CHILDREN OF THE CORN

1975, Nebraska. Burt and his wife Vicky are on a car trip and in the middle of a heated argument between them, a child suddenly appears from a field of Turkish corn that borders the road, with the inevitable consequence of being run over by the car. The couple is in panic because they think they have killed the child, but looking closely, Burt realizes that the child has his throat cut and therefore it was not the impact with his vehicle that caused the death. The man also notices that someone is hiding in the Turkish corn, loads the corpse into the car, and heads to the nearest town to report the incident. They thus arrive in Gatlin, which at first glance seems like a ghost town, but is actually inhabited by a community of children dedicated to the cult of "He Who Walks Between the Rows," a pagan deity linked to Turkish corn that demands adults as sacrifices to make the harvest prosperous. The story of "Children of the Corn" has been quite peculiar. A story by Stephen King published in the collection "Sometimes They Come Back" titled "Children of the Corn" ("The Children of Corn" in Italy) was adapted for the big screen in 1984 by Fritz Kiersh and became, for the Italian market, "Grano rosso sangue." Since then, an absurd cinematic operation has been launched: a few pages written by King have become the starting point for a series of films that today count 8 titles, including a remake, "Campi insanguinati," produced directly for American cable TV. The narrative material of origin is very good and this is the merit of King and the skillful reworking of religious fanaticism applied unusually to the child dimension, as to create a variant of the fundamental "But how can you kill a child?" by Serrador in religious key. However, it was enough to have one film to say everything (and rather well, by the way) that King had hinted at in his story and creating an infinite saga seems a questionable and highly superfluous operation. The result is that each film limits itself to repeating the story of the prototype with small variations from chapter to chapter, with the impression that each film is a sort of remake of the 1984 pioneer. In a similar context arrives the true remake that, on the one hand, we can consider more honest in explicitly stating the intention from the title, but on the other, it is simply the additional useless film of a worn-out and conceptually extinct saga almost 30 years ago. The temporal setting is the "correct" one, that is, the period in which the story was written and the plot initially faithfully follows the one told in Kiersh's film to deviate considerably in the second part. What strikes is the drastic change in the writing of the two main characters, no longer a classic couple who find in their love the strength to fight the sect and the demon for which they preach, but a couple on the verge of divorce who are presented right in the middle of a heated argument. He is a Vietnam veteran, played by David Anders ("The Vampire Diaries"; "Heroes"), strong and prepared for any eventuality, as well as tormented by the demons of war, she is a beautiful and aggressive woman of color (played by Kandyse McClure of "Battlestar Galactica") who seems to have real control over the course of the couple. This stance in the overturning of the original script honors the screenwriter and director Donald P. Borchers, but also represents his primary limitation. By revealing from the start Burt's military preparation, we can imagine how he will react to the presence of the killer children, immediately annulling the pathos towards the fate of the protagonists. The latter, moreover, have been too loaded with negative traits, resulting mostly odious, with the consequent contribution to the annulling of the emotional participation of the spectator. The problem is that even among the ranks of the children there is no strong character that can capture the attention and, above all, the "good" element that in Kiersh's film was represented by two children who helped the couple to navigate through the thousand dangers of Gatlin. Here every child is wicked and reprehensible and none stands out from the other, starting with the anonymous leader Isaac (Preston Bailey) and the little incisive Malachai (Daniel Newman), his right-hand man. To Borchers, director of this film, seems to be more interested in positive protagonists and characters in general, to describe with almost anthropological acumen the life of the children dedicated to the god of corn, with as much deepening on their order of succession and mating and death rituals. Some unusual narrative choices stand out here and there, capable of even surprising the spectator, there is no lack of concession to the most blood-soaked details, but overall, there is the sensation of having witnessed an unnecessary and absolutely unjustifiable operation aimed at exploiting a decidedly worn-out franchise.