Children of the Corn

This movie is very special. So special actually, I created an account just to review it and hopefully save at least one poor soul from wasting an hour and a half of their lives that they can never...EVER...get back. The movie consists of a married couple who fight and bicker so much that you actually hope they will die. The acting is horrid, so on top of hearing two people fight non-stop, its not even believable. I read that casting was only two weeks prior to production...and it shows. The children aren't scary, creepy, or anything really. They're just kind of silly. The storyline lacks any depth at all, and you find yourself praying for "the good part" but it never comes. I wasn't expecting much from a made for TV SyFy movie, but this movie didn't even live up to my very low expectations. Plain & simple, don't waste your time.

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.

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.

A bickering couple (David Anders and Kandyse McClure) driving to California suffer more than marital woes after they accidentally run over a small boy. They discover the boy's throat had been cut and, putting the body in their trunk, head to the nearby town of Gatlin, Nebraska, only to discover it looks like it has been a ghost town for the last 12 years. Outside of a prologue and a few short added bits (exploding car!), this is an accurate scene-for-scene adaptation of Stephen King's short story (King co-wrote with director Donald P. Borchers, who produced the original). And therein lies the film's problem as the 27 page story in itself isn't enough meat for a 90 minute movie. To their credit, the writers does maintain the story's darker ending that the original abandoned. Another major problem is the acting, especially from McClure (BATTLESTAR GALACTICA), who looks a lot like Tyra Banks and possesses the same acting talent. Seriously, I haven't seen a performance this bad in a long, long time. She is woefully miscast and some of her delivery is hilarious (her performance after they hit the boy and she rails on her husband is cringe worthy). I actually prefer the original 1984 film because the villainous kids are actually menacing and dirty. Here, they look like they just stepped out of an Amish fashion catalog.