awfully real, doesn’t it?

So why in the world is Kurt Wimmer‘s remake of Children of the Corn such an abysmally bad misfire? King’s original story gets under your skin in all the best ways, whereas this brand-new film version will have you checking your watch every other minute, praying that it’s over soon. This is a movie that’s just over ninety minutes in length and yet it feels well over two hours.

There are so many issues with this movie to the point of sheer absurdity. For starters, the characters here are genuinely awful. Their motivations are often incredibly hazy and we can never truly understand why a character is doing the things they’re doing. It’s painful to have to sit through and watch.

Nearly every bit of the script is wasted potential. A modern remake of Children of the Corn could have been an intense, eerie, and downright disturbing viewing experience but instead what we got is a film that seems to use video game logic in so many scenes with characters traversing great distances without explanation, awfully hazy character motivations, and an extremely poor pace.

Of course, every horror movie is supposed to be scary or at the very least, creep you out. Sadly, Children of the Corn isn’t scary or creepy. I’d be willing to bet that not even a toddler would be scared of this movie. The filmmakers seemed to have thought that getting Kate Moyer to say some one-liners about death and murder would be enough, but it’s not.

Moyer definitely gave it her all here, but I just wished I saw this performance in a significantly better movie. You can tell that the cast tried to do the best they could with what they got given, but unfortunately, they were not given much to work with here and it’s extremely evident.

It’s also a film that’s hugely confusing and not in a good way. I love when filmmakers try to challenge the audience and make them think, but there’s a difference between being clever with secrecy and being downright baffling. This falls into the latter. So many crucial story beats go unanswered here. The movie is so confusing that even if you enjoy the atmosphere, you won’t always know what’s going on. Let’s just hope that nobody else tries to adapt King’s classic story.

Children of the Corn is an abysmal remake of Stephen King’s classic story complete with an incompetent script, weak characters, and some of the worst dialogue you’ll see in a movie in a long time.