A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

On Sunday, August 30th, Wes Craven passed away, having lost his battle with brain cancer. As the acclaimed director of so many horror films, and the creator of one of horror’s foremost icons in Freddy Krueger, Craven’s work was certainly loved by many. He was the kind of guy who brought horror to the forefront and made it palatable for the masses - while still putting out quality stuff. In remembrance of Craven's legacy, I’m doing a special review of his original 1984 classic, A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Director: Wes Craven

Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, John Saxon

IMDb

I remember seeing this when I was about 14 for the first time, and I thought it was like nothing else I’d seen. The flashy colors, the fast pace and the surreal horror of the nightmares – it was a spectacle and it grabbed me by the throat in a vicegrip. Looking back now, it really was so influential to what came later. It opened up the doors for horror to take on realms outside our own, to explore nightmares and multiple realities, and it gave us all that in such a vibrant and colorful package – taking ideas explored in other psychological films to new levels by visualizing them. We felt the terror.

We start off with our fake main character, Tina, who has been having bad dreams of a man with long fingers for knives and wakes up with her nightgown slashed to ribbons in the front. Her initial suspicion was that Wolverine from the X-Men had snuck into bed with her, but she will soon find out it’s something much worse. Her mom tells her she either has to “stop having those dreams or cut her fingernails,” and ah yes, the days when parents could be that callous about their children waking up with cut-up clothes…

The third option is stop sleeping with scissors in your bed.

She tells her friends, Nancy and Glen, about the dream the next morning, but they of course shrug it off as insanity, as something so insane as a man with knives for hands could never pose a threat to them.

Johnny Depp is looking that way because Wes Craven held up a picture of a two-headed baby off screen to see if the actors could keep their concentration. Depp failed, so he was selected to be killed off later in the movie in the most brutal way.

That’s Johnny Depp as Glen, there, in his first movie role ever, who you might have trouble recognizing in this because he isn’t wearing a shitload of makeup and his hair looks like a normal person’s.

They all have a sleepover that night because Tina is afraid of her nightmares. When they hear a noise outside, they go to check and find it’s Rod, their delinquent wannabe friend who fulfills the ‘80s leather jacket’ quota for the movie. Because every 80s movie needed one of those, ya know – just a product of the time. They get into some verbal banter outside, and Rod immediately responds by pulling out a switchblade. Uh...guys, I’m really not sure that’s the dude you want to bring to your sleepover party.

"I'M NOT OVERREACTING!!!"

Rod then has sex with Tina, which is fine until afterwards when she is brutally murdered by knives cutting her up and throwing her around in the air. Gee - that’s how you know you’ve really got to work on your fucking game. When your partner dies.

Fuck. Just, holy fuck. What a brutal scene.

But this is actually the introduction of one of horror’s most iconic characters, Freddy Krueger, who I’m pretty sure was modeling your grandma’s Christmas sweaters for a living before he got big in this film. The scene where he’s introduced is excellently done, especially because he stretches his arms out like Slinkies and scrapes the walls with those long, metal claws he has. Yes, that's the reason it's excellent. Shut up.

Goddamn, this was all so fucking whacked out and insane. In the best way possible.

But this is a great scene. The nightmareish atmosphere is furiously fast and fun, and the acting is spot on from Englund and Amanda Wyss, who played Tina. Afterward, the surviving characters even start to figure out that Freddy stalks them in their dreams. Good for them. It's good that they're smart.

As Tina has left the building, the movie convenes in an emergency session after that and elects Nancy the new main character. She’s understandably upset the next day as she is in school and falls asleep only to wake up and see this:

Ugh, SO violating the dress code.

Then she runs into the worst hall monitor in the world:

Sorry to go on a bit of tangent here, but really, what is the point of hall monitors anyway? Are you just promoting some fascistic system where kids can’t be trusted to do things by themselves? I mean, if Freddy Krueger can transform into an annoying hall monitor with a striped sweater and a bleeding nose, and nobody notices that that isn't a good hall monitor, maybe it’s worth it to get rid of the profession as a whole.

We also get scenes of her visiting Rod in jail after he is arrested. Rod tells her he didn’t kill Tina, it was an invisible man cutting her up while he was in the room. You might recognize THAT as the lame-ass defense everyone gives now when they're accused of murder, but it actually started with this movie.

Rod is then killed in his cell, which prompts Nancy's father, the sheriff, to start intervening. He's played by John Saxon, the only man in Hollywood at the time who could use such a stern voice all the time.

