'Children of the Corn' review: A Stephen King adaptation without the scares

A group of children stand on a bath in the middle of a corn field.

In a Deadline interview from a while back, when asked about his least favourite movie adaptations of his work, Stephen King said, "I could do without all the Children of the Corn sequels." It's difficult to imagine the horror author changing his mind if he ever gets round to watching this new instalment.

Writer/director Kurt Wimmer's adaptation of King's 1977 short story marks the eleventh (yes! eleventh!) film in the series, reimagining the original story while keeping the familiar tentpole of murdery children who form a strange cult around a small town corn field in Nebraska.

The problem? This bunch of murdery children aren't creepy enough, their town takeover doesn't really make sense, and the whole thing lacks the shock factor that made Fritz Kiersch's original 1984 adaptation a success.

Children of the Corn just isn't scary enough.

There are no shortage of creepy children in horror movies — or in King's work for that matter. One of the reasons the trope is constantly used is because it can be so effective and unsettling to see violence and threat in the hands of young people, ranging from gory classics like The Exorcist to more recent (and very scary) examples like Z and The Innocents.

Children of the Corn won't be joining them anytime soon. Despite the film's main antagonists being children, their all-important creepiness is sorely lacking, with the movie leaning too hard into a gory slasher vibe and sacrificing any tension in doing so. To be clear, the fault isn't with the acting — the child actors all do a solid job, with Kate Moyer being particularly effective as their tiny, psychopathic leader Eden Edwards. The problem is, the script doesn't give the kids enough to work with. The dialogue isn't unsettling enough, there are barely any jumps, and we pretty much know exactly what's going on and where things are headed from the outset.

Oh, and the monster that all the kids worship looks like an Ent made of corn. Sorry.

The film has a few plot holes.

In the original 1984 movie, the opening scene showed a cafe full of clueless adults being suddenly and brutally murdered by a group of well-armed kids and teenagers. The scene was effective because it was shocking but also semi-believable, as the kids a) take the adults by surprise, b) come armed with sickles and meat cleavers, and c) include some older kids among their ranks who can manhandle the grown ups to the floor. Is it a bit farfetched? Yes. But it felt like it could have happened.

Wimmer's Children of the Corn, meanwhile, quickly takes a scythe to any semblance of believability, with the children terrorising the adults in a way that's so unrealistic it quickly becomes noticeable. How do these kids manage to round the grown ups all up and put them in a jail cell, for instance? Why don't the adults try to escape when the cell door is opened? How do the children even go about moving the adults around once they've captured them?

Yes, OK, the children are armed, but seeing 10 grown men cowering under the gaze of a tiny child still feels kind of silly.

Are there any good points?

In the film's defence, it's clearly not taking itself too seriously. Children of the Corn relishes in gore and hammy special effects, and if you go into it looking for a bit of light entertainment you could probably do worse. The acting is decent enough, too, Wimmer's direction is solid, and Andrew Rowland's cinematography includes some undeniably beautiful sweeping shots of seemingly endless corn fields — the kind that are so expansive you could really imagine people getting lost in them.

If you do want a film about people lost in a field, though, you'd be better off watching Netflix's Stephen King and Joe Hill short story adaptation, In the Tall Grass.

Or, better yet, just watch the original Children of the Corn.

Children of the Corn is in theatres from March 3 and available on demand from March 23.

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