No More Bonk-Bonk on the Head

As we head into Spooktober, the spooky stuff starts hitting our queue. Some of it, like Stephen King's Children of the Corn (1984) is pretty silly.

It starts Gatlin, in a small Nebraska farm town, with a boy going to a diner with his dad after church. On a signal, all the older kids start murdering the adults. Fast forward 3 years - Burt Stanton and Linda Hamilton are driving through Nebraska when they hit a kid in the road. Stanton notices that his throat was cut just before he was hit, and loads the body up and starts looking for a town. A mechanic at a gas station tells them to avoid Gatlin, but all the roads seem to point that way. While they are driving in circles, lets meet the kids.

The children who murdered all the adults in Gatlin are lead by the child preacher Isaac, who has the kids sacrifice to He Who Walks Behind the Rows. He has a thuggish lieutenant, Malachi, who just likes killing adults. The kids are mostly happy to be out from under the grown ups, but the little boy from the diner and his sister (who draws pictures of the future) still like to go to their old house and play with toys and records. When our adult protagonists finally get to Gatlin, these kids will be their allies and vice versa.

So it’s the kids vs. adults story - just like the Miri episode of Star Trek. My favorite part of this one is how easily the grown ups here just shrug off the kids attacks and knock them down. Even if they are outnumbered, they’re just kids.

I know King has a reputation as a great horror writer, but it seems to me that, outside of The Shining, all of his movies are trash. (And he hated The Shining.) This one is no different. Not even all that scary, although pretty gory.