213 - Children of the Corn

    A bickering couple drives through the middle of nowhere, encountering a town in which religious fanatic children have taken over and killed all adults.
    This is the 2009 made-for-tv remake.  It’s more faithful to the original story, and proportionally, a much larger budget.  I actually checked this out.  The 1984 version had a budget of $800,000.  In 2009 dollars, that’s equivalent to about 1.65M.  The 2009 version had a budget of about 2M.
    I guess this is to say that the quality of a production has little to do with the budget.  This movie was written and directed by the same guy.  In the interest of directly adapting the story, yes, he did that well.  In the interest of making a good movie, he failed.
    This is one of the first movies I’ve seen where I felt like the performances were the biggest problem.  Normally, when there’s a poor performance, it’s limited to a specific person, or a few people.  With this, there’s one actor that does a decent job, one that does a passable job, and everyone else is terrible.  And this is really puzzling to me, because the female lead is played by Kandyse McClure, who I’ve seen in Battlestar Galactica, and she’s good.  She does a very good job in that show.  I don’t doubt her abilities.  But her performance here is one of the most grating I’ve ever seen.  When she disappears about halfway through the movie, I found it easier to relax and enjoy the movie.
    The children are well-dressed, clean, and healthy.  This is in stark contrast to the town, which is dilapidated and run-down.  It’s actually one of the highlights of the movie - the town looks wonderfully abandoned.  While I have no issues with having different builds for the kids, I do take issue with the largely overweight ones.  It seems like their diet would result it pretty substantial weight loss.
    The script is awkward, and no one talks like a real person would.  When it comes to the kids, this is expected, but the arguments between the couple seem incredibly strained.
    There’s the dark ending, but I couldn’t care less.  None of the characters were likable, so it doesn’t seem to matter if they live or die.
    Effective religious zealotry is a real lynchpin to this story, and the kid playing Issac is so poor… and the kids playing the followers seem so disinterested that it’s hard to believe any of this.
    The one main strong point: it was actually pleasing to see the male lead being willing to kill the kids.  Especially for a made-for-TV movie.