After an uh...incident on the highway a nice normal movie couple really need to find a phone and a place to unload the um...stuff they have in the trunk, but the first town they come to is abandoned except for these weird kids who stick corn everywhere. No amount of creepy happenings or dead phones or slogans written in blood will induce the guy to drive to the next town, so eventually some of the bigger kids show up and things get a bit tense, with shouts of "outlander!" and such.

As a horror fan I've probably seen at least one installment of just about every horror franchise out there, but here it is like the year 2070 and I still have never seen Children of the Corn, not even once. The reason should be obvious to the imaginary people who've read many of my little notices here: I don't much enjoy children, and children are right in the title of this movie. Would a Pompey Fan watch Scummers of the Corn? Would Hitler watch Influential Jewish Businessmen of the Corn? No. To make matters worse it's also Stephen King's Children Of The Corn, and I'm looking at the stinging welts left on my soul by the sort of Anakin Skywalker uberkinder he thinks are adorable to put in horror stories.

So, I've avoided this movie for nearly thirty years now, nursing my bitterness as the decades peeled away and the world changed around me. The Berlin wall fell, the internet was born, robots landed on Mars, the Red Sox won the World Series, twice, and yet still I would not watch.

Well shipmates, my world weary old heart has finally softened. It's just not worth the fight anymore. Besides, thinks I, the children in this movie will be villains instead of the usual precocious sitcom brats that other people seem to inexplicably not loathe, and if the kids are evil then surely a number of them will be slain for the good. So the time has come. Bring on they chilluns of the corn; I can take it.

Hmm. First of all I'm pretty sure I spotted a few college seniors of the corn in there, but it'll be a cold day in H.E. double hockey sticks when I complain there aren't enough youngsters in a movie, so this mostly wasn't so bad guys. I like a little mass murder at the start of a film and I can endorse He Who Walks Behind The Rows as an acceptable minor god, and I even maybe didn't mind that odd little preacher kid, whaaat? It felt really strange and even a bit disconcerting to see a child on screen and not start with the facial tics, but the fabric of my reality was restored when I found out from IMDB that it's not a kid a all, but some full grown guy who just looks strangely like a child. Not a real midget, but like that man boy from Burial Grounds who kept trying to...let's not think about that. Anyway it got me thinking, why can't all children be played by adults? They don't even need to be dwarfs or anything; just say they're kids and I promise I'll buy it. Like have Angus Scrimm play the plucky preschooler who beats up the werewolf next time.

Mostly though I like the movie's corn. Cornfields are just neat. I always like to plant a little myself just for the vibe of seeing it out there waiving in the first cool winds of Autumn. Oh ar, everyone needs a pumpkin patch and a cornfield. I love how the kids stuff that guy's car with corn to make it not go. Whatever the problem, good wholesome corn is the answer. And yes I know technically it's maize, but this is 'Murica dammit. Nebraska really is like that by the way for you outlanders who've never left New York and L.A. It's corn as far as you can see in all directions from one end to the other and even beyond into Iowa. It's not the nice kind of corn people eat either; most of it's crapped right back out by cows so you lot can have your Mac-Donalds hamburger sandwiches. But I'm not here to get political. I'm here to rubbish the end of this movie.

Holy creamed corn Batman, I've never seen a movie get so repulsive so fast. One minute I'm sort of enjoying people getting stuck up on corn crosses and such, then that Thirtysomething guy runs in and taunts the children of the corn into submission and they hatch a plan to kill the god with corn ethanol and sprinklers, and the exact smart-mouthed superbrat I was dreading shows up to fearlessly save the day and everybody's giddy with happiness and cracking jokes by the end. I feel like I was watching a movie and suddenly got pied in the face.

So at the end of the day I was right all along and I cannot in good conscience rate the movie any higher due to the offending youngster, but it's only a big corn turd for the last few minutes and the movie did actually roadkill a throat-slitted little kid.

STOP HATING ME I HAVE NEVER HARMED A CHILD.

The review has ended. I don't seem to have stopped typing though... So near the end there's this scene where they're looking for a hose coupler. See they need to hook the ethanol tanks to the sprinkler system and they don't have the right connector, so they have to look around for one. It's not a long scene, but it's in there. Dialogue is spoken, hose ends are bumped together to illustrate lack of connectivity, a bucket of fittings is rummaged through.

Now of course I understand that in a live action adventure people would need to find all manner of common objects - this very day in fact I needed a tape measure, jigsaw, pencil, screwdriver and elastic bands. A couple weeks ago I even had to look for my plumb bob for god's sake. But movies only have about 90 minutes to blow our minds and here one of them was spent fumbling around for a hose coupler.

I'm not just picking on this movie; I see this sort of thing all the time. And I don't mean in some arty Twin Peaks kind of way where they make a big weird deal out of the mundane, I mean people just doing stuff that shouldn't be in a movie. Plot exposition? Was the screenwriter afraid some smartass critic would say "this absurd movie would have us believe Nebraska corn farms use the exact same hose size for both their sprinklers and ethanol tanks"? Or, more disturbingly, were they actually trying to create suspense with that? Like will they find that coupler in time!? Oh Thank god there it is! A person who's on the edge of his seat from that is about to have a triple heart attack from the next scene where they almost don't turn the sprinklers on in time.

I'm saying if I'm watching other people fiddle with hoses it better be Toshiro Mifune and Vincent Price.