Children of the Corn (1984)

1984
Directed by Fritz Kiersch
Starring Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, R.G. Armstrong, John Franklin and Courtney Gains

So, we're up to the final review of Lick Ness Halloween Season 2014.  You know, a little over a year ago when I resurrected this here blog from the ashes of extinction, I had a goal in mind of being able to do a weekly review for three months.  Here we are, more than a year later, and I've kept it up for a full calendar year.  So three cheers for me.  In all seriousness, these reviews really are a joy, and hopefully my (extremely limited) audience feels the same way.  Thus concludes the extremely lame awards show acceptance paragraph, and you all have permission to write me scathing emails the next time I attempt something like this.

Which means that we're up to yet another movie of my youth, seen for the first time during Halloween season of either 1995 or 1996 - I'm not quite sure.  Either way, I was in my tween years back before that was even a word, and Children of the Corn was a damn scary movie to bratty, X-Files-obsessed Lick Ness Monster.  Unfortunately, I missed out on the legendary night years earlier when my brother scared the ever-loving crap out of my sister by hiding in her closet and screaming "Malachai!" in the middle of the night after they watched it.  Thankfully, nothing that traumatic/awesome happened to me.

Quick background info: The flick was released in 1984 and was a big financial success, grossing more than $14 million off a sub-$1 million investment.  While it doesn't star anyone who is a household name, it's got a pretty good list of respected actors to its credit, as any movie with Sarah Connor, Pruneface and Hans Klopek has a cast that George Clooney himself would be damn proud to cast in any number of his preachy polemics.  It also spawned a seemingly never-ending series of sequels and remakes, and I have seen exactly zero of them.  Well, scratch for about twenty minutes of the Stephen King-endorsed 2009 SyFy film which, for my money, is yet more proof that "closer to the book" definitely does not equal "better."

Stripped down to its bare essentials, Children of the Corn is a variation of the age-old "drive down the wrong side of the tracks" horror/thriller, where Burt (Peter Horton) and his girlfriend Vicky (Linda Hamilton) are passing through the heartland en route to Burt's new physician gig in Seattle.  Both of the actors do a good job making the characters relatable and sympathetic.  Now that I think about it, Hamilton really should rank in the "slightly below main event" tier of horror movie heroines - for all intents and purposes, the first Terminator really was a horror movie.  It's a shame she never got to do more of them.  Anyway, they wind up hitting a small boy in the Nebraskan countryside, and it isn't long before a country mechanic guides them to the small town of Gatlin, where all kinds of weird happenins' are going down.

The movie (and by proxy, the King short story) really does have a pretty damn slick concept, as the children of the town formed a kind of "death cult" three years before the incidents of this main story.  Under the watchful eye of their leader Isaac (John Franklin) and his mysterious "He Who Walks Behind the Rows," the kids murdered all of the adults in town and have been running a kind of scary version of TV's "Utopia" ever since, with the aforementioned mechanic (played by R.G. Armstrong, no less) guiding every adult passing through the area to the town for sacrificial purposes.  There's your setup, kids, as Burt and Vicky wind up in the town and face off against the kids in a pretty suspenseful game of cat, mouse, and really, really spooky bloodthirsty deities.

The A-story of Children of the Corn is fairly entertaining although occasionally dopey (particularly in some of the action movie stuff with Peter Horton, mega hero) but it's in the side stories where the flick shines.  Burt and Vicky befriend the young Job (Robby Kiger) and his sister Sarah (Anne Marie McEvoy), who did not wish to be in the cult and have existed outside of it ever since, forming a surrogate family that somehow manages to carry the movie's babyface quotient.  In between, we also witness a sort of power struggle between Isaac and his chief lieutenant Malachai (played by Courtney Gains, one of my favorite '80s child actors with one of the most distinctive looks in cinema history). 

Now, it's not a big grand statement to say that casting the wrong kids in this movie would have been suicidal - it's tough to find good child actors in normal roles, let alone villainous ones.  Somehow, this movie reversed that trend.  Both Franklin and Gains are menacing, memorable and mean to the core, and by the end of this movie, you really want these murderous trolls (and their Satanic God) to get what's coming to them.

It should come as no surprise that the flick was absolutely trashed by critics.  If you're a successful, visible movie critic, trashing movies like this is probably a prerequisite for your cinema snob card.  Amongst horror fans, the movie is a bit more of a mixed bag; some like it, some absolutely hate it.  I for one, thoroughly enjoy this movie, and find it to be not only a pretty good piece of '80s nostalgia but a movie with some genuinely good performances, especially from Franklin and Gains.  And if you live in the middle of corn country like I do, it can make you feel a little weird on those nighttime drives.

*** out of ****.  Not going to win any awards, but it's a solid B+ affair in the horror realm.  Check it out.