Children of the Corn (Fritz Kiersch, 1984)

Unbelievably, I had never seen Children of the Corn until last night. I say unbelievably because I grew up a horror fanatic in small-town Nebraska, mere miles from the film's setting (though hundreds of miles from the actual filming locations), I'd read the Stephen King short story that provides the film's source material, and I had gazed upon the VHS cover hundreds of times while perusing the horror sections at both the local video store and the three convenience stores that also rented movies. (In the early days of the VHS craze, nearly half the businesses in my tiny hometown also rented movies, including a gas station, a pizza place, and, briefly, a hardware store, but only the video store and one convenience store kept renting by decade's end.)

This should have been a candidate for formative childhood movie, but I had my reasons for ignoring it. I figured I already knew what happened from the Stephen King story, and I was also a little puzzled about how they were going to stretch a whole movie out of it. I was excited when my home state popped up in the story (big Steve's writing about my home turf of western Nebraska! nobody does that!), but the idea of watching a Nebraska-set movie when I actually lived there and was bored by living there didn't really appeal. I also had a bias against horror movies about evil children. As an adult, I love creepy killer kids, but when I was a kid myself, I wasn't buying it. Kids were too easy to defeat, I remember thinking. Just smack a few of them around. They're tiny. (I didn't realize there were teens in the movie. Teens could be scary.) I felt this way about killer dolls, too, but I've since come around. When I popped into the video store to rent some horror, I was looking for Romero's zombies, Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, Michael Myers, serial killers, science experiments gone wrong, and fucked-up monsters. You could keep your pint-size antagonists. Finally, I knew there was a religious aspect to the movie. Again, as an adult, I think religious cults are a great subject for horror, but as a kid, my least favorite hour of the week was the hour spent in church, so I didn't want any God talk mixing with my entertainment (unless you were going to throw some demonic possession or scary devils into the mix). Sorry, Children of the Corn. You had too much stacked against you.

Roughly 67.8 Children of the Corn movies exist and NONE of them have been filmed in Nebraska. At least this first film and the remake were shot in neighboring Iowa, but production on some of the sequels, reboots, etc., has taken place in such non-Nebraska Nebraskas as California, North Carolina, Kentucky, Canada, Oklahoma, Australia, and my current city of Austin, Texas. Either Nebraska has lousy tax breaks or, much like the titular children of the titular corn, doesn't cotton to strangers. Or those elitist movie folk from the city have a condescending bias against my home state. Who should I be mad at here?

WARNING: Corn-based rant ahead. Skip ahead one paragraph if you aren't a current or former Nebraskan. Most of the movie takes place in the fictional town of Gatlin, "19 miles from Hemingford." Hemingford is real and roughly an hour's drive from my hometown. One look at this movie by a native of the area, and that native would know that something's not quite right. We're hundreds of miles east of Hemingford, my friends, not 19 miles. Yeah, most of Nebraska is pretty flat and has a lot of corn, like in this movie. And, yeah, there is still quite a bit of corn in my former neck of the woods. But the rows and rows of corn smack up against the highway are a familiar sight in eastern Nebraska and our neighbors to the east and south, Iowa and Kansas, and not a familiar sight 19 miles from Hemingford. Western Nebraska is not that flat, contrary to stereotypes, and is instead full of rolling hills, large rock formations, and even some man-made lakes. I didn't appreciate this when I was growing up, but it's a pretty part of the country (though sometimes a political nightmare).

WARNING: Car radio rant ahead. Skip to the next paragraph if you're ready for the rants to end. I also want to express irritation at the two scenes in which our adult outsiders, Burt and Vicky (Thirtysomething's Peter Horton and The Terminator's Linda Hamilton), are driving through Nebraska and turn on the car radio, only to be blasted with an evangelical fire and brimstone preacher. In both instances, they turn off the radio without even attempting to change the station and say condescending things about Nebraska. Is your radio stuck on one dial? Do you not know that there is more than one radio station per geographical area? What gives, Burt and Vicky? Nebraska is not a big fire and brimstone evangelical area, and there's not a lot of preaching going on there, radio-wise. (Though Rush Limbaugh's unfortunate popularity in the '90s opened the door to much more talk radio on the dial later; Limbaugh was also the gateway to half my family turning into brainwashed kooks. Fox News, 9/11, and Facebook delivered the death blows.) The Assembly of God and Jehovah's Witnesses churches have a presence in the area, but not on the radio, most of the population tends to be moderately Protestant or Catholic, and no one is too loud about it, at least in my years there. I heard a lot more preaching of the evangelical kind on my drives through Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Burt and Vicky should have turned the dial to 93.3 to get the classic rock and current pop hit stylings of Scottsbluff's KMOR (currently all classic rock; they dropped the pop after I moved and briefly experimented with a mainstream alternative rock format in the wake of Nirvana in the mid-'90s) or 102.3 KPNY out of Alliance (future home of Carhenge and the town that employed my dad) for more classic rock and pop (and hard rock in the evenings). Ironically, KPNY now has a Christian music format. Did Isaac get to them? Or was it Malachai's work?

