USA. 2020.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Kurt Wimmer, Producers – John Baldecchi, Doug Barry & Lucas Foster, Photography – Andrew Rowlands, Music – Bleeding Fingers & Jacob Shea, Additional Music – Tim Count, Visual Effects Supervisor – Steve Vojkovic, Visual Effects/Animation – Digital Domain (Supervisor – Mitchell S. Drain), Visual Effects – Bartolucci Post (Supervisor – Dan Bartolucci), Boogie Monster, Double Barrel (Supervisor – Nathan Stone), Fin Design + Effects (Supervisor – Stuart White) & Territory Studio (Supervisor – Caroline Pires), Special Effects – DTFX Sydney (Supervisor – David Trethewey), Production Design – Pete Baxter. Production Company – Tiger 13/Anvil Entertainment/Digital Riot/Angel Oak Films/Cinemation.
Cast
Elena Kampouris (Boleyn Williams), Kate Moyer (Eden Edwards), Callan Mulvey (Robert Williams), Bruce Spence (Pastor Penney), Jayden McGinley (Cecil), Andrew S. Gilbert (Sheriff Gebler), Stephen Hunter (Calvin Covington), Ashlee Juergens (Carly Cowder), Joe Klocek (Calder Covington)
Plot
In the small town of Rylstone, Nebraska, a local youth attacks people with a knife before barricading up in a children’s home. A disaster occurs when the sheriff arrives and orders halothane gas to be pumped in, killing all the children. Sometime later Boleyn Williams is preparing to leave town to pursue a microbiology degree. The locals are holding a meeting to try and decide what to do after they agreed to plant a GMO crop only for it to have poisoned the corn. Boleyn is angry because she sees the cause of this being the townspeople’s greed and willingness to sell the town’s soul. At the same time, young Eden Edwards is gathering the town’s children and taking bloody revenge against the adults in sacrifice to the entity He Who Walks that lives inside the cornfield.
Children of the Corn (1977) began as a Stephen King short story that runs to only sixteen pages long. It was originally published in Penthouse magazine and can be found in his Night Shift (1982) collection. This was first filmed as the not particularly good Children of the Corn (1984). In the 1990s, someone realised they had the rights to the property and created a seemingly never-ending string of sequels. The surprise is that such a slim story has extended to so much on screen, especially given that little of the set-up is explained by King. So far we have had Children of the Corn II: Deadly Harvest/Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992), Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995), Children of the Corn: The Gathering (1996), Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (1998), Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return (1999), Children of the Corn: Revelation (2001), Children of the Corn: Genesis (2011) and Children of the Corn: Runaway (2018). There was also a remake of the original with Children of the Corn (2009). This averages out at about one film per 1.4 pages of story.
This version comes from Kurt Wimmer who started as a screenwriter, having turned out scripts for films like Double Trouble (1992), The Neighbor (1993), Relative Fear (1994), Sphere (1998), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), The Recruit (2003), Street Kings (2008), Law Abiding Citizen (2009), Salt (2010), Spell (2020) and the remakes of Total Recall (2012) and Point Break (2015). Wimmer made his directorial debut with the revenge film One Tough Bastard (1996) and went onto make the dystopian SF film Equilibrium (2002), which received some modest acclaim, followed by the futuristic Ultraviolet (2006), which was reportedly not a happy experience for him.
Children of the Corn 2020 is not a remake but supposedly a prequel to the original. It follows on from the recent successful revival of Halloween (2018) by using the name of the original while in fact acting as a continuation of the original. This does lead to some confusions. The original film came out in 1984, the Stephen King story was published in 1977 but here the setting is entirely contemporary – characters use modern smartphones, a technology that didn’t even exist in 1984, while there is reference to GMO food, which did not start being commercially released until the mid-1990s. So exactly how it is being a prequel is unclear.
Kurt Wimmer adds a few new spins. There is talk about GMOs and Big Corn (is that even a thing?), which are posited as the reason that corn crop went bad. Elena Kampouris accuses the townspeople of having sold the town’s soul for profits (whatever that means). This has somehow (the film is not exactly clear) caused some type of curse to be enacted and to affect the children. There are provocative scenes with the kids feeding blood to the corn – painting it onto the roots from a large ditch they have dug in the field.
Kurt Wimmer also draws the clash out across gender lines as well as between adults and children. Over and above the previous films, both the protagonist and the leader of the children are girls, which may well have something to do with the Girl Power movement and the push for more female roles on screen in the 2020s. Certainly, young Kate Moyer does calculating evil rather well.
However, the whole film is undone by the ridiculous absurdity of Kurt Wimmer’s staging of the various death set-pieces. In one scene, a man has a noose placed around his neck and then Kate Moyer gets a horse to move away, whisking him up into the rafters of a barn by his neck. In another scene, adults are rounded up in the town jail and the kids arrange industrial pumps to fill the room with halothane gas. In the most absurd of the scenes, the adults are placed in the pit in the field where one of the kids then gets onto an earthmover and fills the hole in with the bucket burying them – given how slow the process of filling a hole the size of a living room in such a manner would be, you wonder why the adults don’t just claw their way out of the slowly filling soil and climb out. Or for that matter, how a young child is meant to be able to reach their feet down to operate the controls of a big machine. The twist ending of the film is also ridiculous.
Equally, the psychology of the characters often seems absurd. Elena Kampouris comes across the kids having slaughtered a horse and painting the blood onto the corn roots. She doesn’t seems the slightest bit concerned about this but instead inveigles the children into a scheme to fool all the adults into coming to the town hall that evening where they plan to put them on trial. The idea of kids putting adults on trial seems absurd enough, let alone the gaping logical flaw in the scheme – that all it takes for the scheme to fall apart is for the adults to ignore the kids or to check with each other on their smartphones and ask “what meeting?”
Trailer here