REVIEW: Children of the Corn (1984)

For a horror fan, is there any higher example of the genre than Stephen King? Don’t answer that with some really old or obscure reference that most people wouldn’t get. But seriously, though he can get overdramatic and his stories can go on a little TOO long, I really like King’s work. I think he’s got a great style, some really cool and creative ideas and a real knack for scaring the shit out of his audiences, from his humble start in the 70s to the modern day where he’s revered as a God of popular literature. Which he rightly deserves.

But really, are the movies based on his works any good? Some of them, like IT, The Stand and the Bag of Bones TV movie from last year, are pretty poor and underwhelming, and while not all bad, fail to capture what makes his books so great. Paradoxically this happens by sticking too close to the source material, which thus robs the movies of having any individuality or style of their own. While I understand wanting to stay faithful to the books and stories the movies are based off of, I think there is something to be said with taking creative liberties and doing one’s own thing with a popular story. Which is why the Children of the Corn movie is so good!

Director: Fritz Kiersch

Starring: Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton

IMDb

Yes, I actually do not hate this movie – is that a miracle of my review blog or what? Usually I rip stuff a new one on here. But this movie I actually thought was really very good. Oh, I don’t mean there’s nothing to make fun of; just that I don’t regret watching it like I do a lot of the other shit I’ve been watching lately for this site…let’s dig into this festival of eerie and campy horror fun, Children of the Corn.

We start off with some goofy narration from a little boy while we see a bunch of people in a diner slaughtered bloodily:

Charming…very charming. And oddly enough that does not scar the little boy for life as he just keeps on narrating as happily as he can overtop these morbid scenes. It fits about as well as peanut butter on a turkey sandwich. And if that wasn’t jarring enough for you, the next thing we see is THIS:

Yes, that’s right, we follow up a bloody death scene with another scene of Linda Hamilton singing an 80s pop song to her husband Peter Horton on his birthday. It’s weird, embarrassing and kind of creepy, and even Horton himself seems to agree as he puts the covers back over his head and tries to escape the reality of the crazy woman he married. Luckily she never sings anything again in the movie. And at least they’re not our main characters---

Dammit! So we have to put up with these two white-as-whitebread squares for the rest of the movie?! Yes, I just said “squares”…that’s what the sheer cheesiness of these characters has done to me…

Anyway, so we see two kids, Job and Sarah, ordered around by some other kid, and we learn that they’re not allowed to have any fun. They’re not allowed to play games, listen to music or even read anything, because it would be sinful. Apparently they aren’t allowed to take acting classes either, because these kids are about as credible as wooden planks! Acting classes truly are the work of the Devil. Why is everything good affiliated with Satan? It’s like the holy just can’t catch a break.

Then we see that kid who tried to leave get killed off and shoved in the road, right where our main characters Whitey Whitenson and his wife, Missus Whitebread, are driving along and slam right into him with their car – okay, their real names are Burt and Vicky. Happy? Anyway they think that they killed the kid at first, but Burt, being a doctor, figures out that he was already dead and was shoved out into the street by someone else. He goes to investigate, while Vicky has a dream that the kid in the road jump scares her in the mother of God of all jump scares:

I really have to give this movie props - THIS is how you do a friggin' jump scare!  So many modern movies get it wrong  - they waste them on silly, inconsequential moments that are just thrown in half-assed to get the teenage girls in the audience to jump. Here we have something actually relevant to the story, and the moment in context is actually very scary and surreal as well. Very well done.

So after that, we see Job and Sarah get captured by Malachi, the redheaded stepchild of the group. They get taken to Isaac, played by Cousin Itt from the Addams’ Family – yes, really. He looks like a wrinkled old man in a child’s body and when he talks it sounds like when you fast-forward a VHS tape and the voices get all high pitched. Truly the picture of fear.

"I am the ruler of ALL the muppets!"

We see him preaching to the crew of inbreds and miscreants that make up this ridiculous town, and all I can think is, is this what a Chick Fil A board meeting is like?

"And then we will make sure our chicken is filled with only HETEROSEXUAL chicken meat...only the purest of them all!"

