Children of the Corn: Genesis (2012)

Do you know how bad you have to be to become the worst movie in the Children of the Corn franchise? Yeah yeah, welcome to October of the Corn, I’m mad at this movie. I complained that Children of the Corn: The Gathering felt like an unrelated script that slapped the franchise name on it, but this movie… this fucking movie… Okay, enough vague ranting, let’s dive in.

We open with a soldier coming home from Vietnam and finding that all the kids murdered all the adults, including his family. He Who Walks Behind the Rows is mentioned, and the soldier gets pushed out a window but doesn’t die. That’s it. That’s the closest we get to the core idea of the franchise. The rest of the movie takes place in the California desert!

Married couple Allie and Tim are stranded in the middle of nowhere and come across a creepy house owned by a man named Preacher (Mr. Billy Drago who is always a treat and the only good thing in this film). Preacher only lets them in when he finds out Allie is pregnant, and while he makes creepy small talk his Ukranian wife tries to seduce Tim. The couple end up staying the night after some poltergeist activity traps them there, but Allie discovers that there’s a small child locked in the shed. We then get two stories: Preacher says that he was the soldier (I’ll get to that later) who survived… somehow, the child is not his, and the boy is evil. Meanwhile, his wife says that Preacher is evil and that the boy is locked up to keep him safe and away from Preacher. Deciding either story is fucked up, Allie and Tim escape in the car of a cop who was yeeted into the sky by whoever. They end up behind car carrier trailer and after the boy kills his mom with his psychic powers, he causes cars to fly off the trailer leaving Tim dead and Allie in shock. She’s brought back to Preacher’s place, where… I guess they’re supposed to be his other wives, or something? There are a bunch of Puritanical women there, and Allie chills out with the evil boy. The end. What does “Genesis” in the title mean? Fuck if I know.

Going back to the Children of the Corn: The Gathering review, I trash talked that the writer/director’s only other major IMDB entry was The Prophecy II. Well, turns out this writer/director–Joel Soisson–cut his teeth on The Prophecy: Uprising (the 4th one) and The Prophecy: Forsaken (the 5th one). And those movies suuuuuck so much I really don’t want to watch them again to review here. There’s just so much wrong with this film. Like, Tim and Allie would’ve been fine at the end if they chose to either stop their car when all hell was breaking loose, or just… changing lanes. Their bickering gets real old real fast. But the most egregious thing? Trying to convince us that Billy Drago once looked like a normal person. Billy Drago looks like every stereotype that comes to mind when you think “swamp hillbilly.” Hell, that’s basically the role he played in The X Files episode “Theef,” which is where I first was introduced to him! I could see him as a Vietnam soldier, sure, but you cast a normal looking human for the flashback? A betrayal to his weirdness!