Suicide, or killed by nightmareish dream-demon for revenge for his parents' sins. Either way, this isn't cool.

His sternness is eternal. It will never die. It will live on even longer than he himself.

While taking a bath at home, Nancy drifts off to sleep, which allows Freddy's hand to try and attack her in the tub. An interesting note: In this scene, actor Heather Langenkamp was not acting. She was just taking a regular bath in the privacy of her own home. Craven just wanted the fear to be real, which, really, is the only way to do a horror film.

Nancy is admitted to this psychiatric clinic where they test her brain waves while she's asleep to get to the root of the problem. The reason you know they're professionals is because they have computers and are wearing white coats. Nancy begins screaming insanely and bloody scratches start appearing on her, so, job well done, scientists! She's good to go home now, and you guys can continue doing your scientist-y jobs.

The greatest scientists in the world.

At home, Nancy has a shouting match with her mother, who refuses to tell her anything meaningful about Krueger. Why? Nancy already knows about him and is saying he's the one killing everyone. Who else could be killing everyone? How would Nancy know about Krueger if he's dead and in the past like her mother tells her? Does her mother really think she's that crazy or susceptible after just hearing his name once or something? I have so many questions.

None of which her mother will answer.

We also find out the sordid backstory of how the parents in the neighborhood burned Krueger alive in his boiler room because he was a child murderer. Which is bad, don't get me wrong. But what neighborhood doesn't have a good story to tell over hamburgers and beers at a cookout? Come on.

Glen is hanging out in his room later on when his bed eats him and spews out a bloodshower enough to cover the entire room for several seconds straight. I think that's awesome.

Clearly he was healthy, considering how strong his blood is.

We then also get the greatest phone sex scene in the history of movies.

So it's really just up to Nancy, who engages in a battle with Freddy. She manages to get Freddy into the real world, which results in one of the better jump scares I've seen – she wakes up, thinking it might actually all be over, and then he pops up from behind the bed. That's kick ass. Nancy isn't impressed, though, so she just sets him on fire and calls it a day.

Her father, the master of all good timing, shows up just in time to see his wife get eaten by a bed with a Halloween smoke machine in the room. Boy, the beds in this movie sure are hungry tonight.

The awesome kind of horror special effects I wish we would see more these days.

So everything seems to be good finally. It's a sunny day and perfect weather for a sunroof and parent murder:

So that's the end – the nightmare is reality and you can't really ever tell when it's over. Craven originally wanted the film to end in a happy manner, with everything that happened in the film just being a nightmare. I have to admit that would have been interesting. But I guess I'm a dark soul, because I like the ending we got. It works because it further blurs the line between the real world and Freddy's nightmare realm, like the whole rest of the movie was doing.

However – I can still see where Craven was coming from. His ending could've been good too. That's because this is a great horror movie, and it doesn't live or die by circumstance like that. This is a story about being young, right on the edge of adulthood. It's about the feeling of your parents dismissing what you say because you're a kid – but in your mind, you're almost an adult; they should listen to you. The kids in this movie find out that a devil in their nightmares is killing them, and it's their parents' fault. The kids themselves are blameless, yet they are the ones who face the penalty for their parents' sins.

Then, not only that, but their parents foil them at every turn in this film – Glen certainly would still be alive if his dad hadn't hung up on Nancy during that scene when she tried to reach him. Nancy's mom could have told the truth halfway through this movie and saved a bunch of lives. In ANOES, the parents are the “villains” - though they have no ill intent, they don't listen to their kids, dismissing them just for being kids, which is an all-too-common thing amongst adults. There's a sense of helplessness about everything in this film, which you, the viewer, feel by proxy of the characters.

Oh, and I guess Freddy Krueger is pretty evil too. I mean c'mon. The guy is a child killer, for fuck's sake.

Through the insane visuals, the groundbreaking story blending reality with dreams, the horrific visual nightmares and the iconic Freddy Krueger, who makes the most of his seven minutes of screentime here, Wes Craven and company created a classic. This is one of horror’s greats. If you haven't seen it, I really recommend it. And if you have, well, then you know what I'm talking about.

RIP Wes Craven. You are gone, but your work on this great film will live forever.

Images copyright of their original owners; we own none of them.

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995)

Well, the Chldren of the Corn series slogs on. This one is called Urban Harvest, which sounds like a really stupid rap album based around a bad Goosebumps book or something. You can definitely see that being the point where some poor sap of a 1990s rapper's career would jump the shark.

