Critic Reviews

While the first Children of the Corn was made on a reported budget of $800,000, it somehow doesn’t look as cheap as this new Children of the Corn, which eventually delivers just enough formulaic violence.

Kurt Wimmer’s newfangled Children of the Corn is a rotten husk of a Stephen King adaptation.

While it isn’t the worst film the franchise has to offer, that’s only because the competition is so weak.

As well-intentioned as the new Children of the Corn might be, it misses the mark by mixing a confusing ecological message with bland scares, forgetting what makes King’s story so enticing in the first place.

This “Corn” sat on the shelf during COVID lockdown, but we can’t say it went stale during the delay. This was cynical in conception and rotten in execution long before the masks came out.

Children of the Corn is clearly one of the worst Stephen King film adaptations ever made — if anything, it seems unfair that it’s included in a category with so many good movies by the grace of a technicality.

There’s no reason a movie with this premise couldn’t be better. Just not in these folks’ hands.

Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.

There’s something particularly galling about the laziness of this one — its flimsy gestures toward topicality, the piecemeal nature of the whole thing — that makes its failures acutely horrifying.

Wimmer has now twice disproved his ability to rehash old scripts through his terrible updatings of Total Recall and Point Break. Now he exhibits zero visual skill as writer/director of Children of the Corn, an unwatchable reboot of Stephen King's 1977 short story about a blood cult of rural Nebraskan kids who slaughter all adults to the monstrous He Who Walks Behind the Rows.