Burt and Vicky find a creepy old guy at a gas station who, when he sees them coming, says to his dog, “Ooh, a car, you know what that means!” Uh…no, I don’t know what it means. But I am suddenly reminded of another film that started off with a gas station and ended in brutal rape and murder exploitation. I sure hope this movie is a little less dark when it comes to the fate of our protagonists. I don’t really need to see rape scenes by a bunch of country kids in the middle of a cornfield, thank you very much.

So the guy tells them to go to this other town to use a phone to report the murder of that kid. So they drive around in circles for a while and get lost like every city-slicker does in the country. Oh how silly. Then SOMEHOW, they end up back at the gas station from before! Only they don’t realize that the kids killed the old man for disobeying them…yes, he was working for them. Why didn’t he just leave? Because I guess the prospect of being a flunkie to a bunch of crazy religious teenagers and ten year olds was just too good for this guy to pass up, and now, he paid for it with his life.

Burt and Vicky end up in this town where all the kids have taken over and turned it into a wasteland. They find Sarah the little girl in this one abandoned house, and Burt, being a doctor, is totally against talking to her with any kind of understanding or patience, like all good doctors are! Being tolerant of people who are afraid or confused just isn’t a very doctorly thing to do.

The best doctor in the world...catty, sarcastic and totally against understanding people's differences! Oh yeah.

So Vicky gets kidnapped by Malachi and the kids while Burt ends up on the run. He finds a bunch of kids in a church drinking blood and all kinds of other stuff and calls them out on being weirdos and freaks. He then gets stabbed in the chest, and like all stab wounds, it’s just a minor annoyance and is easy to walk off, am I right? Maybe his doctor powers allow him to avoid getting stabbed too fatally or something. Or maybe the knife was just made of corn husks…I dunno.

Meanwhile in crazy nutso corn-religion land, they decide they don’t like Isaac anymore and prefer the only slightly different mode of religion that Malachi has, which is more aggressive and involves more teeth:

Has this kid ever thought about doing some work for dental commercials? I'm sure he'd make a bundle.

Burt goes running through the town and teams up with Job and Sarah to hide in an old bunker that apparently, was once used to hide from Communists. Now wait a second. So Burt is already in this crazy town full of kids who are trying to kill him, and he just TRUSTS THIS KID without a second thought? He doesn’t even consider that it could be a trap? How does he know these kids are trustworthy at all? And what’s the point of entrapping yourself further underground? You’re out in the open country! It can’t be that hard to find some place where they can’t find you! Hiding underground where they can just surround you just seems…stupid!

Ugh, okay, so Malachi takes Vicky hostage and parades her through the streets, threatening to kill her if Burt doesn’t come out. They eventually just give up and take her back to the cornfield anyway, alive still, so I guess they’re a bunch of pussies or something. Burt shows up and confronts them and ends up fighting with Malachi and beating him. That comes to an abrupt end when Isaac, who is tied to a cross with corn husks all around it, is eaten by what looks like early MS Paint diarrhea:

I will also accept "molten lava vomit."

That sends everyone running for their lives, but Malachi is pulled back by a demonized Isaac and apparently gets killed.

This is actually really cool. I wish we had seen more of it beyond just one or two scenes...

Burt and Vicky and everyone else hide out in a barn, which…is apparently immune to the wrath of the giant pissed off demon outside? Huh. I guess wood and hay are its only weaknesses. Whodathunkit. Burt goes outside and ends up torching the damn thing with a Molotov cocktail. You know, I think I do like this guy after all.

They adopt the two kids and walk back to their car, only to find one last Child of the Corn waiting for them with a pitchfork, so Burt hits her in the head with his car door, because abuse to children is OK if they’re crazy and religious! And on that note the movie just ends. I should be annoyed by how abruptly it ends, on that abusive note, but it’s just so funny to me, and at least they didn’t waste their time with any bullshit epilogues or drawn out “sequel bait” cliffhangers. That’s always cool.

So Children of the Corn is goofy and campy, but it’s also awesome. The atmosphere is killer, evoked by some eerie shots of cornfields both in the daytime and at night – and it’s surprising how scary this is even when most of the film takes place during the day. The kids, while not GREAT actors, do get the job done and manage to come off as legitimately creepy rather than just silly. The main characters are both good, with real personalities and as an added bonus, they actually DO things rather than just letting things HAPPEN to them, which is a big problem a lot of horror movies have. By avoiding that pitfall, this movie has a lot of drive and momentum and remains consistently exciting all throughout its duration.

