You know the Stephen King TV movie Sometimes They Come Back?  Well sometimes King’s movies come back too.  Like The Shining and Carrie before it, Children of the Corn has been remade as a lackluster Made for TV movie.  The original wasn’t so hot to begin with but it was sure as shit better than this garbage.  It’s even worse than any of the six Corny sequels that followed.  Amazingly, King co-wrote the screenplay for this mess, which may be a sign that the man probably needs to hang up the word processor for good. 

If you’ve seen the original Children of the Corn, I’ll spare you the plot details and just tell you how this one differs.  It now takes place in the 70's.  The hero is a Nam vet with an African-American wife.  There is no cool scene where the Corny Kids massacre diner patrons.  The hero dude has Nam flashbacks while being chased by the Kids in the corn.  Both the hero and the wife get killed and turned into scarecrows.  (Oops, SPOILER WARNING.) 

Now I’m going to tell you the biggest change.  It’s one that is infuriating.  It will make your blood boil.  Ready?  We never get to see He Who Walks Behind the Rows!  You know, the giant groundhog monster the Kids all pray to?  The one who travels underground like Bugs Bunny going to Pismo Beach?  The one that actually made the original worth a damn?  Not here.  Why would King spend two hours building up HWWBTR and then not show him?  That’s like making a Hellraiser movie with no Pinhead. 

Basically the first half of the movie is nothing but the irritating couple arguing in a car.  The second half is nothing but the hero fella running through the cornfield.  The only good part about this version is the awesome scene where Isaac, the leader of the Corny Kids tells a couple of his followers “The time for fertilization has come!” and makes them fornicate in the middle of church while all the underage kids rally them on.  Other than that, this movie is just one big unflushable turd that will stink up the bathroom of your mind for days to come.

Folks, they’ve made the same story 8 times and they still haven’t gotten it right yet.

A bunch of annoying teens wander into a small country town and do stupid things like strap blow-up dolls to gas pumps.  They get offed pretty quickly by the homicidal corn children and are replaced by another set of annoying teens.  This set of teens wreck their car and end up spending the night in an abandoned farmhouse.  The corny kids, who are still worshipping good old He Who Walks Behind the Rows, quickly kill these bozos too.  That is, until one of the chicks figures out HWWBTR’s weakness and puts a stop to the murderous munchkins.

Children of the Corn 5:  Fields of Terror is a bit different that the previous installments.  The kids now apparently have telekinetic powers and can lift victims up in the air and cause lightning to strike them.  That doesn’t stop them from killing people up with axes, scythes, knives, chainsaws, drills, blowtorches, and hooks when they’re in a pinch.  Also, He Who Walks Behind the Rows is no longer a giant groundhog who burrows through the ground like Bugs Bunny going to Pismo Beach.  Now he just chills out in an eternal flame that burns at the bottom of an old corn silo.  Other than that, it’s the same old shit.

Ethan Wiley directed this puppy.  He’s the guy who did House 2:  The Second Story, a movie that everybody seems to hate EXCEPT me.  Well, this movie is no House 2, that’s for damn sure.  I thought he did an OK job on the technical end of things.  The movie is really slick looking and is imaginatively shot and filmed.  Having said that, there is only so much you can do to hide the fact that this series ran out of steam three sequels ago.  It’s marginally better than the last one although that’s not a ringing endorsement.  Mostly, this is the kind of movie where people wander around the dark and call out other people’s names until they get killed.  

The cast is fun, even though they aren’t ever given anything worthwhile to do.  We get three actors known for their involvement in Tarantino movies (Pulp Fiction’s Angela Jones, From Dusk Till Dawn’s Fred Williamson, and Kill Bill’s David Carradine), two Zappa siblings (Moon Unit must’ve been busy), one Arquette sibling (the tranny one), one actor who played Jason (Kane Hodder), and the requisite Before She Was Famous actress (in this case, Eva Mendes).  They do what they can with the weak material, which admittedly isn’t much.

Overall, Children of the Corn 5:  Fields of Terror is a thoroughly middling chapter in the never-ending series.  On the other hand, it does contain a scene where David Carradine’s head splits open down the middle and shoots out flames that go THROUGH Fred Williamson’s face, so it’s got that going for it.  I mean come on, when’s the last time you saw THAT in a movie, right?

Originally this was going to carry the awesome subtitle, “Field of Screams” but those idiots at Dimension chickened out and changed it.

Now that I’ve seen and reviewed all of the films in this skippable series, I’d rank ‘em (from best to worst):  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 4, Part 7, and Part 6.

