Apart from Amityville, the Children of the Corn franchise is the least interconnected film series in the horror oeuvre. The town of Gatlin is sometimes present and a mention of He Who Walks Behind the Rows, but the connective tissue is mostly loads of spooky children and corn. If we count the remake, this is the ninth film in the series, and it takes the bold choice about not really featuring children… or corn. Don’t get me wrong. There are shots of corn and one kid, but that kid isn’t on screen for more than a few minutes.
The wrongly titled “Genesis” (since this isn’t an origin story at all) starts like it is another remake. Perhaps it is. I think it would be called a “reimaging” now. A couple gets stuck on some godforsaken road and go find help. The viewer’s mind is ready for some spooktacular kids giving evil glares at the unknowing, pregnant, couple. They don’t come, but we do get a weird old man in a cabin played by Billy Drago (the wiki page describes him as a “Charles Manson-like character” which he isn’t) who has a mail-order bride from Ukraine.
The couple quickly finds out that the dude is up to no good, and that there is a supernatural entity in the house. I think the supernatural entity is He Who Walks Behind the Rows. The creature needs children to survive, and the old dude has built a cult around it. Turns out, the mail-order bride was pregnant when she arrived in the US, and the kid is locked up in a shed. Bad news all around for the expecting couple.
Most of the film takes place in the cabin, completely void of children (and corn). It’s pretty obvious that they producers pulled a Hellraiser* here. A script was bought and was deemed cheap to make so it could make some profit from DVD sales, but it needed a brand name and there were a few rewrites and a title change and presto, you got yourself a Children of the Corn film.
The lack of children of the corn in Children of the Corn: Genesis isn’t the film’s main issue. The biggest problem it has is that it’s not entertaining. It’s boring and at 80 minutes, it feels long. The story doesn’t resemble Children of the Corn, but it feels like rehash of countless other flicks, and some of them were probably better. Skip it.
* Hellraiser 5 through 7 were based on scripts rewritten to include Pinhead and the Cenobites.
