Horror-101

Syfy Saturday: ‘Children of the Corn’

In an effort to rebrand the network, the Sci Fi Channel recently changed its name to Syfy. Despite the new title, they still show the same junk. Sure, you’ll occasionally find a good genre flick (edited for television and with lots of loud commercials, of course), but their original movies almost never fail to be low-quality dreck. This reoccurring article, entitled Syfy Saturday, will offer reviews of these much-maligned flicks as they premiere.

For this installment of Syfy Saturday, we’ll be taking a look at Children of the Corn.

written and directed by Donald P. Borchers

Remakes have become so popular these days that even Syfy is doing it, with their latest picture being a redux of 1984’s Children of the Corn, itself a Stephen King adaptation. (King himself receives a teleplay credit, but his actual involvement is unknown.) Donald P. Borchers, who served as producer on the original, wrote and directed the new version.

The story, not surprisingly, is the strongest element of the film. Granted, the short story is stretched a bit to far for a feature, but the tale of a town inhabited solely by religious zealot-children is an intriguing one. Not straying too far from the source material, the movie finds a couple traveling through rural Nebraska in 1975. Vietnam veteran Burton (David Anders, Heroes) and his bitch of a wife, former prom queen Vicki (Kandyse McClure, Battlestar Galactica), are having marriage troubles, but things get much worse when they happen upon the town of Gatlin on their trip.

The small, desolate town appears empty at first, but it is soon revealed that it is overrun by the local children, fundamentalist Bible-bumpers who worship “He Who Walks Behind The Rows.” The group is lead by Issac (Preston Bailey, Dexter), a young boy to whom God directly speaks. He orders the kids to sacrifice “adult sinners” to protect them. Further, the children must be sacrificed upon their 19th birthdays. Much of the dirty work is done by Malachai (Daniel Newman), the second in command who is nearing his time of sacrifice. The first half of the film is fairly promising, but once Burton starts going Rambo on the kids — as fun as that sounds (and it is) — the movie goes steadily downhill.

Some people have complained that Issac didn’t look menacing enough in the original, but Bailey isn’t the least bit creepy. In fact, it’s almost comical to see such an innocent looking kid in an oversized hat using such a mature vocabulary. Otherwise, though, Children of the Corn is not a bad remake (although still not as good as the decent-at-best original). With higher-than-usual production values, nice cinematography, and solid effects courtesy of Kevin Kutchaver, it’s one of the better Syfy originals (although that’s not saying much).