Well, you know we've gotten to the aughts when shit stops getting a number and starts to get the most cliched colon-generic-horror-title treatment! Oh boy! I'm shocked there was/is no Children of the Corn: Resurrection, but I should probably knock on wood. What does the industry have against numbers now, anyway? With horror titles, it's best to wear one's lack of dignity on one's sleeve, but unfortunately Children of the Corn: Revelation wants to be super serial, y'all.
Picking up where no one and nothing left off, we're introduced to sexy Jamie, who I think is the sauciest leading lady we've seen so far. Sorry, NayNay. Jamie's in town (which I'm told is quasi-Omaha) because her granny has gone missing, and she's gonna Nancy Drew like a sexy minx, ooh yeah! Sorry, but I have to find amusement somewhere in this dreck. Granny lived in what is evidently a corn-tenement, what with a cornfield growing next door for no reason. Jamie moves in and befriends a wacky assortment of neighbors: an affable stripper, a brutally-insane man in a wheelchair who screams every word he speaks, a prepper, and a stoner. She is, of course, menaced at every turn by obnoxious children wearing clown-white while being aided by an ineffectual cop with a broad buttchin - man, there have been a lot of buttchins in these movies...that could've been a drinking game. 
Um, I'm actually struggling for plot synopsis on this one. The kids hurl stoner off the roof, and he is eaten by the cornfield and regurgitated as a Mennonite child. Prepper is similarly dispatched and the kids throw wheelchair-Tourrettes-man down a shaft, ha. The corn itself grabs stripper from the bathtub - that was fun. Uh, meanwhile, Jamie learns that this nonsense is happening because, oh lord, another evil boy preacher named Abel self-immolated a tent-full of cult members, of whom Granny was the only survivor. The corn-tenement is built on the site of the fire. Michael Ironside shows up pointlessly as a priest who says cryptic things and intimates that He Who Macarenas Behind the Rows is THE Devil and not just a devil, which is a logical (I guess) but stupid development. Sexy Jamie is very lazily attacked by the corn-kids, all forcibly reincarnated from the previous murders. Jamie burns the building down and is then saved from grabby cornstalks by Detective Buttchin. The end, damnit.
Revelation is definitely not the worst of this lot, but it somehow felt like the most pointless. It lacked the malignantly pointlessness and boredom of its predecessors, but it was still pretty useless. At this point, every single element of the original story has been played out 4 or 5 times. Like most franchise flagships, the last bit of depth has been titrated out through sequels that could just as easily have any other name or modus operandi. Nobody wants to see Children of the Corn anymore - it's a stillborn series whose only staying power is wearied name recognition. I think that after Revelation the atrophy finally started to set in, because it would be a decade before the next "sequel" and eight years before the next installment - wouldn't you know it, a goddamn remake. Blarg.
The Gaffer's Rating: 1.5 White Lightnings out of 4.
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