"Children of the Corn," a Movie Review 28 Years Too Late.

When my girlfriend, LSD, and I were looking through free movies to watch on Amazon Prime, for some reason, perhaps because it's the Halloween season, we both decided about the 1984 Steven King horror film, "Children of the Corn."  What's funny is that the only people I know who gave me a review of this movie were my sister and my neighbor, and they both did so 28 years ago when they were stupid-ass kids.  Naturally, they both loved it!

The film actually starts in pretty kick ass fashion.  A bunch of devil/corn worshiping kids slice the throats and poison the coffee of all the adults in a town, and somehow without the rest of the world knowing, they totally take it over.  Their means of keeping this quiet is to switch a few highway signs around and just murder the crap out of any motorists who have the misfortune of taking a wrong turn through their fair city.

Such is the piss-poor luck of Linda Hamilton from "Terminator" and her husband in the movie, the guy with the long hair from "30 Something" and "Side Out," or if you prefer, the-guy-with-the-bicycle from "Singles."  They run up against Malachi, the red-headed murderous ginger, and Isaac, the fruity thespian, Napoleon complex baddy.  They're kind of like the Darth Vader and Emperor of the "Corn."

My lady and I had to start skipping through the movie because it was just so darned crappy.  I should have listened to adults before investing any time in this one and should not have listened to 1980's suburban 9-year-olds.

Sometimes There Are Just Too Many Bad Omens to Ignore

Have you ever seen the Omen (1976)? It is the story of a little boy, Damien, who unbeknownst to his parents, is the son of the Devil. His father, played by the always stoic, and in this case stupidly so, Gregory Peck, who despite seeing numerous insanely scary events, refuses to believe that his boy is the spawn of Satan. Now, I know that this is not something that is easily accepted. I admit that I'm one of the biggest skeptics ever: I'm not sure I believe in anything, be they Gods, aliens, ghosts, or anything else not proven by science without some hard evidence. That being said, I think if I saw some of the crap this guy saw go down, I think I'd change my tune sooner than 3/4 of the way through the film. Here are some of the things he was able to look past:

Damien's Nanny, at his birthday party, hung herself in front of everyone, saying, "I did it all for you, Damien," or something like that.

Damien intentionally ran his big wheel into his mom while she was fiddling with a hanging plant, knocking her off the balcony, killing her unborn child, the very child some priest told the father Damien would try to kill, and oh yeah, that priest knew she was pregnant before anyone else did.

That same priest also had a metal rod go right through his body during an electrical storm, killing him and skewering him while he was still standing, which is how the father saw him on front page news. Would a paper really publish something so gruesome?

They took Damien to one of those drive-through zoos, and after delivering just one creepy smile at them, all of the chimps went bananas and started screeching and jumping all over the car.

Another day, they tried to take him to a church, and Damien started panicking as they were pulling up. They said, "It's just a church, Damien." When they stopped the car in front, and it was clear to him that he would be going there, Damien started punching and clawing at his mother, bruising her badly with no apparent punishment.

Here's the one I really don't like: After their last nanny hung herself, a new one showed up before they even started looking for a replacement. She is obviously an unnerving woman and a Satan worshipper, and she brought a giant scary Rottweiler to protect Damien. Gregory Peck is all nonchalant about it, like, "Hey, I thought I told you to get rid of that dog." This woman is clearly a nut job. Fire the bitch!

In any event, I had to take a sick day today, and I was just lying on the couch this afternoon getting pissed about this guy looking past all of these things. Is there a movie you can think of where a character is a skeptic for far too long into the film, and don't say George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life because that movie is perfect.

Is It Wrong for 3 Straight Men to Watch Flashdance, and What's Worse, Enjoy it?

My friend from L.A. was in town this weekend, and a bunch of us went out. We had entirely too many libations and we were talking about old times. The next day we were all useless, and more than ever aware of how a hangover is much more severe in your late twenties than it was in our seemingly invincible early twenties. This led us to sit around all day watching movies in lazy boys, like a bunch of, well, lazy boys. One movie we watched was Annie Hall. That is an unbelievably influential movie to the point where filmmakers don’t even realize they’re ripping it off. Great movie, but it’s not the one I’m blogging about today. Hell, we didn’t even finish that movie. The one that we left on for its entirety was Flashdance.

