Pretty Good

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Excellent but underrated film

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

I'm not that familiar with the whole sequel-prequel-franchise of Children of the Corn, I only saw the first one, it must have been like 30 years ago, and I remember that one as pretty creepy. But I gather that with so many rip-offs the whole premise should have become pretty worn-out. Then I found this dvd "Children of the Corn: Genesis" in a garage sale and thought that, who knows, a more or less recent version dating from 2011 might have added something new and could be even scarier than the first, considering the nowaday standards for horror movies.Well, I was wrong. The most scary of this movie was the cover of the dvd-box, an image that in the movie didn't even pop up. The movie itself was tedious and had a snails pace, with endless conversations, no scares, and strangely enough no corn and no children whatsoever.A young and loving couple is stranded with their car in the desert and asks for help at a forlorn dilapidated farm. The unfriendly owner doesn't want to help, but when he hears that the girl is pregnant he reluctantly lets them in. Of course - as the conventions of the genre demand - actual help is only available the next morning, so they have to stay the night. Although this is a premise that we've seen for like a zillion times, it can usually vouch for a nice tension-filled rest of the movie. Not so here. The couple tries to befriend the strange owner and his Ukranian wife (why on earth Ukranian??) during an awkward dinner, evidently to no avail, and in the night the girl discovers in a barn outside that a young child is locked up. She constructs her own ideas of what is going on (child-abuse!!) and demands from her boyfriend that they call the police and expose the farmer. But this scheme falls flat when the owner finds out, behaves even more strange and hints that the child is locked-up for protection of themselves. Of course the couple doesn't believe him and after an endless night of talking and bickering they escape in a car the next morning. Really, this is actually all that happens. No scares, no flocking children with frozen gazes, armed with scythes, not even the usual (and for a Children of the Corn-version seemingly unavoidable) creepy cornfield, nothing like that at all. Only in a few dream-fragments of the girl we see hints of a few brutal children but in the rest of the movie we have to settle for just some people talking endlessly.I won't give the end away, but what happens during their escape in the car stands for the only real action and excitement of the whole movie (and by the way with very good special effects, and/or - I'm no professional - old fashioned stuntmens craftsmanship!).So I guess my old assumption was right: the theme of Children of the Corn is probably really too worn out for a decent sequel. At least this one is totally superfluous.

A young couple spend the night at a preacher's home, and soon begin to suspect that he has a child locked up in his barn. Can they save the child from this imprisonment? Pretty much the nicest thing I can say about this film is that it features Billy Drago, who is a decent actor and under-appreciated. The makeup department did a good job making him look old and rustic, and he he has much less of an exotic look about him than usual.That positive note aside, I am a bit confused what is going on with the Children of the Corn franchise. This one has very little to do with children and very little to do with corn. Some efforts are made to connect it to the series by attempting to offer a back story (presumably why this one is called "Genesis"). But it could be changed and not affect the overall story at all.Obviously by stamping it with the Children of the Corn label, more people will rent the film and possibly even buy it. But it does the movie a disservice in the long run. I suspect that if the franchise aspects were changed slightly, this could have been a fairly respectable stand-alone story.Sadly, it was not the last one made in the franchise...

I have to admit, I haven't followed the Children of the corn series up close, so I can't tell you, if this actually makes sense in the series. Than again Dimension doesn't seem to care, if they put a movie out there that isn't that connected to previous entries in a successful series (see Hellraiser for that). But this movie is nicely shot, has some interesting twists (though you can see them coming even before the scriptwriter put them down on paper).In the end this doesn't add much to the horror genre, has the typical erratic character behavior (it's the grown ups who act like children, doing stuff they've been told not to do). The ending is weird too. You wonder why a certain character would accept "help" like that. But until that point you will probably have shut down your brain, just to save it. Good thinking ...

You'd think that with the wealth of ideas that other Children of the Corn movies have succeeded / failed with, there'd be plenty to dip into from this 'Genesis' incarnation. Sadly, the story is tortilla-thin and, as mentioned by other reviewers, goes wildly off the rails from about 30 minutes in.The action starts in a remote desert house, where the stranded couple have to spend the night with the creepy owners. Get used to this location - you'll be here for 90% of the movie. As such, it gets dull quickly. The acting is by-the-numbers and I can't give you any plot spoilers, as there is very little in the way of plot. You can guess what happens. In fact, your guesses will probably be better than the script.This is another of those films that seems to have been made by people who haven't seen any movies for the last thirty years. It offers no surprises, originality or quirks. Even if you just wanted to bask in the 'atmos' of the original CotC, it doesn't have a shred of the ambiance that the original depends on.Boo and hiss.