Rants over. We're six paragraphs in. What did I actually think of the movie? It's OK. Not one of the all-timers, despite its 39.4 sequels, but a reasonably entertaining watch, in '80s New World Pictures comfort-food style. The opening thirty minutes are reasonably creepy and atmospheric, but the movie gets sillier as it progresses, though the corn children's artwork is sick as hell. In a way, Children of the Corn is a folk horror movie (one of my absolute favorite horror subgenres), just a crasser, more commercial version.

Most of you know the basic plot. Child preacher Isaac (Tammy and the T-Rex's John Franklin) has a weird sway over most of the children of Gatlin. He preaches to them in the cornfields, and one Sunday, he organizes a mass murder of every adult in the town. The kids have taken over, and once you turn 19, you're summoned to the corn and taken away by God, or Satan pretending to be God, or an Atari game brought to life, or just killed by creepy kids. We don't know yet. Either way, this cult doesn't seem destined for longevity. His right-hand man Malachai (The 'Burbs' Courtney Gains) is the creepiest and tallest of the kids, tweens, and teens, and he organizes most of the violence, though there is increasing tension between Malachai and Isaac. Brother and sister Job and Sarah don't buy into Isaac's cult nonsense or his strict rules (no games, no music, no TV, no fun, no hanging out in their old house), but Isaac allows them to bend a few of the rules and avoid a lot of the religious ceremony because Sarah has visions of the future, which she draws. You can't draw or make any art for fun in Gatlin, but you are allowed to draw visions of the future and make creepy corn-based religious art. The aforementioned Burt and Vicky are in the middle of a cross-country road trip to Burt's new job in Seattle and end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Isaac calls them "outlanders" and instructs his flock to kidnap and sacrifice them.

I forgot to mention veteran character actor R.G. Armstrong. He's only in the movie for roughly seven minutes, but he gets third billing, above the title, because the rest of the cast is non-famous children. He's the only adult near Gatlin allowed to continue breathing because our creepy little corn children rely on his gas station and body shop a few miles outside of Gatlin for their fuel, auto part, and mechanic's needs. R.G. tells Burt and Vicky to get the hell out of his gas station, stay the hell away from Gatlin, and get the hell to Hemingford instead. Burt and Vicky initially heed his advice, but after some funny business with the road signs, they end up in Gatlin anyway.

Burt and Vicky are our ostensible heroes, but Burt is kind of a bossy, condescending partner, and Vicky is a bit meek and deferential to Burt, though she gets a few strong moments. It's a little odd seeing Linda Hamilton play someone who does what her man tells her to do after seeing her kick so much ass in the Terminator movies. Burt ends up needing the help of Vicky, Job, and Sarah, but he still acts like he's handling it by himself. Come on, Burt. Acknowledge your peers.

I'm still not quite sure what the hell happened at the end. God, the devil, giant gophers, natural disasters, a minor demon, and/or primitive digital computer effects all seem to have a role to play when the shit goes down. Anyway, I enjoyed myself, and the more I think about it, the more Children of the Corn truly predicts the state of modern United States political discourse. Smug, condescending urban liberals underestimating their opponents' power and danger on one side, deranged rural homicidal evangelical adult babies on the other side, rich guys sitting back and making money off of both of them (it was a low-budget film, but you get the idea; box office success, etc.). If our country still exists in a few years, I encourage someone to actually make one of these movies in Nebraska.

Children of the Corn was director Fritz Kiersch's feature film debut after years of making commercials and working in a variety of technical roles on film sets. His other credits include Tuff Turf, with James Spader and Robert Downey Jr., the extreme motocross movie Winners Take All (character names include Rick Melon, "Bad" Billy Robinson, Goose Trammel, Bear Nolan, and Mongrel), the Oliver Reed-starring sword and sorcery epic Gor, a modern Romeo & Juliet update taking place in the world of teenage surfer gangs called Under the Boardwalk, fighter pilot movie Into the Sun, with Anthony Michael Hall, and two episodes of the Swamp Thing TV series. He continued directing sporadically into the 2000s and 2010s while working full-time in academia. He created the film production departments at both Oklahoma City Community College and Oklahoma City University and taught at the latter. He is currently the associate vice president of academic affairs at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.

