Though I have not, until recently, been much of a fan of horror cinema, I was a big Stephen King fan for a few years as I finished up high school and through college. I think I read just about all his books back then except, oddly enough, the various Dark Tower novels. But I do remember the short story “Children of the Corn”. In it, a young married couple, bickering heavily in a long cross-country car ride, have their car break down in a farm town, run from the only inhabitants in the form of a bunch of oddly religious children, and then both are killed by a demon in the cornfields. A postscript has the kids in town being punished when the demon lowers the age they are allowed to live to and a few of the older kids immediately troop off into the corn to die as reflected on by one boy’s pregnant girlfriend. It was a pretty memorable story, with King himself more or less using a similar plot for another short story “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, though King denies doing that on purpose.
But the key word up there is “short”. I don’t think the original story is more than maybe 15 pages long. And yet, somehow, someone made a movie out of it that spawned a few sequels. How do you make even a short feature length film out of a short story? Well, I opted to find out and watched the 1984 adaptation Children of the Corn.
After a brief prologue, narrated by a kid named Job, where all the kids in a fictional Iowa farm community suddenly murder all the adults (save one) under the orders of religious fanatic Issac (John Franklin), we get to young couple Burt Stanton (Peter Horton) and Vicky Baxter (Linda Hamilton). Burt is an aspiring doctor headed west to start his internship, but things get weird when they try to travel through the town of Gatlin. First, Burt hits a kid, but the boy was already dead from the looks of things. Second, the two can’t get to a phone to call for help. The old man running the garage (R,G. Armstrong) seems to just want them to go away and forget about spending any time in town, but somehow, the couple can’t seem to find their way out of the endless cornfields and end up in Gatlin anyway. But the kids are still there, and they still don’t like adults all that much.
But that doesn’t even get into the whatever it is that walks behind the rows.
So, all things being equal, this movie wasn’t all that scary. Heck, I found it weird Armstrong gets third billing above all the child actors and he’s in the movie for maybe twenty minutes. Sure, as the movie opens and the children–save Job and his sister Sarah–massacre all the adults in a rather effective way, the problem is, well, they’re still kids. Some older teens might be more dangerous, but once Burt actually has to deal with them, he rather easily pins and smacks around the biggest boy in the group. It’s not even a contest.
Heck, it’s also really weird seeing Hamlton being, essentially, a damsel in distress. True, she made this one before she appeared in The Terminator, but she’s known primarily as one of the toughest women in cinema for a reason.
But as horror goes, Children of the Corn isn’t scary. When the crazy religious kids finally decide to kill Armstrong and his dog (you know people are bad when they just kill a dog for no reason), it doesn’t surprise much. There aren’t really anything effective in jump scares or atmosphere. I just never felt these children were all that threatening, especially considering how often they seemed to back off with just a shout or a stern look from Burt.
That said, there are two things going for this movie. The special effects look pretty good in places for 1984, and then there’s John Franklin as the child leader Issac. Franklin was actually in his early twenties when he got this role, but he does come across as a legit creepy 12 year old. Yes, he’s over twenty and playing 12 in this movie. He’s short and has a youthful appearance, but he brings an intensity to the role that fits for his evil cult leader type of character. But overall, though the movie doesn’t run very long, it isn’t scary, and outside of Franklin’s performance, isn’t very memorable. Read the short story and the collection it came in instead.
Grade: C-
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