FINAL GIRL explores the slasher flicks of the '70s and '80s...and all the other horror movies I feel like talking about, too. This is life on the EDGE, so beware yon spoilers!

Jul 15, 2013

Children of the Corn: Revelation


Guys, guess how this one ends.

WITH AN EXPLOSION! Truth. It can't be a coincidence, can it? The fiery, explosive climax has to be a leitmotif, right? It has to be. And hey, should you have a fiery, explosive climax, be sure to consult your doctor. Ha ha haaaaaa! Get it? I'm tired.

Okay, so to be honest, Revelation (2001) wasn't quite as bad as I was expecting. It is, after all, the seventh movie in this He Who Walks Behind the Rows-forsaken series and all the various comments y'all have left on the Final Girl Faceplace had me scared for my life! By which I mean I was anticipating a rise in my blood pressure as a result of the suckitude, that I would be ready to enter a murder/suicide pact with this blog at some point during the film. This, however, was not to be. Not because Revelation is any good, of course. Rather, I cried "uncle!" before this day even began, and so, like a condemned person facing their day of reckoning courtesy of Ol' Sparky, I have been at peace throughout these movies. If you count on having a terrible, no good, really bad day, it all might end up better than you assume.

Yup, I thought that by this point in the proceedings I would be a raving lunatic...but I'm not. Yes, I'm kind of losing control of my ability to form coherent sentences, but I'm not as wiped out as I was during my Halloween-a-thon and my Friday-the-13th-ening. Perhaps this is owed to the fact that I'd seen nearly all of those films before I embarked on that journey into darkness, whereas my Corn senses have only tingled twice in the past. (See what I mean about coherent sentences?) When you're on your 15th hour of movie watching, if you throw in a shitty movie you've seen before it is torturous, like running your tongue over a knife blade. Actually, that would surpass torture, wouldn't it? Regardless, it's an appropriate simile. When you're on your 15th hour of movie watching and you throw in a shitty movie you've never seen before, though, it's just sort of boring. From the Stacie-shaped pit of my couch I shrug and toss off a nonchalant "I've seen worse". Like, come at me, Children of the Corn. You can't hurt me, I'm already dead.

All of this is to say that Revelation is bad, but it didn't make me want to kill myself. That is a compliment, although I doubt it will find its way onto the box of any future DVD releases as a pull quote. Whatever. Like I care, Children of the Corn: Revelation.

So. What is all this shit about the corn? Oh, some broad goes to visit her gramma, who has disappeared from her condemned Condominium of the Corn (for real...it's, like, in a corn field). The building is filled with standard stock apartment dwellers- crazy Army dude, mean old guy, stoner, stripper- who all die one by one at the glowers and hands of...the children of the...wait for it...CORN. They are for real of the corn this time, though- each new death resurrects a dead child from the corns of yore. It's not an awful idea, necessarily. It's just lackluster in its execution and its ties to the previous films are, like Part V, virtually nonexistent.

My biggest takeaway, I think, is that in Revelation bugs spill out of someone's mouth and they are CGI bugs made out of computer. In Urban Harvest, the bugs spilling out of peoples' mouths were real. That's how you get shit done. That's acting! Things were better back them, I'm old, et cetera et cetera.

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