Hell, I'm astounded they didn't have any rap songs in this movie's soundtrack. For 1995, that's kind of like being the one gold miner who didn't feel like getting rich in the late 1800s.

Director: James D.R. Hickox

Starring: Daniel Cerny, Ron Menendez

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This one begins with a sort of rushed telling of a usual story for this series – a teenage kid, Joshua, is being chased around by his drunken, abusive father in the country. His father uses what most drunken, abusive parents do – a giant scythe, and he swings it like a maniac as his terrified son runs for his life through the cornfields.

Tough love, at its finest.

Ah yes...just part of the usual parenting regimen. Doing dishes, doing chores... chasing them around with a giant scythe for no reason.

Luckily he gets helped by something even better than child protective services – we get Eli, a strange kid who has the power of conjuring up dark mystical forces that I'm sure Sam Raimi would sue for if he wasn't already a dozen times richer than anyone in this movie:

Well, it's not exactly tree rape Evil Dead style - his clothes are still on...

Eli and Joshua, for some unstated reason, decide to go to Chicago and let themselves be adopted. Why? Isn't the whole idea of this series that the children don't need adults and want to just live on their own drooling and eating corn all day out in the middle of nowhere? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but the kids in the previous two films were very much content with doing that. And this one takes place in the same town, Gatlin, that the other ones were in. So my guess is just that Eli is so annoying and douchey that none of the other kids (of the corn) want anything to do with him, so he has to go to the city to find anybody to hang out with.

The parents they get are apparently leftover stale 80s stereotypes. The mother is a personality-free cardboard cut-out with big hair and screams a lot. The father is a mulleted douchebag businessman who wears suits and does stupid things like adopt two children and then, as soon as they get in the house, says “just remember to knock before you come to our room at night.”

"Honey, we're going to make sweet, sweet love right across the hall from you all night long."

Yup, he adopted two children just to tell them he and his wife will be having loud, constant sex in the night while they're there. Hell, I'll go a step further – I think the only reason they adopted these kids was because knowing impressionable and abandoned kids are sleeping in the other room, turns them on more. Real libido booster, there. You goddamn fucking weirdos.

"Moan louder, they need to hear this!"

Eli is able to match the bizarreness, though, when the mom sees that his suitcase is full of cockroaches – which is a typical carry-on for kids who used to live in cornfields, but the mom's delicate big-city disposition just can't handle it. The dad, though, sees a bunch of ears of corn when he opens it – you know; sometimes you see ears of corn and other times you see cockroaches. That's just the diversity of life.

Either way, I think we can all agree the mom needs to go to a mental asylum and chill out. Especially after the next scene where, while again having sex with her husband, she has a hallucination of having a mouthful of dirt. I mean, I've heard of weird fetishes, but eating dirt before making out? Ew, just ew.

"Ahhhh! Phew, that's the same dream I've had all my life, about dirt coming out of my mouth. How awful."

Meanwhile, Eli grows a bunch of corn in the dangerous creepy old abandoned, almost surely haunted, warehouse directly behind their house. If you're wondering why the department of children and families would let two kids go live right near something so obviously hazardous, or why a house would be built in such a weird place at all, well, you're thinking too hard.

Did I say grows corn? I meant takes it out of a suitcase. You slacker.

And while you were thinking too hard about this dumb-ass movie, Eli killed a homeless man and used him to make super good corn. I guess homeless people are nutritional.

All the people who talk about GMOs would also do well to pick up the cause of homeless people used as fertilizer. It's seriously a problem.

The father comes over and eats some of the corn right there without washing it or anything, just right from the ground, because, I guess after making out with a woman who eats dirt, anything seems better.

"Mmmm, tastes as black and filthy as my soul."

He decides that the corn is so good he can take it to his work and sell it to Germany, even going over the head of his boss. What's that? You don't care and are wondering why this scene is in the movie? Yeah, me too. Skip it!

We then see they go to an inner-city school where kids are just allowed to bring knives in just in case they want to get in huge fights with their classmates. School security was lax back then. But don't worry – all they really do is shove each others' chests and get close enough to kiss if they wanted to, without actually hitting one another. Like most school fights, ya know.

Just kiss him, you fool.

Also, if you’re wondering why some of these kids are dressed like clown pimp gangsters with colors bright enough to be in a Skittles commercial - well, it was the 90s. Just leave it be.