 

C.H.U.D. (Douglas Cheek, 1984)

Several highfalutin' New York theater actors, playwrights, and producers were at a party in the early '80s and started goofing on the idea of making a cheap horror movie. The half-serious idea built up steam as the party continued, and, long story short, C.H.U.D. became a reality. Noted C.H.U.D. skeptic Joe Bob Briggs feels the movie doesn't really work because the actors and filmmakers are slumming in a genre they don't entirely respect. I can sympathize with that take, and there are moments in the film where a horror lover's touch would have improved things, but C.H.U.D. is a solid, well-acted, and enjoyable '80s monster movie. And C.H.U.D. is just fun to say.

Because of its New York theater/indie film scene origins, C.H.U.D. is packed with early roles for people who would go on to long careers as well-known character actors. The two male leads, John Heard and Daniel Stern, had already established themselves in film alongside their theater work, but most of the cast were making their film debuts or had only a handful of prior film roles (though most were theater veterans), including Kim Greist, Christopher Curry, Sam McMurray (memorably appearing in Raising Arizona a few years later), Vic Polizos, Graham Beckel, Bill Raymond, Peter Michael Goetz, Jay Thomas, Jon Polito, and, last but not least, John Goodman. I even blinked and missed small parts for Frankie Faison and Patricia Richardson. If most of these names are unfamiliar to you, type them up in the image search of your choice and you'll probably know their faces from dozens of movie and TV roles.

C.H.U.D. was filmed all over (and under) NYC (and a bit of Jersey City), with the bulk of shooting in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan shortly before its gentrified transformation into expensive residences and high-end shopping for the affluent. C.H.U.D. is a sweaty, grimy, dirty movie, and the filmmakers succeed admirably at avoiding any New York glitz and glamor. They also avoid sleaze, focusing exclusively on grit, dirt, and dank. (Imagine C.H.U.D. in Odorama or Smell-O-Vision.) For a deep dive into the film's locations, I highly recommend this post.

For a cheap monster movie, C.H.U.D. was ahead of the times in treating homelessness and environmental issues as interconnected crises. A segment of the NYC homeless population living near the subway tunnels and sewers underneath the city (see the documentary Dark Days for part of the real-life inspiration) has been disappearing. This mystery is worrying two men who don't yet know each other, photographer George Cooper (John Heard), whose day job is in fashion photography but who has been taking pictures of his neighborhood's homeless people as part of an art photo/photojournalism hybrid project, and A.J. "The Reverend" Shepherd (Daniel Stern), an activist who runs a neighborhood soup kitchen. George can't find any of the undergrounders he's been photographing and therefore can't finish his project, and none of them (except for crazy, knife-wielding Val) have shown up at A.J.'s soup kitchen for three weeks. Meanwhile, the EPA and the NRC are up to something in the underground, and they're being mighty secretive about it. What are they hiding? That's right. Chuds. Does C.H.U.D. stand for "cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller" or "contamination hazard urban disposal"? Oh shit. Maybe both?

The cops finally start sniffing around the mystery when the housed population begins disappearing. Police captain Bosch (Christopher Curry) is especially adamant about getting to the bottom of all these disappearances after his wife goes missing. He forms an initially uneasy alliance with A.J. after running into secrecy and bureaucracy at the top but turns into a chud-fighting crusader who gets things done. The characters love saying Bosch's name, probably because it's almost as fun to say as "chud." Try it. "Hey, Bosch!" "Forget it, Bosch." "Come on, Bosch!" The dialogue is full of phrases like this. My particular favorite is when an exasperated A.J. says, "It doesn't wash, Bosch." If I were on the writing team, I'd have snuck in, "You've gone too far this time, Bosch," or "Bosch just blasted a chud!" but you can't have everything.

Other important characters include George's girlfriend Lauren (Kim Griest), a model who can hold her own in a chud attack, Mrs. Monroe (avant-garde theater vet Ruth Maleczech), a homeless woman living in the underground whose brother was attacked by a chud, and Wilson (George Martin), an official from the NRC who is covering up the secret dumping of toxic waste.

Things reach the breaking point when chuds attack a diner, rudely before a couple of cops played by John Goodman and Jay Thomas get to enjoy their cheeseburgers. The bloodbath brings out the cops, government officials, most of the main characters, and a bunch of neighborhood extras, and unites George and A.J. at last. (They would appear together again, on opposite sides of the law this time, in Home Alone, a movie that could have used a chud or two in my opinion.) Crisis finally averted, the chuds would remain quiet until 1989's C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D., which will have to wait for a future post.

The film, surprisingly director Douglas Cheek's only feature (he mostly works as a film editor), is a bit light on blood, guts, and full-on mayhem, and the chud effects are a little cheap (though I have to remark on how jacked the chuds are; they must have been blasting their quads and doing a bunch of Internet yoga videos taught by rich influencer women who love inspirational quotes; their neck muscles are insane), but the acting is obviously good, the story is well-paced, the suspense scenes work, and it's all pretty fun. I mildly urge you to enter the chudniverse.