Children of the Corn: Runaway

Looks like Dimension is at it again.  It was just about a month ago that I encountered the tenth installment in the Hellraiser franchise, and that didn’t quite sit all that well with me.  Now, we’ve got a ninth entry in the Children of the Corn series, Runaway.

This series has had a pretty bumpy go of things over its span.  The first film, based on a Stephen King story, told us of a strange occurrence in Gatlin, Nebraska, wherein the children of the town, seduced by a demonic presence in the guise of scripture, rose up and slaughtered the adults.  This theme has more or less carried through the franchise, usually defaulting to some sort of kids-trying-to-kill-adults-because-evil sort of thing, but there has barely been all that much in the way of overarching, canon narrative.  Sure, a couple characters (particularly Isaac) have returned in later installments, but the connections between the foundations and the later entries has been increasingly tenuous.  These sequels have also variously attempted to reboot the franchise (including a direct remake, the only entry I haven’t yet seen), but apparently none of the attempts have stuck.  This time out, we’ve got something of a direct sequel, referencing the initial spark of the series without really bringing up much else.  I think of it as a splinter sequel, a story set in a particular universe but not necessary adhering to the entire canon of said universe.

The story follows Ruth, one of the original Gatlin children, as she finds herself on the run from her past.  She starts out pregnant, fleeing from the influence of He Who Walks Behind the Rows; for the remaining majority, though, she’s the single mother of her thirteen-year-old son, Aaron, and they’re drifting about the Midwest while Ruth deals with her past demons.  She’s constantly haunted by bloody spectres and traumas, often triggered by seemingly nothing of note.  She uncomfortably settles in a new town, thanks to the help of the local mechanic, who gives her a job and a place to stay, and a diner waitress, who provides snarky friendship.  She’s still not welcome in the town, though, as she’s an outsider (you know how provincial small town folk can be, amiright?) and she’s “shacking up with” the African-American mechanic (and don’t forget they’re racist, ‘kay?).  But her demons just won’t abate, and she’s forced to come to grips with her past and future.

Gotta say, this isn’t that bad an idea for a late sequel like this one.  I mean, the concept of a murderous child being forced to deal with her past sins while trying her best to avoid repeating them sounds pretty interesting, right?  Plenty of fertile ground for a darkly psychological character study.  What we get, though, is not that.  Sure, she’s plagued by demons and such, but there isn’t much spoken on the event itself, and we’re just constantly told she’s crazy, tormented.  Not much comes of this, because, spoiler alert, these ostensibly imaginary spectres are kinda real, their influence definitely so, and the bloodshed continues yet again.  It’s not even much of a beleaguered road film, what with the static setting in both time and space and the lack of any real tension throughout.

The color palette is washed-out, possibly indicative of Ruth’s mental state, but more likely a vain attempt at creating creepy visuals.  Indeed, plenty of played-out horror tropes are at play here, including the once-subversive use of out-of-place cutesy music (usually sounding like a music box playing in the ethereal distance) and children laughing and the sense that reality isn’t what we believe it to be.  Nothing works, though, as nothing close to an atmosphere is created.  Never once was I creeped out, uncomfortable, uneasy, or even invested.  At first, the very frank and straightforward inclusion of the hallucinated children in normal shots was an interesting technique, basically turning the usual on its head and playing with the audience’s perception right alongside that of Ruth, but the novelty wore out fairly quickly, another contributor to the lack of atmosphere and a potential hint at laziness.

This sense of laziness is further underlined by the poor script, the questionable gore effects, and the even more questionable directorial choices.  The writer, Joel Soisson, has quite the rap sheet to his name, penning and directing the last entry in the franchise (2011’s Genesis) and writing, among others, Dracula 2000 and its two sequels, Mimic 2 (I honestly didn’t know there was a sequel), the final two films in the Prophecy series (which he also directed), Hollow Man 2, the two sequels to the American remake of Pulse, and Hellraiser: Hellworld.  He’s clearly familiar with the straight-to-video sequel machine, and his eye for “quality” is on full display here, with flat characters (which almost exclusively tend toward being complete assholes), clunky dialogue, and a strange vein of misogyny.  The blood effects are mostly monotone, usually comprising reversed footage and CG blood, and far too much is either off-screen or mishandled (there is a throat-slicing scene early on that very clearly looks like a prop knife is spreading Karo syrup on an otherwise unblemished neck, all while the camera’s lilting attempts to hide this fact), making the violence come off as insipid and far from horror-inducing.  Making all of this worse is the direction and editing of John Gulager, whom you might remember as the director of the Feast trilogy and Piranha 3DD.  Gulager seems rather fond of the hand-held camera, even if there’s no legitimate purpose for its use in the film, and consequently many scenes that should have some measure of emotional heft are rendered neutered, more likely to cause seasickness than anything.  The editing is choppy, flat, and uninspired, every so often cutting before any weight can be felt by the viewer.  One scene in particular highlights the myriad problems at once:  At one point, Carl, the aforementioned helpful mechanic, makes a move on Ruth, who seemingly accedes.  The resulting “love” scene is filmed about three inches from their faces with a constantly wafting camera, rendering the visuals almost incomprehensible, as though we were watching things through the eyes of a dyed-in-the-wool drunkard.  Moreover, the focus is constantly shifting in and out, and the cuts certainly aren’t helping our comprehension.  It’s a mess of a scene, the worst of the film, but it’s emblematic of Gulager’s hand here, which was too heavily uninterested in telling a cohesive and intelligible story of any appreciable weight.

On a brief positive note, Marci Miller, who plays Ruth, does a pretty solid job with her role, even though Soisson didn’t exactly give her much to work with, and Mary Kathryn Bryant’s Sarah, the waitress mentioned above, is fun and sassy for most of the runtime (sadly not all…), providing at least a couple chuckles to distract from the surrounding asshattery (even though, admittedly, she is also being an asshole, one that we can get behind).  But the rest of the cast isn’t all that good, either overdoing it, sleepwalking, or oscillating between the two (looking at you, Lynn Andrews).  Jake Ryan Scott, playing Aaron, is possibly the worst, giving nothing but soggy, sullen wood — and we’re stuck with him for a decent portion of the runtime.

At the end of the day, this straight-to-video sequel of a long-suffering franchise (that probably shouldn’t have been turned into a proper franchise in the first place) is just another example of the ever-crunching sequel machine.  It serves no real purpose but to maintain property rights and hopefully turn a profit, all while diluting the property as a whole and exhibiting a great deal of laziness and/or ineptitude.  It’s cheap in the grandest, most encompassing sense of the word (the Germans might call it “mies” rather than “billig”), and it certainly looks it.  It’s not worth the time unless you’re really serious about keeping your completionist status or you just wanna riff on a cheap horror flick.