Children of the Corn

I was able to get to the end of this movie, but... only because I wanted to see how this version differed from the 1980s version, and to also see if this version was any truer to the original Stephen King story.

The two main characters were definitely more true to the original short story. Their bickering was pretty nasty, but the woman was overdone in her acidic nastiness, to the point of straining the boundaries of disbelief. Anyway, their acting was sincere and created a believable tension where the events that followed had their opening.

The movie was better in many ways than the 80s version, all except for one main glaring error. The casting of whoever played Isaac, the child leader/preacher. His line delivery was slush-mouthed and weak, words trailing off too quietly, with no believable passion. For the casting of a evangelical preacher, this particular child was an absolutely terrible choice. Every time he had any screen time or lines, I just kept saying "nope, no, nuh-uh, NOPE" in my head. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief and the obvious failure in the casting choice just kept bringing me out of the story.

The casting of Malachi was too much a mimicry of the 80s version.

Its difficult to cast children for TV movies, I assume, but at least get some kids who don't speak as though they've been novacained.

If you're a Stephen King fan, this might be worth exploring. If you were a fan of the original movie adaptation, well maybe then, too. Otherwise, there are much better choices.

Everybody only seems to talk bad about the female lead actor/actress and IMO she was not the only bad actor in this crap they call a film. All the actors in this....whatever--were just.plain.HORRIBLE. OMG the movie was so poorly acted, the kids looked neither creepy nor scary they looked more like some bad teenagers from some 80s movie about kids having a Rad summer or whatever. Goodness grief who wrote the script? Everything about this movie was just awful. I turned away 15 into the film. I watched this again thinking maybe i should give this movie a chance. What was i thinking? Ugh. I wish I could give this movie so many negative stars because that is exactly what this piece of blah deserves.

This has to one the worst made for TV movie I've seen, never mind it was a remake of a Stephen King Classic. The lead actress really overacted her part, but I really can't blame her with the script she took her lines from. The children aren't even in the least bit scary and the little boy who played Issac recites his lines like he's still trying to remember them. There is absolutely no atmosphere, eeriness or creepiness which the original movie had an abundance of. This version is stale and falls flat on its face. The male lead is the only one who is even slightly believable. Who wrote the script? I had to keep asking myself did they write this for adults.

Oh, why SYFY do you keep persisting in torturing us with cheap and stupid movies? I'd give this movie a -10 if I could.

Absolutely unnecessary remake of the 1983 original, this time for the small screen. A couple wanders into the wrong farm town, where no adults are to be found. There seems to be an awful lot of somber-looking kids hanging around, however. I think most of you know where the plot goes from there. The acting is so-so, the scripting also just so-so. The so-called leader of the children looks oddly like a cartoon character, with a really big hat and spindly legs and squeaky voice. He reminded me of a cross between Mickey Mouse and a mushroom. As such, he is good for a laugh. The film has no scares, but it does have some decent violence as the story progresses. There have been something like six CHILDREN OF THE CORN flicks prior to this, most of them not worth watching. Heck, even the original was nothing to write home about. So I am not sure why anyone thought a TV remake was needed. It wasn't.

Of all the Stephen King books and films, I find the movie Children of the Corn to be about the most interesting. As a fan of horror movies, I think films with children as villains seem to work for me. Poltergeist and Insidious are two quality horror movies that involve children and families. Village of the Damned was another and this spawned others. Children of the Corn is one of the most interesting of these films because of it's originality, atmosphere and it involved many kids, not just one. This series had some sequels with the first one coming out in 1984 with mixed reviews. The most recent in the series was a remake on the Syfy Channel in 2009 eight years after the last one.

This remake uses most of all all the same ideas of the original including corn fields in Nebraska and kids with religious views who have killed their parents and looking to strike again. This time the victims are an argumentative couple who were on their way to a honeymoon trip in California.

As a creepy kid film, it is very important that there are good performances from the child actors. Here, I was disappointed in the child characters. Other than the Isaac character (Preston Bailey) just about every kid plays their part like extras. At the same time, these characters are not creepy and don't work well as villains.

Even though you could pick at it a little and get maybe something, there isn't much of a plot here. I do like the leads of David Anders and Kandyse McClure but they aren't given much to do and they really mope around a lot. There are some interesting sets here but the kill scenes are not particularly good. There are some beneath the surface ideas that do come into play here. and these include the idea of race, spiritual aspects of the corn and religious overtones throughout.

Of course you can't take any of this story too seriously, but obviously there is no way something like this could happen in our country with our government. A town full of killer kids and young pregnant girls would be responded to quickly by the police and military and would be a CNN headliner for weeks. A minor flaw maybe but still hard to overlook.

I found Children of the Corn to be disappointing and a movie with an hour and half plot that ran too long at two hours. This is a TV film that feels like a tornado stringing things and ideas around with no purpose and really just wasting our time.