31 Days of Halloween

** out of Five

The Children of the Corn franchise does not exactly have a proud history and had gone deep down the direct-to-video well by the 2020s and did seem like it would be a good candidate to finally get a bigger budget reboot as these franchises go. That did not seem to go well. The movie they made played at two film festivals in late 2020 before sitting on the shelf for two solid years and then getting an unceremonious release in 2023 to basically no box office and extremely hostile reviews. In fact the movie is presently sitting at 12% on Rotten Tomatoes and while I’m certainly not going to say this movie is “good” I do think it’s at least a little more decent than that score would imply. The movie is actually as much a prequel as a remake as it eschews the “car breaks down in a cornfield” set-up of the original (and Stephen King’s novella) and instead depicts the origins of the madness with the kids rising up and killing the parents as one teenager not affected by the corn deity going up against them. The initial disagreement setting up all of this (something about farmers using hybrid seeds and opting to take farm subsidies) seems like absolute nonsense the writers made up after half reading one article about the agriculture industry and doesn’t make much sense. The film’s kills and gore are pretty meh and uninteresting as well and the acting is a pretty decidedly mixed bag as well with some of the kid actors being better than others and the adult actors feel pretty “central casting,” and the “corn deity” looks kind of lame. So, what’s there to defend about it… well, I do think that the basic filmmaking is relatively competent and while I’m not going to tell you the film’s format is wildly original its “Lord of the Flies” formula is at least not something I’ve already seen in a million other horror movies (more like a dozen other horror movies). It marginally exceeded my very low expectations, put that on the poster.
** out of Five