No, the 2023 remake of Children of the Corn doesn’t fix the franchise

Zac Efrons fire starter got a lot of hell in early 2022 for being a crappy remake of a Stephen King book-to-movie adaptation that wasn’t great to begin with. Well, there’s good news for this movie: The 2023 revival Children of the Corn franchise is even worse. This is the 11th film and second remake based on King’s 1977 short story about a murderous cult of children who sacrifice their parents to appease a pagan corn god in rural Nebraska. And although it’s not the worst movie the franchise has to offer, that’s only because the competition is so weak.

The newest children of the corn was directed by Kurt Wimmer, a journeyman guy who wrote this Total recall And point break remakes, and whose last outing was as a director Ultraviolet back in 2006. That’s a brand for Children of the Corn, a franchise that has never involved particularly respected filmmakers. Wimmer’s directing is competent enough, with little stylistic flourishes here and there. But with a script this bad, there’s not much that can be done to salvage a film. And since Wimmer wrote it too, he only has himself to blame.

This is a remake in name only, since children of the corn

upholds the concept of children rising up to kill their parents in the name of “who goes behind the lines” and then pretty much discards everything else. Wimmer’s first big mistake is to eliminate King’s outsider’s view of the story, a grown couple trying to understand what went wrong in a seemingly abandoned Nebraska town. He replaces her with a high school senior named Boleyn Williams (Elena Kampouris). Boleyn will soon be leaving the small town of Rylstone, Nebraska for college. She wants to study environmental science and help Rylstone recover from a series of crop failures caused by genetically modified corn. Then everything falls apart.

Boleyn is both an insider and an outsider. She’s a kid in Rylstone, so she’s safe from the plan hatched by 12-year-old psychopath Eden (Kate Moyer) to slaughter every adult in town. (The “why” of all this is saved for the end of the film and is groan-worthy when revealed.) Boleyn opposes the plan. Until it’s too late, she believes there must be a peaceful solution to the conflict between the town’s quarreling adults and children. The adults are desperate to bulldoze Rylstone’s corn crop for state subsidies and move to Florida. The bloodthirsty children… don’t want that. (Again, the “why” is both elusive and stupid.)

Kampouris delivers her best horror movie emoting as the plot thickens, but Wimmer doesn’t know what to do with Boleyn once the narrative is in motion. This means that she spends much of the film standing around in horror and not really do lots of everything. The same goes for her father Robert (Captain America: The Winter Soldier‘s Callan Mulvey), who throws up his hands and declares that there is nothing he can do about Rylstone’s destruction, making his character irrelevant to the rest of the film.

A more accomplished recast comes in the form of 14-year-old Moyer, who steals the show as the female equivalent of the original film’s teenage preacher, Isaac. She’s a mini-Joker in the chaotic Heath Ledger/Joaquin Phoenix sense, with added shades of a genocidal dictator and a murderous cult leader. Moyer gives her everything as Eden, and her hammy delivery as this evil, sneaky villain is a hoot – in fact, that’s the only really pleasing thing about this picture.

An area where children of the corn chooses to remain inexplicably faithful to the original source material in his portrayal of He Who Walks Behind the Rows, briefly described in the short story as a green human-plant hybrid with glowing red eyes. Wimmer follows this idea and overloads the back half of the film with unconvincing CGI effects. (One scene cuts short king kong, as He Who Walks falls out of the corn to snatch a woman tied to a cross.) We see way more of this cornstalk scarecrow monster than we need to, and every time it shows up, it realizes bit silly looking.

If children of the corn If it was just an empty-headed cross between a creature movie and a killer kids movie, it might have been fun. What really brings this remake down is the fact that it brings up so many socio-political themes that Wimmer never pursues and makes you wonder if he stumbled upon them by accident. Children and parents bickering over how to treat the environment is extremely relevant at a time when Gen Z is making headlines with their climate activism. This film hints at that connection and then drops it. Eden and her followers rationalizing their behavior step by step correspond to the way ordinary people become fascists in real life. Wimmer isn’t interested in the subject either.

It’s frustrating, and these failures are not due to apathy but to incompetence children of the corn it’s more fun to sit through. To see the potential the film has set itself ablaze, running into a dry cornfield at half-time, is oddly underwhelming: there’s plenty of screaming and blood, and children giggling while clutching rusty farming implements, but none of it gets anywhere . No thought is provoked and no emotion aroused – least of all fear. “Nothing ever dies in corn,” one kid explains to the other before going on a killing spree in the opening scene. Maybe it’s about time this franchise changed that.

children of the corn debuts in theaters on March 3rd and will be available in digital outlets such as Amazon And vudu on March 21st.