Saturday, February 11, 2012

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995)

Recently, a smattering of Children of the Corn movies became available on Netflix, but #2 is strangely missing.  Instead of waiting for some crazy Netflix agreement with the distributor to materialize, I decided to cut my losses and go straight to #3.

So apparently in this installment, there are actually parents living with children in the possessed town of Gatlin.  There's a dad and his sons, Eli and Joshua.  When the seemingly "evil" younger child Eli offs his dad, the two are declared orphans and are turned over to social services.  In horror movies, foster parents always get the shit end of the stick.  While these people clearly mean well, they always get stuck with the craziest-ass kids.

The kids have been pulled from the farm and dumped into inner-city Chicago, where they struggle to assimilate.  Joshua is anxious to make friends, but Eli is intent on wearing his Amish-esque clothes and just being a general weirdo.  He brings corn with him from Gatlin, and plants it near his new home, setting off a strange chain of events.  Apparently "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" can be transported elsewhere via corn?  Random.

All the adults start dying in weird ways, and of course, Eli is behind it.  At this point in time, I'm having a hard time hearing "Eli" without thinking of Eli Manning (GO GIANTS!) but that's besides the point.  While Eli runs around slaughtering adults, Joshua is all about learning basketball, and getting busy with one of his classmates.  However, he quickly learns that Eli is preaching (brainwashing?) to all the students, and they appear to be buying it.  Why do so many people seem to believe in this ridiculous corn god?  Scientology makes more sense than this shit.  And what sort of city zoning allows for a random cornfield in the middle of downtown Chicago?  Clearly I'm thinking too far into this.

People's faces melt, and their heads crack open and are full of roaches.  A weird impaled head grows out of the ground.  The child Eli has apparently been in that form for quite some time, due to a special Bible he has.  Even though this movie was made a decade after the original, the special effects seem pretty much the same.  Looks like I'm in for a lot of Children of the Corn, since the next 5 sequels are available on Netflix instant.  I'm sure they'll continue to improve ;)

Fun fact: This is both Charlize Theron and Nicholas Brendon's first movie.

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