“Run away, run away,

Run away if you want to survive”

-Real McCoy  “Run Away”

CHILDREN OF THE CORN: RUNAWAY tricked me, and I didn’t realize that it did until about halfway through the film. It was around that time that I caught myself thinking, “This is better than I thought it would be. It looks good too. It looks like a movie”. I guess I didn’t expect the tenth movie in the CHILDREN OF THE CORN series to look as professional as RUNAWAY looks, so the movie took me by surprise. Here’s the thing though: It was also around that time that I realized nothing had really happened in the movie. The plot just spins its wheels, while looking decent, or at least not as embarrassing as I thought it would.  I mean, this is the CHILDREN OF THE CORN series after all.

I’ll be up front about this: I have not seen every CHILDREN OF THE CORN movie. I have seen the first one, and maybe one or two of the sequels on the Sci-Fi/Syfy Network. I am not an expert on the franchise, and I really don’t have any fondness for the original movie either. I belong to the “I can’t believe this is the King story that got a 10 movie franchise” camp. That honor should belong to DREAMCATCHER. Maybe the other CHILDREN OF THE CORN sequels are shot well too, I don’t know. I do know that this one looks like it’s got some money behind it, and is well-shot, which I guess shouldn’t be a surprise since it’s from FEAST director, John Gulager. FEAST looked good, and this looks good. So it makes sense.

I know I’m just repeating myself, but that’s really the only takeaway I have from CHILDREN OF THE CORN: RUNAWAY: It’s technically competent. Being a competently made film is nice and all, but nothing really happens in the film itself. Here’s the plot: A pregnant woman escapes a murderous child cult, and spends the next decade living anonymously with her child in a small Oklahoma town where she gets a job, goes to the local diner, sleeps with her boss, and is convinced that the evil cult is following her. Spoiler: An evil cult is following her. Laying out the basic plot like that isn’t necessarily fair to the movie. One of my favorite movies of all-time is EVIL DEAD 2, and you could really boil that down to: A Group of people go to cabin and an evil force terrorizes them and picks them off one by one. EVIL DEAD 2’s plot is brimming with propulsive energy though; zooming from set-piece to set-piece, while COTC: RUNAWAY slumps its shoulders and confuses mopiness with character development. But at the same time, there is some decent gore, a well-staged set piece or two, and it looks nice. It looks “like a movie”.

I’m not even completely sure what I mean by that, but it’s something that has been going through my head a lot lately. I recently watched MOHAWK, a movie that I really liked, but had some issues with on a technical level. There were moments during the film that looked cheap, and look less like a movie and more like someone filming a War of 1812 re-enactment in the park. But in MOHAWK I was so caught up in the plot– and the characters that inhabited the film–that I gave some of its weaker technical elements a pass. So, on one hand there’s MOHAWK; a movie that I really liked despite some iffy production value, and on the other hand there’s a movie like CHILDREN OF THE CORN: RUNAWAY, a movie with good production value, that I did not like at all. Is that fair? Who really cares? It all comes down to story for me, and I think it always has.

Storytelling is what I’ve always gravitated towards in film. This is a good thing, because I watch a lot of low budget horror movies. Even in the lowest of low-budget movies, if I can find something within the films story that I like –whether it be a character or a thematic element– I’ll probably like the film overall.  if something excels on technical level, but its story leaves me cold, I’m more likely to dislike the film.

I don’t think that preference is limited to film for me. For example: I don’t like Prog Rock. I know people that love it. If you throw on some early Phish, or Frank Zappa, I can appreciate the craftsmanship on display–but if I’ve got my headphones in, they are more likely to be playing Springsteen. When it comes to sports, I prefer college to professional. Professional football is the better played of the two games; The passes are crisper, the routes are sharper, there are less missed tackles, the players get paid so it doesn’t weigh as heavily on my conscious, but it’s missing the emotion that college football provides. When two rival schools are on the field, and the students are there, and the band is playing, that’s the story for me. If it’s well-played on top of it, it’s a nice bonus, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.

I have gone completely off-track here, and I need to clarify that I don’t believe that CHILDREN OF THE CORN: RUNAWAY is like a Frank Zappa album, or a great Prog Rock album. It’s probably more like a post-grunge album from a band that’s never really released a good album, but keeps releasing them anyway, so at least this one has a couple of good solos. The story is bland, generic, and feels like one of those late-era HELLRAISER movies where they took a script from another movie, and slapped on the franchises title as a cash grab. I’m just rambling now and I’m going to wrap this up. Sorry, but CHILDREN OF THE CORN: RUNAWAY didn’t give me much to talk about.