So I guess for the rest of the film is taken up by Eli somehow, mysteriously, winning over every kid in the school to his werdo corn religion, worshiping He Who Walks Behind the Rows. I’m guessing nobody had much imagination when writing this, because it’s seriously unbelievable that any kid would follow him. Yeah - I’m sure a bunch of streetwise Chicago kids are gonna want to join up with some weird Amish-looking kid who worships a Lovecraftian corn deity on a whim; that's fucking realistic.

Well, everyone except Joshua, anyway. He’s too busy having sex with the neighbor girl. I just love how hackneyed and random this scene is - it’s like hey, you survived this long into the movie and had to watch the parents fuck, so here’s a scene of two attractive people doing the same thing. That’s your reward.

Most of the other scenes are just Eli ripping off The Omen and doing a particularly poor job of it. Hard to really be scared of this movie when most of it has been done 15 years prior and much better. And how many more scenes do we really need in any movie of a creepy kid leering at adults and then eventually killing them? Is someone really sitting around in a dank-ass apartment writing this and going 'oh yeah, THIS is really original'?

I guess eventually they catch onto what Eli is doing after he makes a common mistake for wannabe cult leaders and crucifies a priest using cornstalks and other wildlife. Damn. That has ruined so many aspiring cult leaders!

"Kid, you're really not very good at acting like a creepy older person. Quit watching The Godfather so much and instead, just take acting lessons."

So Joshua and his girlfriend’s brother go off to Gatlin again to find this magic Necronomicon-esque book that might solve the whole thing. To do this, they first have to fight this horrific abomination:

"Quick, use your football moves on him!"

Seriously, what the hell is that? It looks like a bunch of straw stuck together with human vomit and then a Jack ‘O’ Lantern’s face was drawn over it. Someone tell the neighborhood alchemist not to get drunk next time he makes something.

Also, the girlfriend’s brother dies stupidly before they leave. Farewell, whatever your name was! You were a valiant soul to try and survive in a movie this stupid.

Back in Chicago, we get a scene where Eli is mobilizing his cult to go and, I dunno, eat lots of corn on the cob or something. It’s probably something more violent than that, but really, does it deserve any more dignified write-up? No. Joshua shows up and announces that the only way he can kill Eli is by destroying the book AND him at the same time. Which I’m pretty sure he just made up on the spot. I mean, how lazy can you get? This was literally never mentioned in the film before.

Joshua also makes a reference to the situation being like killing a worm by cutting off its head. Yes. That IS what it's like. Heh heh... but yeah, this is just the kind of clever writing we have in this movie, and I am basking in its glow like a person lying for hours in a manmade tanning box... and getting cancer from it.

"Now part like the sea in an extremely hackneyed and contrived way to let this lone dissenter through! Yes, my minions, go now and do so!"

Eli dies, but then He Who Walks Behind the Rows arrives, looking like something Ray Harryhausen would have made when he was tired after a three-day mountain hike and wanted to go to bed. The kids all wake up from their hypnotized trances and then they all start getting eaten.

Imagine if the Harry Potter films had CGI like this.

And wait a second - they were under a trance that whole time? Really? I couldn’t fucking tell, and I’m not even sure you made an attempt to tell us, movie. Sometimes I wonder why I even try to put this much effort to review these things, for how little effort they actually put into making them. I could just post a picture of a potato, no other context, and that would be appropriate enough to sum up half the movies I watch.

Only the potato is more interesting.

Anyway, the girlfriend character stabs the monster, but I guess that’s all she had - it turns around and eats her immediately. But then Joshua stabs it like once and that ends the whole thing. My favorite part about this is that she's actually alive inside the monster still and escapes completely fine, as if nothing happened. I guess his digestion is really fucking slow and his teeth really fucking soft, like pillows.

Or she's related to that guy from Jaws: The Revenge last week who also escaped being eaten by a monster...yeah, I'm going with that one.

Everyone goes home, wondering how best they can forget the unearthly abominations they have just witnessed. The possibilities are endless for them. Will they partake in alcohol, weed, LSD, cocaine? Who knows?

The movie is unsatisfactory. On every level of story, character and relevance, it gets an F. The effects can be kind of fun, but they aren’t enough to save it. Overall, like in any urban school, this movie deserves to be swirlied in the bathroom - head completely shoved in a toilet and flushed. That’s all Urban Harvest deserves. I have written it, it is my grade, and so it shall be carried out.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Children of the Corn 2 - The Final Sacrifice (1992)

The original Children of the Corn was already a stretch, being a whole feature length film based off a 30-page short story. But then they decided 'hey, we can one-up THAT in stupidity!' and decided to make a billion sequels to that original story. That's insane. That's pants-shittingly, madhouse, poop-flinging insane to levels that make the current 'shared universe' trend look positively conservative...I mean, at least the Harry Potter spinoffs are based on a multi-million dollar franchise, and at least the Marvel movies slated to come out for the rest of our natural lives are based on comics people already loved. What was there with Children of the fucking Corn? A 30-page short story by Stephen King. That's it. That was the extent of the inspiration for this franchise that ended up being like 11 movies long.

