Children of the Corn

The seeds of Kurt Wimmer's doom are the fruit of his greatest success. Equilibrium, his style-over-substance 2002 breakout hit was Fahrenheit 451 with gunplay, and more fun than it deserved to be. He'd parlayed his success as a screenwriter for the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (a thankless task if ever there was one that somehow improved on the original – at least on the page) into getting it made, and it gave studios the belief that he could elevate garbage to meaningful junk.

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.

Wimmer keeps those elements, but dumps King's Old Testament-critiquing subtext about the malicious ways of a merciless god. Instead, he implants a half-formed fable about adults messing up the environment, and a subplot revolving around agricultural incentives which are … bad? Good? It's so hard to tell. He Who Walks Behind the Rows has been renamed He Who Walks, but let's just call him Corn Groot, a shabby CGI mass that is best only when seen at great distance. The farmers don't see him, possibly because he hides himself, and possibly because they seemingly all live in a small, pleasant suburb. For a community seemingly dying on the vine, they all seem to be living pretty comfortably – just one of many logical flaws here.

The original short story and the original 1984 film adaptation (incredibly, the first of 11 films in the franchise) wisely bypassed exactly how the kids managed to take down all the adults. Wimmer instead decides to depict the insurrection, one based on a couple of bored teens waving chainsaws dismissively at some grownups, all at the behest of orphaned Eden (Moyer), the hyperbolic prophet of He Who Walks. It's not just that the events don't really make a lot of sense, it's that they're shot, acted, and edited without the slightest nod to narrative coherence. There's a pivotal scene involving a deadly pit that doesn't make an iota of sense as to geography, chronology, or even how it was dug or how everyone ends up in there.

Half the performances are absurdly overblown, the other half so understated that the actors seem concussed – and caught in the middle is poor Elena Kampouris as Boleyn, the teen protagonist determined to evade Eden's bloody sacrament. She's given little to do except gawk in fear at something offscreen and occasionally foil Eden's plan with some questionable logic, to which Eden usually replies with a heavy sigh, like she knows it's all so ridiculous and implausible – a sentiment you'll share about the film.