Children of the Corn: Genesis

Inspite of the dvd of this movie lying in my cupboard for almost a decade, i never felt the urge to play it.

Saw this 9th part recently.

This one started off very well. We get to see a soldier around the 70s return home to find his family massacred by kids and then the movie moves to the present time where a couple take refuge in a preacher's house situated in the middle of nowhere.

The film kept the suspense but the ending is rushed n doesnt make any sense. We are just left to scratch our heads.

Our preacher in this movie has a hot wife (the girl from Hostel). The way she seduces the main lead, viewers expected some nudity or sex scene but we are deprived of that due to low budget.

It has 2 very known faces, Duane Whitaker n Billy Drago.

Children of the Corn... what a bizarre franchise. The first 3 followed a set storyline, and the rest (aside from 6) were just their own stories ala Halloween 3, sometimes with very minor mentions of previous entries. 'Genesis', the 8th film in the series, is quite good for the first half. Intriguing storyline involving a couple's car breaking down in the California desert, and they seek refuge from a weird preacher and his hottie Ukrainian wife. There's a child locked up in a shed behind the house, and it seems like a bizarre entity doesn't want the couple to leave the Preacher's house. For the first 40 minutes or so, the film tells a good, straightforward creepy story. Acting for the most part is good and credible. But then, things get extremely messy and confusing. Nothing is explained, the last half will have you scratching your head. Should I mention the horrible stock footage car crash? Yeah, that was hilariously bad, and makes a film that did a good effort of covering its' low production values for the whole film look EXTREMELY cheap. Good start, messy and confusing middle, horrible conclusion.

I have to admit, I haven't followed the Children of the corn series up close, so I can't tell you, if this actually makes sense in the series. Than again Dimension doesn't seem to care, if they put a movie out there that isn't that connected to previous entries in a successful series (see Hellraiser for that). But this movie is nicely shot, has some interesting twists (though you can see them coming even before the scriptwriter put them down on paper).

In the end this doesn't add much to the horror genre, has the typical erratic character behavior (it's the grown ups who act like children, doing stuff they've been told not to do). The ending is weird too. You wonder why a certain character would accept "help" like that. But until that point you will probably have shut down your brain, just to save it. Good thinking ...

This is even worse compared to the previous movie that I reviewed. This is the only movie that doesn't have any children as the main focus with exceptions in the opening, dream sequence, and the ending. The story is nothing interesting to talk about and is rather boring. It's mostly the characters who get lost, go to a house, notice something suspicious, and get trapped. I don't even know why they made this movie like this and add nothing new to the franchise. The whole supernatural force isn't that effective because it mostly forces the main characters to stay in the house for no reason and feels unnecessary. Also, it spends a lot of time with exposition dialogue that gets boring quickly and isn't anything too interesting to learn about. And the movie has an anticlimactic ending to it. I am going to skip the characters because all of them are rather boring and aren't that interesting to talk about. And the acting itself sucks.

Children of the Corn: Genesis is the worst compared to the previous movie. I do not recommend this movie at all.

Genesis difference very much from the standard CotC movies, you will not find much corn and even less of children, almost no existent, and no Gatlin town, actually they are pretty much in the same cabin the whole movie, so it's different, doesn't have the CotC feel either, more like a possessed themed movie. But all that being said, the tension has probably never been better within the series, good acting (Billy Drago steels the show, possible the best performance of within all CotC movies), good camera-work and good effects, so it's a good crafted movie but, it's probably not what I wanted from a CotC movie. About the title Genesis, I didn't get much about that, it doesn't tell anything about the creation or beginning of anything, and towards the end I felt the plot was going nowhere, and when talking about the end, I didn't liked the ending at all.

Overall, Children of the Corn: Genesis was better than expected, but confusing and different.