Lousy Lottery 12: Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering
Welcome, friends, to the Lousy Lottery! Here’s how it works. First, I post four movies to a poll on Twitter. Fans vote to pick which movie to make me watch that week. I watch it, review it and spread the word about an amazingly awful, terribly terrific b-horror flick.
This is week 12! Your pick for this week is *sighs loudly* 1996’s Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering!
Normally, I try to watch the selected Lousy Lottery movie, review it and publish it within a week. It’s part of the deal. Yet, this week, I had to break that rule. Why? Because this movie is so awful, so vile, so disdained that I could not find a copy of it anywhere. No physical copies, not streaming, not even in, shall we say, less than legal forums. Just to give you a wee picture of how deep into the trash bin you guys dug to find this one! So, while you read this review, please try and picture Paul Rudd’s character in Wet Hot American Summer picking up in the cafeteria and that’s the level of enthusiasm I have while writing this. This is for you, dear readers, this is for you.
I’m going to assume you are familiar with the first entry in the Children of the Corn franchise. In case you are not, there are a few elements of the original important to this film. In the original film, a couple is on a road trip when they stop in a small Nebraska town. Their car needs a part or something and so they’re stuck for a bit. While stuck, they learn the town is overrun by a group of child street preachers who murderously uphold their interpretation of ‘he who walks behind the rows.’ In short, a small group of amish-esque children hang out in the cornfields and murder adults in the town who don’t do their bidding.
Flash forward a few years and we meet up with Grace Rhodes, a medical student who grew up in that small Nebraska town. It’s shocking that Ms. Rhodes is played by Naomi Watts (The Ring, Mulholland Drive), but it’s even more shocking that she seems to be unaware of the town’s past. You know, the town she grew up in. Well, she’s returned home to care for her mother June, played by the incomparable Karen Black (Family Plot, Burnt Offerings), who is suffering from intense agoraphobia. Grace is also returning home to do some detective work into just what the hell is going on with the kids in this town.
Here’s a thought, maybe it’s not agoraphobia. Maybe she’s an adult who lives in a town where adults get murdered on the regular and, well, staying inside seems pretty damn prudent. Frankly, who cares what’s going on with the kids, just get the fuck out of there!
Well, she can’t take that attitude because some of those local kids acting strange are Grace’s younger siblings. Why are they suddenly reverting to little murdering preachers? Why didn’t it happen to Grace herself as a kid? Well, why don’t you just keep your reasonable questions to yourself, okay?! When Grace arrives, she learns the doctor she was going to work with is dead and the body is missing. Oh, also, her mom finally left the house only to be lured into a barn by creepy kids and murdered. She gets some blood draws from some of the kids, don’t ask me how, and sees that the blood appears to show signs of death and decay. Are the kids actual zombies? Sure, why not. Maybe? Who knows.
Grace has no idea what the hell is going on and tries to find the doctor for help getting to the bottom of it. En route, she is kidnapped by the father of one of the murdering kids. Dear old dad takes Grace to his sister’s house. There, Grace learns that the town had this kid with special ‘dark powers’ and didn’t seem to age, presumably due to all that choice dark magic. His powers grew too much and the town did what any town would do. They burned the little bastard and buried his ashes in a wall. No muss, no fuss.
Just like that, it seems we discover why this town is so royally fucked up. But, do we? I mean, really?! Anyway, that’s all in the past anyway, right? Well, I guess not, because suddenly the kid, Josiah, is alive again, I guess, and starts killing adults too, starting with Grace’s best friend. Again, how did Grace not know about this? Why was anyone still living in this town at this point? I mean, is there a gold egg-laying goose somewhere that I’m just not aware of? Grace and some of the other adults head to the doctor’s clinic and miraculously discover that Josiah’s weakness is mercury. Oh, really? How could they possibly have…you know what, never mind.
So, the adults discover the kids, including Josiah, are gathered at a local barn. They fill bullets with mercury, not sure how they knew how to do that, but they did. They also had a ton of mercury, apparently, because they hooked gallons of it up to the sprinkler system. They confront Josiah. He doesn’t die after being shot with the mercury bullets and flees. On come the sprinklers. He still won’t die. Geez, how much of an environmental disaster did spraying an entire lawn with mercury cause? So, Grace steps in and kills Josiah herself with a scythe. Child murder at its finest. Just like that, for some reason, the curse is broken and they all live happily ever after. Oh, one last thing, just before ‘the end’ they reveal one of the kids was Grace’s kid that she’d abandoned. Okay, goodnight everyone!
What a weird and random twist. Totally unnecessary and super heavy for no reason. That’s a great summary of this movie, actually. This movie just doesn’t need to exist. That it takes itself far too seriously and is super heavy for no reason makes it even less necessary. It just, well, isn’t fun. I love settling in and watching a lousy movie, but this felt like more of a badly made drama than a fun b-horror movie. It did give us Naomi Watts and I will never complain about seeing Karen Black on screen, but I have little else to thank it for.
I’m not the only one who felt that way, either. Not only did this movie get a ‘straight to video’ release, it actually was only released on one of those DVD’s that had multiple movies on it. Miramax put out a Children of the Corn DVD that had parts 2-7 on it. That’s it. That was its release. Never a good sign. All this complaining aside, I always have fun watching horror, even when it’s terrible. This, like many of the Children of the Corn movies, hits on two types of horror I really do love too: rural horror and religious horror.
If you, like me, dig that sort of horror, then you’ll at least be able to make your way through this one. You tell me you’ve got a movie where a bunch of demonic children hiding in rural cornfields and I’m in.
Though it was a mess, there was at least a singular vision from writer/director Greg Spence. He was clearly trying to find his voice. He directed this film and then The Prophesy II, both of which flopped and went straight to video. However, he then stopped pursuing a career as a director and switched to producing. Sometimes we just have to find our space. His producing career was much more successful and included some of the best TV in history, including the mini-series John Adams and a little known show called Game of Thrones.
Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering certainly had its problems. I’ll point out that there were four different cinematographers on the project. That alone ought to give you a sense of some of the problems with this movie. That said, it isn’t all bad. It has its moments, not the least of which is watching Naomi Watts kill an evil preacher kid with a scythe. In the end, I’m not sure I’d say it’s worth a watch unless you really are a completest, but if you are, it’s not all bad.
Don’t forget to see what’s coming next in the Lousy Lottery. Make sure you tune into Twitter later today and vote for Lousy Lottery 13! My handle is @MrJosh79, look for it and don’t forget to vote!
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