There are some plot holes, sure, which I’ve made fun of here, but it was all out of love, trust me. And hell, compared to a lot of stuff I review, this was one hell of a tightly constructed movie. It’s not perfect and could have been even darker and bleaker, but as it is, Children of the Corn is a classic. If you haven’t seen this yet, get on it! Stat!

Pics copyright of their original owners. None of 'em are mine.

REVIEW: Parents (1989)

Well, I for one think it’s a great thing we have movies like this. How else could we ever learn what to do if we figure out that our parents are cannibals? This specific, strange and unlikely occurrence is represented in the movie Parents with…well, about as much dignity and artistry as the plot would normally promise…

Director: Bob Balaban

Starring: Randy Quaid's cannibalistic gut

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098068/

We start off with our main characters, Randy Quaid, his wife Mary Beth Hurt and their son Michael, who is such a good actor that he doesn’t even have to act to show us his character’s personality! He just sits there with a blank expression on his face and we get it entirely – his character was dropped on his head when he was younger and now goes about life with a constant monotone and a vacant look in his eyes at all times. You could argue that he’s this way because his parents are so weird, but nah, I think he was just dropped on his head, because I’m an ass like that.

Introducing Bryan Madorsky, who after this movie, would never be taken seriously as an actor again. Poor kid. I think his real life parents are the actual evil ones for letting him STAR in this shit.

Elsewhere, we learn that Randy Quaid can’t act without enunciating every syllable like he’s constipated and Mary Beth Hurt always has super wide eyes and a fake smile on her face. Michael doesn't feel like eating dinner, so they exchange some pretty poor and stilted dialogue and then send him up to bed where he jumps on the bed in slow motion, followed by a dream of everything turning into blood, like a low-rent version of The Shining:

Yeah, I used to have dreams about falling into a sea of blood, too. But I guess I shouldn't be TOO mean about it. I mean, this IS a movie about...well, nah. I should be even meaner about it actually. I'm too nice!

Afterwards, we get a very sensible and logical transition into this, with goofy sitcom music played over it:

Ah hah...."sensible"....riiiiiight...

Yes, that is one of Parents’ main things – trying to be funny by playing silly music in some scenes. That’s about it. Where’s the joke? Did it get eaten by Randy Quaid? You’ll find that many of the so-called humor in this movie is more just odd and makes your eyebrows raise a little bit and go “Huh?” I don’t really think the writer knew anything about how to write comedy. Oh, and just take a look at some of this rivetingly good dialogue the movie seems to think is worth putting in:

MICHAEL: I had a nightmare.

MOM: Oh, Michael...you didn't take your pajamas off again, did you?

MICHAEL: No.

MOM: Seems the only time you have nightmares is when you take your pajamas off. You didn't, did you? You'll eat something, won't you?

MICHAEL (shaking his head): It was a mistake moving here.

(MOM pricks her finger with a knife by accident.)

MOM: Michael, get out of here!

(MICHAEL runs away.)

....Is this even real? I feel like I got sucked into some bizarro world where nothing makes sense; what are they even going for? He doesn't have nightmares unless he sleeps naked? What the hell is this? And then at the end she just randomly shouts at him to leave...what; why?! This makes no sense and it's making my brain melt!

So...yeah. I don't really like this movie so far.

So Michael goes to his new school where the teacher asks him and the other new kid, a girl named Sheila, to tell the class something “new.” Now that’s a weird way to phrase it. What if the kids told the rest of the class something they already knew? Would the teacher send them out of the class in shame? Anyway, the girl tells them how to make a margarita and Michael tells them that they can turn invisible if they cook a black cat in boiling water...yeah, I don't even have enough surprise left to articulate how I feel about this bit; the movie has already desensitized me to any kind of shock or awe. My apologies.

