Children of the Corn (2009)

You know what the original Children of the Corn lacked? Sufficiently disagreeable characters, ones you could really un-sympathize with. Well, the remake offers them in abundance, both in the pre- and post- pubescent forms. But it’s ok, ‘cause it all means something.

A couple with marital troubles hit the road for a second honeymoon (but the lawyer with the divorce papers is just 70 miles that-a-way!). We get to sit in the car with them while they bicker endlessly. Both of them have a point: I wouldn’t want to be married to either of these a-holes. She’s one of those nagging wives who like to twist the dagger whenever her husband is down in any way. He’s one of those jerks who never, ever compromise on anything at all and he has that good ol’ Vietnam PTSD on top of it.

You forget you’re not watching a Lifetime movie, because the kids don’t show up to terrorize these douchebags until the last 30 minutes. The weird thing about the last 30 minutes is, once the action kicks in, the Vietnam vet loves it. He doesn’t care what’s happened to his wife or what’s going on in this town. He’s enjoying the combat tactics and the blood on his hands. He kills kids left and right with a gusto you can only describe as hilarious. Who would want to divorce this guy?

But that’s the problem with America. We’re always searching for the enemy ‘out there.’ But the real enemy is inside, right here, in the heartland. It’s in our minds, like the PTSD. And it’s in the soul of our country , like the—yep, you guessed it, the goddam corn!

America is a corn-crazy nation. The government subsidizes corn production with billions of dollars (nearly twenty billions, in fact), whereas the second-most subsidized crop, apples, gets less than one billion. Vegetables like broccoli ain’t doing so hot. What the fuck do we do with all that damn corn? Well, we convert it into an unhealthy form of sugar called high-fructose corn syrup. Not good for you, but it’s so damn cheap because of the subsidies. It’s because of this that you can buy a box of Twinkies for less than a bag of apples or carrots. It’s ass-over-tea-kettle backwards. This corn production is reducing our lifespans. It may be plausible to imagine a world where only kids are alive, ‘cause adults have all been sacrificed… to the corn. Or to eating Twinkies. Whatever. Point is, are we not all ‘children of the corn,’ in some sense?

At least, I think the movie was trying to make a point like that. I don’t know if it ever really got there. It’s a lot of arguing and then, once the fun starts, it’s over way too fast. And we never see the wife nekkid. But it has its enjoyable moments. If you’d never heard of Children of the Corn or at least never seen any of the movies, you might even like it. Ultimately, what makes the Children of the Corn movies so popular, so much so that they’ve had more sequels than any other Stephen King story, is just the drawing together of so much Americana. This one has plenty of that, at least.

Gingerclown (2013)

Imagine a strange, curious species of extraterrestrial that wanted to reach out to the human race and express their interest in mutual exchange. Imagine that species knew nothing more about us than a box set of the most popular American ‘80s movies. And imagine that species stubbornly insisted on communicating in the medium of film. They’d probably make something like Gingerclown. But in this case, it’s not aliens from another planet. It’s just Hungarians. I don’t know much about Hungary. They have a ridiculously overcomplicated language and they’re somewhere in Europe. Also, they gave us Gingerclown.

Gingerclown is about a nerd and a pretty, popular blonde with a heart of gold who both get chased by drunken jocks into a haunted amusement park after dark. Eventually the jocks follow. They all discover the park really is haunted. Not by ghosts, but by a host of surreal monster puppets. With their true and pure hearts, just maybe our hero and heroine will get out alive and in love.

Right away you know something’s up when you hear the jocks talking. The dialogue is stilted and suspiciously obsessed with balls. The actors’ delivery veers between the bizarre cadences of ‘Biff’ (da-duh-da-pause-da-duh-pause-da-da) and a straight-up Eurotrash accent. Those varsity jackets aren’t fooling anyone! Nor is placing the amusement park behind the Hollywood sign.

Your suspicions that all is not right with Gingerclown are confirmed when you actually meet the clown. He isn’t ginger or a clown. He’s a big, lumbering troll. And the creatures in the amusement park with him aren’t clowns, either. They’re big, lumbering cyclopes, giant, lumbering spiders, and other weird stuff. It’s like they inherited a swimming pool of old latex from a deceased relative and moulded these things before they ever had a script. They’re actually really cool-looking creatures. They just don’t make any sense.

The nerd and the bimbo, as protagonists, don’t do much protaging. They stumble from one odd creature to another, interact in a variety of surreal conversations and activities, until they stumble to the next creature. Probably my favorite of these surreal conversations is when the bimbo, near the end of the film, tells the Gingerclown, “You’re not a clown at all, are you?” 

Gingerclown is—it’s like someone dumped Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, Revenge of the Nerds, and Legend in a compost heap on a Hungarian onion farm and they all kinda decayed over the decades into this. In the same way, it’s kinda like looking at our own culture in a funhouse mirror. It’s weird and briefly amusing.

With the production value of a decent Full Moon flick and much less common sense, Gingerclown is an interesting plunge down the rabbit hole. I won’t say it’s good. But I will say it offers a unique experience. On that alone, I recommend it.