Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992)

Directed by David Price [Other horror films: Son of Darkness: To Die for II (1991), Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (1995)]

I have to say, I have an actively hard time disliking The Final Sacrifice. It’s not a good movie, and it’s nowhere as classic as the first movie, but it’s so damn funny at times, and if you can deal with a somewhat iffy story, at least the film can offer some quality deaths.

As it is, the story here is just so wonky. It apparently takes place shortly after the first film (so I’m guessing 1984), with the children of Gatlin being largely adopted by a neighboring community of Hemingford (based on Hemingford Home, where, as I’m sure we all know, Mother Abigail lived in The Stand). Well, you can take the children out of Gatlin, but you can’t take the Gatlin out of the children, and so they reform their religious separatist movement. Also, while I appreciated them mentioning Isaac, the fact that they didn’t mention Malachi, or the fact that come the end, they followed Malachi as opposed to Isaac, sort of bothered me.

Oh, and there’s also a subplot about a town conspiracy to sell spoiled corn for economic gain (the poisoned corn being set up as one potential explanation for why the kids went crazy in Gatlin), and there’s another thing going on about how there’s a Native American spirit of the land that gets revenge of those polluting it, or something like that.

Here’s the thing – all of this over-complicates things. The first movie wasn’t innocent of this – I really think the first film should have avoided showing anything supernatural during the conclusion. The reason being is that I find a growing commitment to Old Testament Biblical values among the youth, causing them to turn on adults, far more interesting than the idea that the kids were just victims of bad corn. One deals with interesting sociological issues, and the other is just bad luck.

The story here really should have been streamlined. I think that would have benefited the film greatly (and that way, they also could have gotten rid of that God-awful CGI, as it gave me bad flashbacks to Hideaway), and I don’t see how adding in the Native American legends did much to make the film better (aside from giving Ned Romero’s character a reason to exist). Overall, the story isn’t great.

Also, the characters aren’t that great. I liked Ned Romero, as he was quite funny at times (“No, what happened in Gatlin is that those kids went ape-shit and killed everyone”), and while he was no Isaac or Malachi, Ryan Bollman was decent as a younger preacher of He-Who-Walks-Behind-The-Rows. Terence Knox (The Hunters) didn’t strike me as that likable a character, nor did Paul Scherrer. Rosalind Allen (Ticks, Son of Darkness: To Die for II) got so little personality, I’m surprised she existed, and Christie Clark (The Mummy’s Dungeon) looked cute, but I don’t think she added much either.

Even if the story and characters aren’t great, though, you still have a lot of amusing kills, and I mean a lot. Some are simpler, such as a house being lowered on an old woman, or another old woman who gets killed in her powerchair (the innocent children of Gatlin used a remote control and drove her into a busy intersection), or even a meeting house getting sent up in flames, surely killing most people at the town meeting.

The better ones include a freak storm which sends a corn stalk flying through a van window and impaling someone in the neck. The other guy there got his throat slit by corn stalk leaves. There was a guy caught under a corn harvester. Someone was stabbed to death with syringes. And perhaps my favorite, using a voodoo doll (which is something that is never once brought up again or alluded to), a kid carves into a man’s nose during a church service, causing one of the worst nosebleeds imaginable.

Save for the nosebleed death, none of these are particularly brutal or gory, but most of them are either quite amusing or just entertaining. There is an occasional darkness to the film – the movie opens with people finding quite a few decomposing corpses in the basement of a house in Gatlin, and later in the film, people run into the scattered remains of human beings in a cornfield, things such as hands and feet. The Final Sacrifice isn’t a gory movie, but honestly, as far as kills go, it’s decent.

I’ve seen most of the movies in the Children of the Corn series, and only a handful are films I actually find poor. As for Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, I don’t delude myself into thinking the movie’s good, but I’ve been pretty entertained by it in the past, and that hasn’t changed with this most recent viewing.

7/10