Children of the Corn: Genesis (2011)

Movie Info

You don’t want to come in…not because it is terrifying but because it is lame

Tim (Tim Rock) and Allie (Kelen Coleman) find themselves stranded in a small dusty desert town.  Seeking help, they end up at the home of a man called Preacher (Billy Drago) and Preacher’s mail-order-bride Oksana (Barbara Nedeljáková).  Tim and Allie learn that leaving will mean spending a night at the farm, and the discovery of a child being locked up in an outside shed leads to a desperate attempt to escape…but escape might not be possible.

Written and directed by Joel Soisson, Children of the Corn:  Genesis is the ninth film in the series following the made-for-TV remake Children of the Corn in 2009 (or the ninth if you are considering original stories).  The previous entry Children of Corn: Revelation was released in 2001, and this film received negative reviews like most of the sequels.

The first Children of the Corn film was a fun and creepy movie…and the series progressively got worse.  With many of the Children of the Corn, you at least had creepy kids, terrified victims, or rows of cornfields hiding danger.  In Children of the Corn:  Genesis, you get none of this.

We need a dream sequence…to get some kids and some corn

The movie starts out with a completely unrelated story of a soldier coming home from the war in Vietnam and being killed after discovering his parents dead.  I thought this would somehow come back into play in some way, but it doesn’t.  It is followed by a story with no urgency or development (many times the characters just step off to another room to talk about how they are worried).  There isn’t really any corn, barely any kids, and even scenes like the ending wreck on the highway make little sense because the characters are literally in Los Angeles or some major city where no one seems to respond.  I have a hard time even envisioning what the director/writer thought he was going to be scary or work in the story.

The cast is also lacking.  Billy Drago is a horror veteran and very creepy, but his creepy nature can only get him so far.  Kelen Coleman and Tim Rock just come off as the annoying couple that you don’t want to survive (Coleman’s maybe a slightly better actor, but her character is so obnoxious that it doesn’t matter).  Barbara Nedeljáková (also a horror vet) doesn’t seem to have much of an idea on what her character is about which is probably more of a fault of the script than her as an actress.

So kid…seen any bad movies?

The movie also is visually not compelling.  The movie is basically in the set of the house and doesn’t have many visual components.  You can have scary kids, but other than the opening and a dream sequence, you really don’t even get that.  There are no jumps of scares, but as with many bad horror film, there are some laughs because of this.

Children of the Corn:  Genesis is really a waste of time.  It doesn’t cross back into the “so-bad-it-is-good” realm and is pretty much just a bad movie.  You could rewatch the original (or you could even rewatch many of the sequels that are amazingly even better than this).  I kind of thought with Children of the Corn:  Genesis in the title it would be some sort of origin story at very least…but instead you get nothing (and you’re expected to like it).  The film was followed by the slightly better Children of the Corn:  Runaway in 2018.

Related Links:

Children of the Corn (1984)

Children of the Corn II:  The Final Sacrifice (1993)

Children of the Corn III:  Urban Harvest (1995)

Children of the Corn IV:  The Gathering (1996)

Children of the Corn V:  Fields of Terror (1998)

Children of the Corn 666:  Isaac’s Return (1999)

Children of the Corn:  Runaway (2018)