My Review

I was once a child of the corn. When I was six years old, my father’s company moved from New York to Indiana, and before I knew it, I went from living in the suburbs of Syracuse to growing up in a tiny town surrounded for what seemed like infinite miles by nothing but cornfields. Endless corn can be pretty and picturesque at first, don’t get me wrong. Cornfields can catch light in interesting ways, and they can be fun to play in, especially if you’re a kid. But after a while, for months at a time, for hours and hours on end, seeing nothing but corn, and corn, and more corn… it can do things to a person.

We only lasted about a year in Indiana. The whole experience was surreal in many ways. Many of the people who lived in our town had never left our town, despite the fact that it had one traffic light and basically two roads. We used to travel to Indianapolis on the weekends to visit the Children’s Museum, and I remember my mother’s friends being shocked that she would take us that far without my father. “That far” meaning about 40 minutes, down one straight road that led right to downtown. “But… your children! In the city?!” My mother’s from Brooklyn. She could handle Indianapolis, no problem.

This is all to say: I am intimately familiar with the central conflict at the heart of Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, which involves cornfield-dwellers clashing with the pace of life in the inner city. As a fan of Stephen King, of his original “Children of the Corn” short story, and of the original film adaptation, I was looking forward to seeing why the franchise decided to move the action to the city. But, wow: the results are a frustratingly mixed bag of cool special effects, hilariously awful ones, groanworthy “acting,” legitimate scares, and utterly nonsensical writing.

Let’s start with those effects, which are credited to someone named “Screaming Mad George,” which is pretty much the best horror movie crew member name of all time. Some of the creature and gore effects are pleasingly cheesy in the way that a lot of similar B-horror movie practical effects are. You can tell it’s a model of someone’s head that’s splitting open and spewing cockroaches into the air, for example, but it still delivers on the shock. There’s one scare involving a half-buried mostly-dead head that’s legitimately creepy, and there’s another moment during one of several crucifixions where an interestingly-lit statue of Mary Magdalene transforms into a delightfully grotesque and completely unnerving vision of evil.