Children of the Corn: Episode IV

Naomi Watts? Word? First Academy Award winning Charlize Theron is in one of these movies and now NayNay? Well, apparently this franchise is a springboard for imminent success as a young actress. And Naomi is actually the main character in Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering, not to be confused with Highlander but occasionally to be confused with The Gathering of the Juggalos.

I'll be honest, I don't really remember a lot about this one; shit was dull, dreary, and confusing. Naomi is a med student who returns home to Grand Island, Nebraska, in order to help care for her psychologically-whacky mother and her younger siblings. She starts working at the local clinic, and then things start getting corny. This time the bad guy is another possessed kid who acts for He Who Slam Dances Behind the Rows, who I guess wasn't killed in the Chicago throwdown of Part III. The (of course) Biblically-named Josiah emerges from a dry well, decapitates a local cracker, then struts around like an unmasked Kano from Mortal Kombat working some obtuse spell on the kiddies in town. But why? Seems like he can telekinesis all the murder he wants by his damn self. And why are only children subject to the hypnosis? Fuck me for asking questions.

Naomi is vexed when all kids all develop simultaneous flus (as in, they have the same temperature at the exact same time), yet no one informs the news or CDC. Then kablammo, all the kids are pipers in the pied. Exactly what this accomplishes is up to interpretation, but all the kids act creepy as Josiah presumably murders around town some more, including a particularly funny dispatch of the old doctor via gurney-guillotine!

Guess what else I remember about this one? Nothing. It's fucking boring and dreary in that awful direct-to-video way. But I guess NayNay unearths the sooper-secret that Josiah is the bastard son of a local lady who became a popular child-preacher who was then fed mercury in order to keep him from aging....science! So Josiah murdered his fellow white-collars and was..."given to the darkness" by locals but for some reason also burned alive. That's his origin?! A deleted scene apparently identifies Josiah as He Who YOLO's Behind the Rows, but I call bullfuck, not that any of this makes enough sense to warrant dispute. NayNay kills him and embraces her own bastard sister-child, or possibly sister-wife. I forget, and so should you.

The Gaffer's Rating: 1 Corn Fritter out of 4.