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.