Six sequels and they still haven’t got it right.  

The only “Revelation” here is that the filmmakers starting using CGI cornstalks.  Between this series and the awful Hellraiser sequels, Dimension Studios have pretty much cornered the market when it comes to awful direct to video sequels.  

A chick named Jamie (Claudette Mink) comes to a decrepit apartment building (located conveniently next to a cornfield) to find her missing grandmother.  Meanwhile two pasty faced youngin’s who look like they shop at the Amish Gap stand around and look stoned out of their gourd on Ritalin ala Haley Joel Osmet in The Sixth Sense.  The other tenants of the building include a stoner, a paranoid gun nut, a paraplegic and a hot stripper.  The kids start offing the tenants one by one (the best death is when the stripper gets attacked by killer cornstalks in her bubble bath) before coming after Jamie.  

It doesn’t have much to do with the other COTC movies (He Who Walks Behind the Rows is only mentioned in passing) and the kids are more like ghosts than the actual killer kiddies we’ve come to know and love.  Starship Troopers' Michael Ironside co-stars as a priest with a fucked up face.  Directed without a shred of style by Guy (Stepfather 3) Magar.

I apparently skipped the last 661 entries in the Children of the Corn franchise.  

This one is the only “true” sequel I guess because it’s the only one that actually has any returning characters.  That doesn’t mean its any good though.  

Little Isaac (John Franklin who also co-wrote) the prepubescent demonic cult leader from the original Children of the Corn is back, this time waking up from a 19 year coma (which would make this 2003) to lead “the children of the children” of the corn.  Meanwhile a young woman named Hannah (Natalie Ramsey) returns to Gatlin Nebraska wanting to find out what really happened to her mother (Robocop’s Nancy Allen) who was once a card carrying Child of the Corn.  Isaac kidnaps Hannah and wants her to “accept her birthright” and mate with his son.  In the lame-o finale, He Who Walks Behind the Rows takes the form of a smirky Beverly Hills 90210 reject and kills Isaac.  

By this time the series was about as comatose as Isaac.  Director Kari (Zebra Lounge) Skogland’s thudding pacing (way too much time is spent on the “creepy” deserted hospital), not to mention the lack of gore (a head getting split down the middle by a machete being the lone exception) make this one the dullest Children of the Corn yet.  Since all the so-called “children” are about 27 now, the film lacks the most basic thing that made the Children of the Corn series worthwhile in the first place, namely kids killing adults!  Stacy Keach co-stars as an alcoholic doctor who gets electrocuted.  

Best line:  “How dare you castrate my words you fuck!”

Long before Naomi Watts fought little girls on a bad hair day in The Ring and got pawed by a big stinky ape in King Kong she was doing battle with Stephen King’s wicked corn shucking stepchildren in this dreadful sequel.  

Watts stars as a young girl who goes home to Grand Island, Nebraska (I didn’t know there were any islands in Nebraska but never mind.) to be with her nutty agoraphobic mama played by Karen (House of 1000 Corpses) Black.  She gets a job as a nurse at a local hospital where there’s a mysterious epidemic of kids getting sick.  The only cure is to turn into children of the corn and hack up their parents.  They are led by an eternally young Marjoe Gortner wannabe preacher that has a face with the consistency of freeze dried silly putty and can only be killed by mercury.  

It’s got very little to do with the original Stephen King story or even the past three movies.  There’s no “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”, no giant gopher monster, just a bunch of killer kids in cornfields.  By now the series had worn paper thin, so all that really matters are the death scenes:  There’s a dismemberment scene straight out of Lord of Illusions, only with farm implements, a doctor gets cut in half by a razor sharp hospital gurney and a crucifixion via hypodermic needle capped off with a sickle through the forehead.  It’s not a good sign when there are not one but TWO slow motion shots of glass breaking BEFORE the credits or when every single character with a speaking role has a “scare” dream sequence to pad the movie’s running time.  Watts, whose star quality is evident in an early role, gives a good performance and is easily ten times better than this mess deserves.  

Hey at least it’s better than The Ring.

Eli and Joshua, two killer corncob kiddie refugees from the devil worshipping cult in Gatlin Nebraska come to Chicago where they move in with foster parents.  They don’t seem to notice that Eli’s a little wacky (praising “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” during grace is a dead giveaway) and it doesn’t take long before he’s planting corn in an abandoned warehouse (“BLESS MY HARVEST!”) and welcoming the return of the demon groundhog devil-god.  Meanwhile Joshua is more adept at blending into to his new surroundings and does more “urban” things like play basketball, shop at K-Mart, and make time with a hot black girl.  Meanwhile Eli is up to no good, putting cockroaches in the school lunch (clearly a statement about the public school’s lunch program), putting fire down the throats of social workers and making their face burn off and converting his gangsta classmates into becoming a new crop (pun intended) of children of the corn.  