Yes, she is a welder by day and a semi-erotic dancer by night, with aspirations of becoming a dancer on Broadway, or whatever. She is, in fact, “just a steel town girl on a Saturday night,” etc, etc. The movie does follow the token 80’s, and let’s face it, almost every movie’s formula of boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy blows it somehow, boy gets girl back, roll credits. While the film does follow this horribly predictable formulaic pattern, it manages to be memorable through the visuals. Watch the scene when Jennifer Beals is wearing a sexy-ass, sleeveless, tuxedo number, eating what appears to be a shrimp cocktail in a seductive manner, and all the while touching his junk under the table with her fishnet stockinged foot. I defy you not to get a little frisky in that scene.

It’s not even just the fact that she’s smoking hot in the movie, which she is, but she is so damned captivating somehow. She has that hint of craziness (see breaking a window in his house at the slightest sign of infidelity, running away from him for no good reason, taking her bra off through her shirt, asking him to close his eyes and “feel the music,” getting out of his Porsche under a bridge with traffic going both ways and walking down the middle of the street.) I don’t know about you, guys, but I like a little hint of crazy. I don’t like them too crazy, but you have to admit that a little bit of crazy can be fun and interesting, and it often translates into “the sack.” Did I just say “the sack?” How old am I?

I have no idea what the character’s name is! That may have something to do with the fact that we were talking throughout the whole thing, but the fact is the dialogue isn’t important in the movie – it’s the visuals. Hey, why not have her and her friend stop and watch some breakdancing for what seemed like way too long? While we’re at it, why not have her do an artsy-fartsy dance in kabuki theatre makeup with strobe lights blasting while she runs into the walls? Was she a meth-addicted performance artist? Would people really come to that dirty bar to watch performance art? Wouldn’t they yell for her to take it off, etc? Oh no, these working class, Pittsburgh natives just sip their beers and applaud her efforts. There is one scene where she tapes up her feet and proceeds to dance alone in her apartment, but the dancing appears to be more accurately running in place, and more exercised based than anything else. The amount of sweat shooting off her curly hair is ridiculous (see photo)! I think I may need to switch to running in place dancing in my apartment to fill the cardio component of my workouts. Great looking scene though, and it is when we hear Michael Sembello’s Maniac, which had to be rewritten due to the fact that it was originally a song about a serial killer. You didn’t think I’d get through this blog without a tid-bit of obscure music knowledge, did you? Anyway, there are tons of bazaar, visual based scenes that aren’t realistic, and they don’t really move the story along, but it’s a lot of fun to watch somehow.

What is really sad is that because Jennifer Beals is so damned captivating in the movie, the character grows on you to the point where you really do want her to nail that audition at the end. I felt a little gay when I got the chills right when she puts the record on and What a Feeling by Irena Cara kicks in. I felt even gayer when faced with the realization that I was guarding the remote all day, and perhaps a little more into this movie than my friends, but that’s a realization I don’t care to delve into right now. Moving on, she falls down at first, but she asks to start over. That’s when she wins those judges over. Maybe it was going judge-to-judge, spinning around pointing right in their faces, or the 80’s-out fist pumping while backpedaling, but I contend that when she goes into that tight, fast, breakdancing backspin she really won their hearts. We don’t know for sure if she passed the audition, but it doesn’t matter. The way she goes running out of there, looking like she’s on top of the world, with her boss boyfriend, the foreman or whatever at the steel plant, who has put a bow on her pit bull and brought flowers, you know that either she passed the audition or she simply knows that she has wowed those judges and she doesn’t care what the result is. That’s all the viewer needs to know, so it is at this time that they do the cheesy freeze frame and the film concludes, with all of us, or maybe just me, feeling a little happier than we were before investing that hour and a half. “What a feeling,” indeed. God, I wanted to delete that lame sentence, but it’s too funny, so I’m going to leave you with that: “What a Feeling,” indeed.