CHILDREN OF THE CORN II: THE FINAL SACRIFICE

US, 1992, 92 minutes, Colour.

Terence Knox, Paul Scherrer, Ryan Bollman, Christie Clark, Rosalind, Ned Romero, Ed Grady.

Directed by David Price.

The original Children of the Corn franchise was based on a Stephen King story, released in 1984 to some success, the period when there was a Stephen King adaptation almost every year.

Eight years later, this sequel appeared, taking up from the end of the original but speculating about the characters and the situation. And there was to be a third in the series, remakes and further elaborations of the themes.

The children in the town have killed their parents under the influence of some kind of demonic power, associated with the corn and the cornfields. Adults from neighbouring towns and families are offering to adopt the children, the police investigating, journalists looking for scoops.

The central character of this film is Micah (Ryan Bollman) whose parents are dead but who is taken over, in a sequence in a cornfield, by the demonic power, making something of an evil cult leader with power over the children, then reverting to a quiet manner.

The other central characters are a father and son, quite alienated, the father a journalist looking for a story, having time with his resentful son. The father finds an attractive woman who runs a bed-and-breakfast. The boy encounters a lively teenage girl. The filmmakers obviously thought that this was necessary for the popular appeal but it all seems very contrived. Micah boards with them and friends the son, capitalising on his resentment of his father.

The goal of the children is to destroy all the adults. The journalist encounters a Native American, treating him with condescension and implicit racism, only to find that he is a professor of archaeology at the University and is able to show the journalist paintings and stone indications of the past, children wanting to take possession from their parents.

The horror aspects of the film include several spectacular deaths, especially the children undermining the stilts under a house collapses on an old woman, her sister (played by the same actress) is in a wheelchair and is smashed into by truck. She then hurtles through a window into a room where the oldies are playing bingo. The local doctor and the sheriff are part of a scheme to hoard the corn and make a profit of this – and both of them meeting their and deaths.

About the final confrontation, the woman and the girl bound, in the cornfields, Micah with power over the son and willing him to kill the women, the Native American and the father on a huge tractor with which the sheriff had previously threatened them, mayhem and Micah are dragged into the tractor and hideously transforming into the monster possessing him.

This sequel was quite well-received – and then a further film is in series.