Directed By Kurt Wimmer

Starring – Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey

The Plot – The film describes the events leading up to, and including, the massacre of the adults of a small town in Nebraska by their children, after the adults’ irresponsibility ruins the crop and the children’s future.

Rated R for violence and bloody images

Children of the Corn Trailer #1 (2023) – YouTube

POSITIVES

There are a couple of saving graces that not only make this movie watchble, but also keep it from being the single worst installment of the entire franchise. The first is the unnerving work of Kate Moyer as the primary antagonist, who makes the most of the awful material given to her to showcase a range and corresponding nuance that feels decades above her age, with naturalistic deliveries that remain distant from the same breath of desparation from other child performances trying a bit too hard to feel creepy. Beyond Moyer, this is the first installment in the entire franchise to give a legitimate backstory and motive for the children to overtake and eliminate the adults. While it’s free of perfection, as the adults themselves are the worst kind of one-dimensional cliches that limited screen time can conjure, but it does provide the child antagonists a conflict to escape from, with hints of deeper, darker issues lingering just beneath the surface for some of them. With any kind of attempt to flesh out their reasoning, it provides merit for the extent of their desparation, in turn somewhat justifying the prequel route of this re-imagining that otherwise adds nothing to the benefit of this narrative.

NEGATIVES

Being that this eleventh installment of the franchise has been completed and on the shelf since 2020, it’s no accident that it’s just now seeing the light of day, as this film is truly awful from start to finish. It begins with a horrendous screenplay, full of illogical consistencies and dialogue so laughably bad that it often breaks the concentration in context of every scene or sequence it regrettably supports. On the former, the growing list of plot holes intensifies with each passing minute, whether in the transportation of heavier unconscious adults, or an ending in which a character soaked with gasoline doesn’t catch fire, but literally everything surrounding her does, and when combined with these awful lines of interaction like a child saying “It’s past my bedtime” or “Child knows best”, we start to understand that even at 88 agonizing minutes that this film will never ascend beyond an awful trailer that conveyed everything that you need to know about the quality of this film, perfectly. Aside from this, there isn’t a single character whom I wished to invest in or support along the way, with abusive adults or psychopathic children being the options to get behind. Sure, there’s the central protagonist like there always is, who stands in the middle of these respective sides, but she might be the weakest character of them all, with the musical score and photography working overtime to solidify her as this environmental badass, and instead just eviscerating the relatability from her outline that you hope will end with an untimely death. Aside from the characters, the gore itself never rises to the occasion, with a complete lack of ingenuity or practicality that soils the expressive sentiment of its appeal. This movie has some truly awful C.G.I for the experience, with supernatural characters or artifical blood that nearly reaches cartoon levels of illustration that lack depth, heft or any kind of believability to their summoning, unintentionally dating this film in the worst kind of way that doesn’t feel relevant even by 2020 standards. The good times continue with the aforementioned framing device of this simultaneously being a prequel and re-imagining of the original 1989 installment, with an internal battle over the creativity that grinds the pacing to a screeching halt almost immediately from the ground running. Because this film is trying to properly supplant a backstory to this plot for the first time in its franchise’s history, it takes a little longer than I would’ve appreciated for the killing to materialize, and even then the pay-offs lack little to the imagination or expressive appeal of what’s depicted, making this an arduous slog of a film that feels twice of its run time. This aspect could easily be forgiveable if it was further used to conjure compelling characterization or meaningful social commentary for the setting beyond “Our crops are dying”, but it remains thinly one-note until the action and conflicts start to arrive, leaving us spending time with uninteresting or irredeemible people without a shred of humanity or dignity between them. It doesn’t get any easier either with progression, as the entire final act of the film is easily the weakness of the movie for me, which trades boredom for blundering on its way to an ending that is every bit silly in concept as it is confusing in capture. For this film to even have the balls to attempt sequel-baiting is audacious to say the least, but doing so makes it feel like a tacked-on ending supplanted by the studio, if even just for the way it contradicts previous character actions, to make them feel downright moronic as a result. Finally, while not as traumatic to the extent of the other previously mentioned aspects of underwhelming returns, this film’s attempt to pay homage to a certain horror icon with cutesy background touches made me angry in my seat, and almost made me walk out entirely from this film at only the forty minute mark of the experience. It can be seen when the child antagonists begin to lash out against their adult oppositions, and our protagonist walks between two crossroads, with one of them obviously and confidently displayed as Elm Street. To compare Freddy Krueger and the citizens of Springfield to this heaping piece of shit is like a backhanded compliment with a chainsaw, and only further intensified my disdain for it by now bringing other actual legendary properties down with its humiliating re-imagining.

OVERALL
“Children of the Corn” is proof that some films should remain shelved. With underwhelming gore, an illogically disjointed script, and hauntingly humiliating levels of computer-generated effects, the film wastes away the talents of nine-year-old Kate Moyer while further disintegrating the value of its predominantly problem-plagued franchise, leaving the crops condemned by the foundation surrounding it that remains unstable.

My Grade: 2/10 or F-