The CHILDREN OF THE CORN Are Ugly As Hell

This movie is average. In fact, it’s the most average movie I’ve ever seen. In even more fact, Children of the Corn actually stands out in how average it is.

Children of the Corn is the story of Sarah Conner and her husband, who was played by the guy who started in Side-Out, the greatest beach volleyball movie ever.* I don’t know his name, so we’ll call him Karch. While driving through Nebraska, Sarah Conner and Karch run over a kid, and after worrying about it for just under zero seconds they decide to toss him in the trunk and look for help. The movie wants us to believe this vehicular homicide was an accident, but judging by the way Karch bitchslaps one of the Children of the Corn later in the movie, I’m starting to think it may have been on purpose.

So we see one average murder and thirty average time-lapse photos of the sky and various average suspenseful things which take place over an average score which averagely tries to hide the fact that it was totally obviously 100% ripped off from the Halloween theme. It’s not until Sarah Conner gets captured by the Children of the Corn that we get our first look at the cornfield-worshipping tykes of the same name. It was here that I made an interesting observation:

The Children of the Corn are ugly as shit. All of them. Even the extras. The main bad guy has teeth that could open a Campbell’s Soup can and a face that could probably stop time. Every time I looked at the prophet kid, it was as if his face was kicking my eyeballs in the groin. Even the bit players were hideous. They all could’ve been wearing Gizmo costumes and holding a kitten in each hand, and they’d still be ugly as sin.


Pictured from left to right: Sarah Conner, Yeti.

Through the course of events we learn that all the kids killed all their parents, but it’s never explained why. No not once never. Maybe they cover it in one of the 7 (seriously) sequels. If this movie doesn’t seem too scary up till now, it’s because it wasn’t, but there was one awesome scene: the fight between Karch and the kid pictured above, whose teeth are each about as big as a coffee table. Karch pretty much vacumms the cornfield with this kid’s face while the rest of the kids watch, and to add insult to injury, Karch sits on the kid after he’s down and bitchslaps him. Again. And again. And again. And again. Not one real punch is thrown in the entire fight, just a series of “get back in the kitchen and warm up my dinner” bitchslaps.

After Karch gives the kid the Tina Turner, the rest of the children instantly convert from their corn-worshipping religion and they join forces to battle the monster who lives in the cornfield. The monster, by the way, looked like this:



The kids decide that the only way to stop the monster is to set the cornfield on fire, although numerous shots of the cornfield show us that it’s on fire already. So they burn it down (again), and after the most uninspired and unnecessary afterthought of a surprise ending to ever make me roll my eyes and say, “that was gay," the movie ends with Sarah Conner, her husband, and a couple of the kids riding off into the sunset, leaving, if I’m reading my Body Count Calculator 5000 correctly, 0 people dead. Hey Hollywood: if you’re going to call your movie a horror movie, you better damn well have someone die in it.

There’s two types of bad movies. Bad movies that know they’re bad, and bad movies that don’t know they’re bad. I don’t know why I just told you that, though, because this movie wasn’t either of them. It was just…average. Two Jason heads. And that’s today’s review, which, honestly, was just kind of okay.

As the Shocktober Spectacular comes to a close, stop by tomorrow for Phantasm…the movie review to end all movie reviews. Literally.

* Side-Out supposedly took place on a pro circuit. In one scene, the guy from COTC aces his opponents with an underhand serve. I played beach volleyball for four years in college and I never once aced anyone with an underhand serve. Not even when I played on Wednesday nights at the YMCA, which, according to the sign on the gym door and the unusual number of players with crutches and respirators, was handicapped night.