Sigh. Sometimes I just don't even know. But someone made the movies anyway, despite all logic, and so I am here to review it. This is just how it works. It's fate that everything is happening this way and I have no choice in the matter.

Director: David Price

Starring: Terence Knox, Paul Scherrer

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

We start off with a guy discovering a bunch of dead adults in a basement, killed by the children of the corn before the film started. This presumably didn't really make the smell in his basement any worse than it was.

"I can't tell if it's the week-old salami down here or the rotting decrepit bodies of people I used to know, but man, it reeks down here now."

It turns out all the adults in a small town called Gatlin are dead and the kids end up in homes in a neighboring town. Like any respectable professional doctor, he gives them all lollipops and sends them on their ways, which I'm sure is a decent pacifier for the fact that their families are all dead.

Yes, they actually killed their own families, but the doctor doesn't know that...

The main character is this jack-off journalist who is traveling to the town to do a story on the killings with his son, because all good writers bring along their annoying sons to work. The son swears a lot and his dad reprimands him, asking him if he learned to talk that way from his mom, and then in the same conversation his dad also swears a lot. Because why make any sense even at the beginning of your movie?

They get to the town and have dinner with this hot chick who owns a hotel and wears shirts that say “Come sleep with me” as an advertisement for it – which I guess is actually brilliant advertising, if the person wearing it is attractive. At dinner, the son constantly makes fun of his dad and undermines his credibility at every turn – which makes the son my new favorite character for making fun of his weenie of a father.

The dad takes him outside and shouts at him about how he was an accident and a mistake, which is heartwarming in its honesty. I'm just so glad to see this family finally coming together and revealing all their secrets.

But yeah, the son leaves angrily, and the dad looks back inside at the boy who I'm sure he sees as a totally legit replacement as a surrogate smaller person to annoy some more.

"Wait, I need someone to project my own insecurities onto!"

"Eh, you'll do from now on."

While waiting for a bus out of town, the son runs into a hot chick, who flirts with him for no reason and then tells him as an afterthought that the bus doesn't come until Tuesday. What amazing priorities. I guess because he is the only person in town who is her age as well as NOT enjoying standing around staring unblinking and creepy, she immediately is attracted to him, which is exemplified in a later scene where she's standing underneath a waterfall in a bikini top and invites him over by actually non-ironically uttering the line “What, have you never seen a girl before?”

It's like she speaks solely in overused 1960s family movie romance cliches, and to really go all the way, just acts out every teen boy's fantasy too.

Speaking of kids who enjoy staring unblinkingly and being creepy, that's what the children of the corn do for most of the movie. I just love how unsuspecting everyone is about this – oh yes, that group of creepy kids who stand in a perfect group formation at all times and stare and smile creepily at everyone passing by CAN'T be up to anything bad!

Subtlety is, shall we say, not their strong point...

When they're not doing that though, they like to stand around in the corn and shout incredibly poorly written dialogue about how they killed the adults to make their own world a paradise. Being an adult for these kids is apparently just the worst thing you can be. It's like Peter Pan if written by Charles Manson.

My question though, is what happens when these kids grow up? Do they just get exiled or killed as soon as their voices drop and they start thinking about why exactly they're wasting their time with a cult of fucking moronic little children? If so, this is the worst cult since End of the Line.

The father, meanwhile, is just kind of wandering around doing nothing in a school, where he finds pictures of kids murdering their parents. He also runs into a stereotypical Native American man who does nothing but make insulting statements about how awful every white person is. While a Native American would have just cause to be suspicious of white people trying to take their land and shit, here it just comes off as out of place for a dumb Children of the Corn movie.

"I wanted a part in Poltergeist II, but instead I got shoved into this piece of shit. I've been drinking hard whiskey ever since."

Oh, and they find out there's actually some kind of conspiracy involving corn with mold growing on it, which they think released toxins into the air to make the kids go crazy and kill their parents. Somehow it's also some sort of conspiracy involving the sheriff, who goes insane and ties them up, trying to run them over with a corn harvester.

