Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice
Directed by David Price
Written by A.L Katz, Gilbert Adler,
Starring Terrence Knox, Paul Scherrer, Ryan Bollman
Release Date January 29th, 1993
Published January 31st, 1993
Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice is a bonkers disaster of a horror sequel. Produced 8 years after the original Stephen King adapted horror flick, the film is laughably out of touch with even the minor pleasures of the 1984 film. Comically inept director David Price, the son of the head of Dimension Studios at the time, starts bad and builds one unintentionally comic scene after another until the whole thing crashes off the rails in a beautifully unintentionally hilarious train wreck.
Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice begins in Gatlin, Nebraska, the setting of the original, Children of the Corn, where a group of children are being rescued. Somehow, 8 years later, law enforcement caught wind of what happened in Gatlin. Rather, they heard all of the adults had died and figured they should rescue the supposedly innocent children of Gatlin. I think that's what is happening but the comic ineptitude of the direction of Children of the Corn 2 makes it appear as if the kids boarded a bus in their new hometown and then immediately got off and joined new families.
Meanwhile, journalists are covering the carnage in Gatlin, specifically a newsman and his camera operator who stop for a moment to give our protagonist a hard time. Terrence Knox stars in Children of the Corn 2 as John Garrett, a tabloid journalist coming to cover the story. Out TV journalists mention that Garrett is a disgraced former TV reporter but that is not something that will ever come up again or be remotely important to his 'arc,' to use a phrase that barely applies.
After acting like High School bullies, the TV guys head to a nearby cornfield to shoot some B-Roll. This is the filler material you see editors use to transition from one part of a story to another. There, in one of the great unintentionally comic moments in this rather brilliant unintentional comedy, Corn comes to life and kills the TV guys. Stalks of literal corn come to life and use their sharp leaves to slice the throat of the cameraman while another corn stalk launches itself like Poseidon's Trident through the window of the newsman, impaling the reporter.
It's as if whoever wrote this opening sequence hadn't seen the original movie and believed it was literally about killer corn stalks. Oh, and this NEVER happens again in the movie. Yeah, the movie employs actual Corn as a killing device and then never uses this motif again. It's cheap schlock of the highest order, a bit of complete nonsense that is so tasty in its unintended brilliance that I can't help but admire how awesomely stupid this sequence is.
Back to our protagonist, he along with his son, are staying in the same neighboring town that the kids of Gatlin have been brought to. In fact, they are staying at a Bed and Breakfast with Micah (Ryan Bollman), who is the new leader of the Children of the Corn cult. It is Micah who now carries out the wishes of He Who Walks Behind the Rows. This essentially boils down to wearing black and having his voice pitched in a funny overdub intended to make him sound possessed by a demon. It's quite funny, especially when his sacred robe looks like a cozy Snuggie that he cut the arms off of.
The ineptitude of the scripting and direction of Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice is a perfect example of that sweet spot for so bad its good movies. It's so bad you might think it was done intentionally but so obvious that it comes from a lack of care and talent that it becomes kind of poignant. Poignant in that you almost feel bad laughing at the effort that went into creating something so very, very, unintentionally funny.
There are so many great so bad its good moments in Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice. A famous one finds the titular child cult menacing an old woman in an electric wheelchair. The kids have an R.C car and somehow, Micah uses his dark magic to hack the woman's wheelchair so that he can control it. Micah rolls the poor old lady into the street where she is hit by a car. This creates a remarkably funny visual in which a very obvious dummy in an electric wheelchair goes flying through a plate glass window, interrupting a bingo game. That Wheelchair Old Lady is not a meme is a missed opportunity for our entire culture.
Find my full length review at Horror.Media linked here.
