Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
It´s Halloween time, and images of skeletons, ghouls and specters fill our heads. Children all over the nation dress in their creepy best or in the trendiest plastic masked costume available. Their goal is to get candy. Personally, I like to break out the old ALF mask and become a Melmacian Shock Trooper; off to eat as much cat as I can in one night. Okay, so maybe I just hit a few Halloween parties and drink a bit too much alcohol. However, Halloween means more than just Trick-or-treating, partying in costume and skeletons, ghouls and specters. Halloween is also about cheesy B-Grade Eighties horror films. This is the time of year where Anchor Bay really delivers.
One of the DVDs that was made available this year by Anchor Bay is the cult classic "Children of the Corn." Based very loosely from a story by Stephen King, "Children of the Corn" tells the tale of two young adults, Burt (Peter Horton) and Vicky (Linda Hamilton) who come to a town where the children have killed everybody over eighteen and now are under the rule of a religious zealot named Isaac (John Franklin). Burt and Vicky are lost and they just need to find a town. However, they end up in a deserted town surrounded by acres and acres of tall and golden colored corn.
I have heard of people who can no longer go into a cornfield after watching this film. In all honesty, the corn is perhaps the scariest element of this small horror picture. It just stands there, all menacing and evil, just waiting for some poor soul to become lost and hacked to bits by pre-pubescent devils. The kids themselves aren´t that scary. The really bad creation meant to be the root of evil at the end of the film isn´t scary. It is all about the corn. The message of this film could very easily be "corn is evil." A lot of time is spent in this film showing the corn. After watching this film, I don´t fear the corn. I´m still wandering why some people did.
And, that is the problem with this picture. The corn is not scary, and neither is the rest of the film. The only real frights in the picture are a few quick shocks. There is no sense of terror or fear. The film does hold some cult and campy value. The two top children, Isaac and Malakai, make for interesting characters. Linda Hamilton appears in pre-Terminator form. The corn looks nice. In the long run (through the corn of course), this is just one of those films that is great because it was not that good, but constantly reminds us of something else that was good. The situation is fairly absurd and a much better picture could have been made from the source material.
Is "Children of the Corn" a bad film? It certainly is not "Scream" or "The Exorcist." The film is probably closer to "Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows." There was a lot of promise, but the end product just wasn´t that good. Yet, the film has amassed a following over the years and some people will argue with you for hours that the film was scary. I found "Children of the Corn" entertaining because of its campiness, and certainly not because of its ability to scare. The ending of "Children of the Corn" ranks among the worst of all time. I believe a little more work there, and less time on screen of the murderous children would have delivered a classic horror film that could have scared the heebie jeebies out of some people. This film can be fun, but don´t expect too much from it.
Average user rating (1-5):
[release]6422[/release]