Naturally because both of these two are clearly the weirdest little shits in the entire class, they bond immediately. She tells him that she’s from the moon, where everyone can just do whatever they want, and…maybe she’s just kidding? Maybe it’s true! Or maybe she’s mentally handicapped. The dialogue is delivered in such a way that it’s impossible to tell. In some movies that can be a big help, but here it’s just lazy since it has no relevance to anything else.

At night Michael wakes up and finds his parents…well, just look:

And that's how you give your kid some kind of complex or disorder; good parenting right?!

Yeah, because I’m sure THIS has NEVER happened before now! I know Randy Quaid’s character can’t be bothered to get the rod out of his ass long enough to talk like a normal human being, but still, if you’re going to roll around on the living room floor half naked, you might want to NOT have a kid who could wake up at any moment! Move it to the bedroom like normal people!

So in a scene so cliched that it's almost original again for these kinds of 'screwed up family' movies, we see that Michael's class is asked to draw a picture of their families! When the teacher looks at Michael's drawing later, she finds...

What an awfully drawn and poorly colored picture! Send this kid to some art classes. He really does need help!

And then that night they’re all getting ready to go to dinner, and Michael’s dad for some reason keeps telling him to behave himself, because…yeah…the kid who acts like he’s in a coma, and barely moves unless you direct him, will probably misbehave…is it THAT HARD to write anything good? Tell me. No, seriously, writer Christopher Hawthorne – tell me! Are you surprised that this guy never wrote anything else for the movies again?

At the dinner itself, Michael and Sheila roll around on the bed while she tries to cut his hands off – again, can’t tell how the hell I’m supposed to feel about this scene. Amused? Horrified? What?! And then at the dinner table the father spills a drink on the mother clearly on purpose aaaaand that’s the scene, was it worth your time, audience? I’ll just assume you’re shaking your heads in a disgusted and exasperated manner as I was when I watched this worthless scene.

Every time Mary Beth Hurt smiles in this movie I just want to smack her face off. So...annoying...

Throughout the rest of the movie we get a lot of forced and trite speeches from Randy Quaid as he doesn’t even try to hide that he’s secretly evil. Truly a performance on the same level as any of the great film villains from Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter to Norman Bates in Psycho. Add Randy Quaid in Parents to that list, movie buffs! Truly he deserves it…hahaha, I’m full of shit. Basically the whole movie up to now has featured scenes of the family eating dinner together and young Michael doesn’t want to eat and just ends up going to bed early every time, sensing something wrong with the food that he can’t place his finger on…so what did he do for his whole life up to now? Just never eat? How is he not anorexic by now? I mean, it’s not like the family apparently made any changes to their routine when they moved into their new house! So what’s the deal? I’m so confused right now!

And really, movie, when was there ever a need to see two small children spraying each other with wine while playing in a freezer with their shirts off?

Ugh, there are just some things that you can't even describe how they make you feel. What the hell am I supposed to gain from this? How am I supposed to react to it? "Oh, the cute little kids are taking each others' clothes off and playing in an icebox with a bottle of expensive wine"? What is WRONG with this movie?

The father forbids Michael to see Sheila again and, although they’re together in the very next scene after that, she never shows up again otherwise. So what was the point of her character at all? If you said nothing and that they were just padding out the movie with filler, you win the million dollars!

So Michael then goes to his father’s work place, which of course has no security guards or even anyone else in the entire building to stop him from just walking through the front door willy nilly. He hides under a table, does not discover anything useful, and leaves. After that, Michael finds a severed leg in the basement at his house, because hey, screw hiding the evidence! Just put your half-eaten body parts in an unlocked basement! That’s the smarty-smart way to be a ‘secret’ cannibal! Then his dad is waiting for him in his room:

Gee. I’ve NEVER seen a scene like THIS before, right?!?!

I mean, OK, so they're not identical, but the mood is very similar and you can't deny this is what Parents was thinking of in its little wormy brain...

I mean WOW, what a blatant rip-off! You aren't even trying, are you movie? I guess what I said earlier about it being a low-rent The Shining was more accurate than I thought.

