ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JUNE 10, 1993
By Steve Newton
The previous movie “based on a short story by Stephen King”, 1992’s The Lawnmower Man, bears so little resemblance to anything King wrote that the horror master belatedly sued to get his name separated from the film.
The latest flick spawned by one of King’s short works, Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, is more fairly based on his 1977 “Children of the Corn” tale, but he should still sue its makers over this worthless piece of cinematic dreck.
Corn II is so despicable that it makes the lowly Children of the Corn flick from ’84 look good.
Now that’s a scary thought.
The movie opens with tabloid journalist John Garrett (Terence Knox of TV’s Tour of Duty) and his rebellious son Danny (Paul Scherrer) driving their van into sleepy Gatlin, Neb., where the bodies of 50 dead townspeople have just been discovered. It seems that the dim Garrett, a former Newsweek reporter (yeah, right), is covering the story for a rag called World Enquirer, but it’s the town’s young people who appear to be the culprits—not some evil alien offspring of an abducted Elvis—and Garrett finds that hard to believe.
Meanwhile, Danny—who resents his dad for abandoning his family when he was just a child—is semi-intrigued by the leader of the kid cult, Micah (Ryan Bollman), and his anti-grown-up preachings. Micah and his followers believe that it is only by wiping out the older folks in their midst that they can eradicate sin from the earth, so in the name of He Who Walks Behind the Rows (of corn), they give a church-goer a killer nosebleed, poke a doctor to death with his hypodermics, and crush an elderly lady with her own house!
While all this is going on, the newshound and his son are busy romancing the only two women in town who appear to be available. Dad hits the jackpot with the owner of the local bed-and-breakfast (Rosalind Allen), but while Danny is making out in a cornfield with teen bombshell Lacy (Days of Our Lives’ Christie Clark), a dismembered hand gets uncomfortably lodged beneath her and breaks up the party.
The two gals eventually get captured by the kids for the climactic sacrifice scene, but a big corn-husking machine saves the day and makes red soup out of the loud-mouthed Micah brat.
The director of Children of the Corn II is David Price, who made his feature debut last year with the direct-to-video horror sequel Son of Darkness: To Die For II. But Price is not alone in his ascension to the title of He Who Makes the Crappy Movie, because he got a shipload of help from this flick’s lame-brained writers and emotionless actors.
Save your money and wait till Corn II comes out on videotape.
Then don’t rent it.
Go here to read more than 350 of my reviews of horror movies released theatrically in North America between 1988 and 2018.