If you can figure out how this makes any sense in the film, well, you're better than I am at this sleuth work.

The wild eyes, the crazy evil grin, the completely over the top violent overreactions to everything - yes, elect him sheriff, he is perfect.

I dunno – he's just insane because GMOs, or money, or because sheriffs in small towns rarely have shit to do so they just like killing people with corn harvesters randomly. Either way I am sure the population of your local farmer's market will have an opinion about the purity of corn in some manner.

The whole movie is just confused as hell – we get scenes of the children of the corn murdering people mixed in with the random moldy corn investigation as well as scenes like these, which look like they came out of a cheap Harlequin romance novel adaptation:

"I thought I felt you getting frisky back there, but THIS is just ridiculous!"

To be fair though, most of those cheap romances don't end with finding disembodied hands on the ground while trying to have sex. If they did, I'd watch them more often.

The death scenes are even more over the top – witness the glory of a kill scene in a church where the main Child of the Corn stabs a voodoo doll thing and a guy bleeds to death from his nose.

This was the worst day at church since that day Millie had a hemorrhage from the bloody knife fight she had been in down at the retirement home last month.

Who was that guy? Why kill him specifically? I dunno. The movie never explains it. Hell, I'm also still trying to figure out how he managed to make that voodoo doll work, and why it's never used again for anyone else.

In another kill scene, they manage to rig an old lady's wheelchair so she gets hit by a truck and sent flying through a window of a nearby bingo hall.

To add to the super wacky comedy of the old lady in a wheelchair dying, some idiot then stands up in the rubble and goes “Bingo?”

This right here - this is the moment this franchise dies a cold death. There can be nothing else of worth spawned from this series at all after a scene this horribly cliched and hackneyed. It burns thine eyes even to gaze upon it for a second! AAAAHHHHH! 

As for how they managed to control that lady's wheelchair to begin with, eh, fuck it, I have no idea. Let's just get the rest of the review over quickly.

The finale is based around the son joining the children of the corn and going with them to their crazy ritual thing. They ask him to kill that girl he's been spending time with to prove himself, and the real indicator of what a great relationship they have is, HE ACTUALLY HESITATES AND CONSIDERS KILLING HER.

"It was fun having sex with you, but it was also fun having sex with the corn!"

Yes, really – he has to think about it for a few minutes. I guess it really was a hard choice between a kind and caring girl who seems to really like him, and a cult of weird Addams Family rejects whose only plan is to live out in the corn, cackling cartoonishly every hour or two, with no other ways of sustaining themselves until another town stupidly takes mercy on them. You know, I changed my mind; I can see why his dad hates him now.

They escape, and then get captured again, which really does great at padding out the bloated run time of this movie more than a fat kid eating a box of marshmallows all in one sitting! It's only 92 minutes, but don't worry; it feels like twice that.

There's a really lame scene where the leader of the children, about to die, pleads for the son to come save him because they're supposedly really great friends and stuff – I guess the movie forgot to show us those scenes – anyway, he turns into a demon for a few seconds, which does very little to influence the good guys' opinions.

Somehow the Native American guy died during all of this, and so they do the natural thing and burn his body right there in the corn fields before getting in a car and driving away like nothing ever happened.

Clearly he didn't have any relatives or loved ones who would have cared to know about this. Just burn his rotting corpse right now.

A faint voice from afar: "WAIT! I'M STILL ALIVE IN HERE! OH GOD I'M BURNING ALIVE IN THIS CORNFIELD! AHHHHH!"

So this was pretty much complete nonsense. It seemed that way when we watched it, and afterward as I did this review, it seemed absolutely removed from reality in how crazy it really was. Plot threads were brought up and forgotten about just as quickly, the characters had no personality and the movie couldn't really seem to decide what it wanted to be. Is it a comedy, a horror film or some sort of weird message about food safety? Or is it just a piece of shit?

I think I'm going with that last one.

What was their plan when that town adopted them all after they killed their parents, anyway? I just can't imagine the complexities going on in their peanut brains. Really if they were so badass and ready to kill, they could have just slaughtered all the adults immediately and not even tried to pretend they were regular good kids - hell, they never tried very hard in the actual movie anyway, and instantly seemed evil without any provocation.

But whoops, if that actual logic had been applied, we wouldn't have been graced by the perfection that was Children of the Corn 2, or its gajillion sequels. Here's a picture of moldy corn to sum up what I really thought of this movie:

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.