After that shit is over, Michael brings his school psychiatrist home to show her the basement, but the bloody leg is gone now. She looks over by the window and a dead body pops up from somewhere. Instead of being collected and calm like an adult should be when a child is in danger, she lets out the longest and most exaggerated scream I’ve ever heard in a horror movie as we get a very poor camera pan-up to outside the house where the parents are coming home. And no, movie. Ripping off Halloween while playing goofy elevator music isn’t going to make us laugh; it just makes us more annoyed:

You probably would think these were in the exact same scene in the exact same movie, if I wasn't telling you otherwise. It's not like ripping off two of the most iconic horror films of all time would EVER turn any heads, right? But I guess the fact that no one ever saw this piece of shit is an answer good enough.

At dinner Michael tries to beat up his Quaid-dad, but they tie him up and force him to try and eat some of their delicious human meat. He stabs his dad in the chest and then we get an extremely long and drawn out scene of them chasing each other around the house, screaming, bleeding and trying to kill one another. There’s one scene where the dad is about to throw Michael into the fireplace, but the mom stabs him before he can do so – these kinds of scenes could have almost been interesting, which makes it doubly annoying that there are so many goofy and over the top scenes like with the music. It’s like the makers of the movie were just arguing the whole time over whether to make a comedy or a straight horror film; there’s no cohesion at all!

Also on the list of things that would traumatize a kid. This movie should just be called Bob Balaban's Child Traumatizing Adventure.

The movie ends with both parents dead and Michael in the arms of his loving grandparents. The last shot is of him looking at the delicious…meat sandwich they’ve apparently given him, because I guess just meat and bread is all old people eat. And then we get the credit sequence which is trying to imitate an old 1950s sitcom credit sequence, and completely failing at being funny or effective, because again, this movie was about as coherent as a drunken William S. Burroughs writing with his toes.

I guess this could have been a funny ending, but really, you're doing this after the macabre and eerie ending the film had, and the several very disturbing scenes contained within? It's just confusing as to what they were trying to get across. If this thing had just chosen a direction and tried harder to actually stick with the conventions of that style, it could have worked, but unfortunately it was mostly just a big unwatchable, pretentious mess, and I'm glad I'm done watching it now.

So yeah, Parents is complete ass and merits no viewings in your entire life. But it did teach us that you should make REAL DAMN SURE that your parents aren’t cannibals before you have dinner with them! And I think I’m becoming a vegetarian after watching this movie. Seriously. Ugh.

All images are copyright of their original owners. I own none of them.

Kazaam (1996)

Starring: Shaquille O'Neal, Francis Capra, Ally Walker

Directed by Paul Michael Glaser

IMDb page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116756/

Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaam

"Kazaam" is a film about a genie (basketball star Shaquille O'Neal) who must grant three wishes to Max (Francis Capra), a troubled young boy who is hoping to connect with his estranged father (James Acheson).

This movie really annoyed me. The kid is a little brat who spends most of his time on screen acting like a smart-ass and antagonizing everyone he comes across, including the audience. He also tries to establish a relationship with his father, who is involved in organized crime and yet Max still feels he is a viable alternative to his mother (Ally Walker) and his would-be step-father (John Costelloe), who are not that bad. Did I mention he is also stupid? As for Shaq...well...let's just say he is better on the court (well, in his prime anyway) than onscreen. His performance comes off as silly and awkward, though to be fair he does seem to have fun in the role. The two characters do not get along well during any point of the film with the exception of the end (which is kind of required) and in the middle when they engage in a god-awful rap duet, which is one of unfortunately many dumb scenes throughout the picture.

The worst part about this movie, even more from the performances, is that it does not really make sense. It is supposedly aimed at kids but it spends a lot of time focused on a bunch of criminals and people hanging around clubs. Were the filmmakers trying to bring in Shaq's older fans? I am not sure but whatever they were trying to do, they failed. It is a little odd to be putting that in a film that also features the basketball player riding around on a magical bicycle and making junk food fall down from the sky. As a result, it makes you lose focus on the plot and gives you less reason to about what happens next. It is not helped by a number of plot holes. I will not mention all of them, but here is one example: a stereotypical Middle-Eastern crime lord (Philip Santella) knows all about Kaazam's powers and limitations despite having very the little knowledge about him. Maybe he knows about genies based upon what he learned in his homeland, but we will never know.

Well, there is nothing else I can really say except...the film sucks and I do not recommend it.