#village of the damned
Thu, 13 May 2021 15:15:24
Day 8
Reflections on: Children of the Corn(1983)
- I’ve been hearing references to this title my entire life, yet never really knew what it meant. It was exciting to finally watch it - I love corn!
- As a child I think I conflated this film with Pumpkinhead(1988)andVillage of the Damned(1995). This is probably the worst of the 3 but it was still pretty entertaining.
- The protagonists drive a car with a book on the dashboard. The book is Night Shift - a collection of short stories by Stephen King. One of the stories in it is “Children of the Corn”. When a filmmaker adds these cute little winks and sly nods to their films they create a surreal logic vortex. These characters are fans of Stephen King’s writing? Have they got to the corn story in the book yet? Wouldn’t they react differently if that was the case? Linda Hamilton’s character would say something like “This is eerily similar to this story I’m reading right now”. I hate it.
- Linda Hamilton made this the year before she starred in The Terminator (1984). Her character in this couldn’t be any different than Sarah Connor. She is repeatedly denied any agency despite being smart and capable. It almost feels like she couldn’t wait for the movie to be over so her career could start. I know I am projecting but she deserved better.
- Please forgive this long rant: the male protagonist (played by Peter Horton) is supposed to be a smart doctor but he consistently makes very bad decisions and has terrible instincts. He looks like a poor-man’s Steven Weber and dresses like a Jerry-Seinfeld-jeans-and-sneakers-wearing GOOF. He’s bossy, preachy, unlikable, and pathologically arrogant. He gets lost on the highway and instead of listening to a female character he decides the best solution is to DRIVE THROUGH A CORN FIELD. He sucks. It is unclear why Linda Hamilton’s character is with him at all.
- My favourite part of the movie (besides all the corn of course) is when the main guy successfully evades a knife attack only to immediately ram his face into a pole.
- A lot of corn was harmed during the making of this film. Linda Hamilton’s character asks “What is it with this corn?” as she walks through an abandoned diner full of corn on a street littered with corn. This is a good question.
- Courntey Gains (AKA Hans Klopek from The Burbs (1989) - one of my favourites) is great as Malachai - a violent teen with beautiful feathered red hair. He plays this character as if he’s doing a bad impression of a D&D goon. His buddy Isaac is played perfectly creepy by John Franklin (AKA Cousin It from The Addams Family (1991) - another of my favourites!).
- Good basic fashion, except for Linda Hamilton’s long pleated dark beige shorts. Tons of denim. Nice quilt. Even the dog wears a yellow bandanna (which means he’s into watersports).
- Lots of menacing shots of corn.
- Excellent arts (painting and collage) and corn-based crafts (see above).
- Very weird effects. Both practical and… animated??
- Spoiler alert: this is about A CORN LORD!
- Feels like it was written AND made by kids.
- Good music - both spooky choir chanting in Latin and Runaway by Del Shannon - which remained stuck in my head for days after watching this.
- Ends weirdly abruptly.
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Day 2
Reflections on: Village of the Damned(1995)
- This might be the last good thing made by John Carpenter.
- I really liked the original Village of the Damned (1960) but this one is so unlike it that it was enjoyable in different ways.
- The effects are about as good an episode of The X Files. Even though it’s from 1995 it feels more like a late 70′s horror movie - in a good way!
- Kirstie Alley plays an epidemiologist who quotes Sherlock Holmes and smokes constantly - both in clinics and around dozens of pregnant women.
- Stars Superman (Christopher Reeve), Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and some cows.
- I think Mark Hamill had fun playing a melodramatic priest. His first line in the movie is “Weneed finger paints!”
- This falls under the genre of pregnancy horror movies such as Rosemary’s Baby(1968)It’s Alive (1974), and The Brood(1979).
- It was nice to see a scene featuring a very straight forward discussion about abortion :)
- This has lots of elements of other good John Carpenter films: hokey premise yet shot in beautiful widescreen cinematography, set in a coastal California town, spooky synth soundtrack, and pumpkins.
- One of the white-haired children looks like Jay Leno.
- If a bunch of weird kids want to live in a barn maybe you shouldn’t interfere?
- I watched this while wearing a fleece. This feels important to note.
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