In the end Joshua turns on Eli and tries to stop him so Eli lobs some oversized flaming toasted marshmallows at him.  Joshua kills Eli which brings out the He Who Walks Behind the Rows (He looks like a cross between a giant skinned vulture and a piece of shit.) which starts slaughtering kiddies left and right.   This leads up to a decent climax when it eats Joshua’s gal, (hilariously bad sub-Godzilla 1985 effects are used) and he heroically cuts it’s gizzard open and pulls her out covered in He-bile.  

Some of the kills are creative (mommy getting a water main through the back of the head making her mouth spew out water then blood, a head being ripped off by cornstalks, guy getting cut in half by windowpane, etc.) but others are downright silly.  There’s also an unnecessary preacher character who dreams about scenes from Part 1 and 2 and a subplot about shipping out Eli’s corn worldwide (it makes people’s heads explode open and spew forth roaches) that goes nowhere.  Putting the film in an urban setting is a novel touch although director James Hickox (director of the greatest killer mutant crocodile movie of the new millennium, Blood Surf) doesn’t really use the setting to its fullest potential.  (Probably due to it’s miniscule budget.)  

Look fast for Charlize Theron making her film debut as one of the children and a cameo by Johnny Legend.  Supposedly this was the only COTC flick that Stephen King actually liked.  Hickox is the brother of Waxwork director Anthony Hickox and son of Douglas Hickox who directed Theater of Blood.  

Best line:  “Harvest this, motherfucker!”

Remember back in the early 80’s where EVERYTHING Stephen King wrote got turned into a movie?  At one point I think his grocery list was optioned for a film, but nothing ever became of it.  This flick was the first full length feature to be based off one of his short stories from Night Shift.  

Director Fritz Kiersch (who also directed the ultimate James Spader NOT playing a yuppie movie, Tuff Turf) sets the stage with a strong opening.  A bunch of kids in the rural farming town of Gatlin, Nebraska wander into the town diner after church lets out and kill all the grown ups via poisoned coffee, meat slicer, and the ever popular farm implements.  

And you thought those Village of the Damned kids were bad.  

Flash forward three years later (although none of the kids have seemed to age a day) to where the adult hating kids have taken over and turned the town into some sort of satanic Amish death cult ran by the creepy kid Isaac (John Franklin who looks like a Prozaced out Damien) that don’t allow music or games (some kids don’t go for his tyrannical reign and rebel by playing Monopoly) and worships “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”.  A young doctor (thirtysomething’s Peter Horton) and his girlfriend (Salisbury MD native Linda Hamilton) are passing through when they run over a cult escapee and wander into town where they are labeled as “Outlanders”.  

The carrot topped Malachai (Courtney Gains from The ‘Burbs), Isaac’s rival to the throne of devil worshipping tykes kidnaps Sarah Connor and take her into the cornfield.  Meanwhile Horton checks out a decrepit church where there’s a blood drinking ceremony where we learn everyone on their 19^th birthday “Go to HIM”.  Horton hides out in a bomb shelter until Malachai calls him out by screaming “OUTLANDER!” like a hundred times.  Horton follows the children out into the cornfields where Malachai offers up Isaac for sacrifice to “HWWBTR” in which he turns into something that resembles a video game on acid.  But Isaac comes back with a vengeance and lays the smackdown on Malachai.  When “He” finally does show up he gets around the same way Bugs Bunny got to Pismo Beach, by burrowing his way under the ground.  

If that doesn’t crack you up, the scene in which Peter Horton is attacked by demonic cornstalks will.  

Anyhow, the finale has Horton fertilizing the fields with gasoline and blowing up the “He”, which leads to the obvious question, if you blow up a devil monster in a cornfield, wouldn’t there be popcorn for everybody?  

You know after defeating a hulking android from the future in The Terminator, you’d think Hamilton could have taken out a bunch of pint sized devil worshipping runts.  The performances are okay but the film never manages to top the excellent diner massacre scene and slows waaay down in the middle section.  

I guess that’s what you get when you turn an 11 page story into a 90 minute movie.  

Franklin returned to the series fifteen years later for Children of the Corn 666.  Followed years later by several direct to video sequels.