Children of the Corn (2023) Review

 "I know, it sucks."
-Eden Edwards



The adults of Rylstone have failed their children in every way and the town is dying.  This makes it easy for one of them, Eden (Kate Moyer), to recruit the rest into joining her cult.  As they plan to murder all of the adults, one teenager, Boleyn (Elena Kampouris), is the only one who can stop Eden.


What Works:

The best part of the movie is the cinematography.  This is a beautifully shot movie with wonderful shots of the landscape and the corn.  Unlike many of the movies in this series, this Children of the Corn looks like a real movie.

Finally, I saw this movie in an empty theater with just me and a friend.  We had a grand time shouting at the screen whenever a character did something stupid.  There are quite a few moments that are so bad it's good.  It made for some great entertainment, but it's not because the movie did something right.


What Sucks:

The acting is pretty terrible across the board.  Not everyone is bad, but almost everyone is.  I don't want to name names because I don't want to be too hard on child actors, but there were some absolutely painful line deliveries.

The CGI looks really bad at time.  We get an explosion and a character getting ripped in half.  Sounds awesome, right?  Except it looks embarrassingly bad.

One of the biggest problems with the movie is that a lot of it doesn't make much sense.  Early on, the adults decide to accept government help to deal with their failing crops, but they have to bury all of their crops to get the help, but the kids want them to focus on making the crops healthy again.  I may be getting all of this wrong, but I don't know a whole lot about agriculture and the movie doesn't explain it well.  This is the primary conflict of the movie.  You'd think they would want to make it clear.

Finally, there is a really interesting premise for a Children of the Corn movie here that the series hasn't done before.  Showing the fall of the adults and the rise of the cult is interesting.  A nice slow-burn movie where we see the adults fail and more and more kids join the cult.  This could have been a fun premise.  The problem is they skim over the conflict and the cult takes over pretty quickly and it devolves into stuff we have seen before.  This movie is a major missed opportunity.


Verdict:

Shockingly, the 11th Children of the Corn film isn't very good.  I'd probably rank it as the 7th best, which is pretty pathetic.  It looks good and has a few moments that are so ridiculous that it's funny, but the acting and CGI suck, the story doesn't make much sense, and the movie as a whole is a major missed opportunity.

 2/10: Awful 




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