As reported yesterday, I sat down last night to watch the TV remake of the Stephen King classic Children of the Corn.

I came in with an open mind hoping to see an interesting reinterpretation of the 1984 adaptation or at the very least a competent retelling of the story.

Regrettably I received neither of these things.

Honestly when I found out that it was a “SyFy Original” I should have run for the hills. I mean this is the same stellar production house that gave us Frankenfish and Mansquito.

Instead I persevered in the name of science and these were my findings.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

The movie opens with the same protagonists, Burt and Vicky, traveling through the bible-belt on their way to a more metropolitan destination. This time around however our lovely couple is on the verge of splitting up, so the playful bickering and minor arguments that slowly escalate things in the original film are replaced in the new rendition by shouting matches and insult hurling that begin in the first frame and don't stop till halfway through the movie.

We're told that the road trip is an attempt by Burt and Vicky to save their marriage, but from the way they fight it's difficult to derive what about it is worth saving. The two seem to revel in hating each other with only occasional, and seemingly accidental, lapses into kindness and warmth.

The character assassination continues until Burt, who is driving, becomes so distracted by the fight that he plows into a little boy who wanders out of the cornfields and into the road. The reaction that follows exemplifies the couple's relationship.

Our two leads spend a few moments in shock and horror and then go right back to attacking each other. Vicky literally goes through a litany of Burt’s past deeds and enumerates why they have led him to kill this boy. The biggest of these is his time spent in the war in Vietnam. Meanwhile Burt goes into full CSI mode and determines that he couldn’t have killed the boy and insists that Vicky examine a gory neck wound to prove his point despite the fact that she’d have no real way to determine whether he was telling the truth.

The rest of the first half of the film is spent watching Burt and Vicky snipe at each other while trying to find some local authorities to report the boy’s death and in the process try to convince whoever they find that it wasn’t Burt who ultimately killed him.

I will say that the staging during this half of the film is done quite well. The roads and surrounding farmland loom menacingly and the deserted town feels appreciably creepy and desolate and they did a nice job integrating the corn-related religious iconography into the various abandoned buildings.

Which brings us to the kiddies.

While our two adults are playing the who-can-hate-on-the-other-the-most game, the children are busy listening to scripture from prophet Issac, tending to the crops and generally trying to act creepy. One difference between this one and the ’84 movie is that the inner-workings of the childrens' society is more closely shown. You actually see them harvesting, preparing dinner, and in a disturbing scene towards the end, having sex.

Another major difference between the two films is in the quality of the casting. John Franklin, who played Issac in the 84’ film, felt genuinely disturbing. A lot of this came from his demeanor and from the things he didn’t say, often preferring to let his mere presence unnerve the audience. In contrast the new Issac, Preston Bailey, is a little motor mouth who pretty much doesn’t stop preaching throughout the whole movie.

Consequently Bailey ends up coming off as a little kid trying to act like an adult. This would actually be fine were it any of the other cast members because they are kids attempting to take on the roles of adults. The problem in Issac’s case is that he’s supposed to be a prophet, which is why the others follow him. Whether he really talks to their God is meant to be ambiguous in both films, but in the '84 flick Franklin makes Issac self aware enough to choose his words carefully and let the perception of him by his flock do most of the work. This perception is even more important for the audience.

Similarly the actor who plays Malachai in the remake, Daniel Newman, doesn’t come off as threatening as Courtney Gains did the original film, but he gives a good effort. The real problem with the new Malachai is that he never questions Issac. I was waiting the whole film for it to happen and at points they even seemed to be building up to it, but nothing ever transpires. This to me was the central tenet of the Malachai character, aside from being the group enforcer. It was supposed to show that an older, bigger kid would eventually make a power play due to the nature of such relationships among children. Even Issac’s mass hypnosis of the group wasn’t enough to stop it forever.

Eventually the adults and kids come together and that’s when things go totally off the rails.

Burt wants to check out every abandoned structure in the town one-by-one, while Vicky, understandably, just wants to get the hell out of there. After coming up short at the other buildings, Burt finally hits pay dirt at the church. He proceeds to go over the place with a fine-tooth comb while Vicky waits in the car where she is becoming increasingly uneasy.

As it turns out Vicky’s quite right to be nervous seeing as how all the children suddenly surround her car and then go to town on it using rakes, pitchforks, shovels and other implements of farming destruction. Meanwhile Burt, whose only fifty feet away in the church, hears none of this. There’s metal being beaten and battered, glass being shattered and Burt is oblivious. It takes Vicky firing off a shotgun to finally get his attention at which point it’s already too late and Burt runs out just in time to see Malachai torch Vicky alive.

Cut to Burt giving a ridiculous Rambo-esque monologue at the children.

No seriously, he gives a speech about how his time in Vietnam has trained him to kick the kids’ collective assess.

‘Gee Burt, I’d think that you being three times their size and four times their age would have been enough, but thank God you’ve got that military training too.’

I'd love to keep through the scenes play-by-play, but this review is already overly long. Instead I've condensed the second hour of the film into a nice, tidy paragraph that reads thusly:

Burt fights two of the bigger kids and kills them, Issac throws knife into Burt's shoulder from rooftop, Burt runs away into Corn, kids give chase but get freaked out by corn and wait for Issac/Malachai, they show up and kids all enter corn, chase, chase, chase, chase, chase, Burt takes out a couple more kids including tiny wannabe profit that might’ve replaced Issac, kids all get called home for supper, Burt gets bored waiting around for kids in corn field and has Vietnam flashback to pass the time, Issac and Malachai have heart-to-heart about their faith, Malachai’s pregnant girl is sad after Issac drops the age of self-sacrifice from 19 to 18, kids all go to church after dinner to watch two of their members have sex while the others look on excitedly, Burt continues having flashbacks and stumbles onto Vicky’s corn-crucified body, Malachai tells his girl he has to kill himself for the faith, girl gets pouty and has vision of burning the corn, Burt suddenly shows up crucified next to Vicky without any explanation, cut back to Malachai and a bunch of the other eighteen-year-olds who walk off into the corn field presumably to sacrifice themselves, THE END.

Now lets back up a moment here.

First off lets examine the scene in the church with the “fertilization ritual”. Here we have two underage kids doing the nasty and a whole bunch of really underage kids getting off on watching it, all while Issac reads from scripture.

Um, ewwwww…

Second we have the main protagonist Burt just wind up dead. One minute he’s having a mental breakdown/freak out and the next he’s up on a crucifix next to his wife. Rule number one of storytelling, don’t gloss over any important event of your main character especially if that event is their untimely demise. The audience generally likes to see these kinds of things first hand.

Lastly there’s the “this is more faithful to the original text” defense. Stephen King helped write the screenplay for the remake and I have no doubt it hues more closely to his short story. The same exact thing happened with the TV remake of The Shinning and there, as in here, the reboot paled in comparison to the original film adaptation. The key word here is “adaptation”, a change in structure that is almost always necessary when going from one medium to another. Simply Xeroxing the book and making a script out of it never works, -see also the first two Harry Potter films-

All-in-all I give the TV remake of Children of the Corn two out of five feathers.

It tried its best, but its best was pretty forgettable and at times downright awful.

Better luck next time SyFy.

-Quoth the Raven

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