Blu-ray Review: “Children Of The Corn: Runaway” Adds Nothing New To This Tired Franchise

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“Children of the Corn: Runaway” follows a young pregnant woman who escapes a murderous child cult in a small Midwestern town. She spends the next decade living anonymously in an attempt to spare her son the horrors that she experienced as a child. She lands in a small Oklahoma town, but something is following her. Now, she must confront this evil or lose her child forever.”

When the original “Children of the Corn,” starring Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton, was released in 1984, it made over $14 million at the U.S. box office. Since then, there have been a total of nine sequels, including this one. Unlike other horror franchises, like “Friday the 13th,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and “Halloween,” the “Children of the Corn” series, minus the first two films, have all gone straight to home video but there is a following because, with each iteration, they more than make their money back. John Gulager, who directed the enjoyable but campy “Feast” and “Piranha 3DD,” takes the helm here and while he gives the movie a very stylistic and polished visual style, the overall narrative is tired and uninspiring. The problem with “Children of the Corn,” like so many other horror series, is that you are tied to the exact same story, no matter how many ways you try to deviate and create something new, you always have to come back to the town of Gatlin, Nebraska, where the origins of the story began.

One year after Gatlin endured a failed corn season, a malicious and evil presence possessed the minds of all the children living there, promising them a successful harvest if they killed all of the town’s adults. They did so and the town was taken over by the children. In this version of the story, a young girl, Ruth (Marci Miller), one of the town’s original children, after having become pregnant as an older teenager, knows that they will want her unborn child to join them but she refuses, setting fire to the cornfields and all the children dwelling in it. She hits the road, giving birth to a son, Aaron (Jake Ryan Scott), and as the years go by, the duo stays on the road, never inhabiting a town longer than a few days, with Ruth finding casual work as a mechanic. When they reach a small Oklahoma town after their old truck dies on them, a local car garage owner, Carl (Lynn Andrews III), takes pity on them and offers Ruth a job after she proves her skills but with no place to stay, he gives them access to an old house on the outskirts of town that is not inhabited anymore. For a while, things seem fine, but like before, Ruth begins hearing voices and seeing strange things when nobody else around her can. When the malevolent force from her old town of Gatlin possesses the local children, Ruth knows it’s only a matter of time before history repeats itself and she must decide, once and for all, to either keep running, or to face her fears, once and for all.

The one saving grace of “Children of the Corn: Runaway,” is its star, Marci Miller. She is eerily reminiscent of a young Amy Steel, the red-haired heroine of “Friday the 13th: Part 2” and the criminally underrated “April Fool’s Day.” Here, Ms. Miller shows a range of emotions that most horror characters never get a chance to display and she does so with great aplomb. Director Gulager’s father, the legendary Clu Gulager, himself the star of such great ’80s horror classics like “The Return of the Living Dead,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge,” and “The Hidden,” pops up almost unrecognizable in a scene-stealing cameo. While the film has a decidedly 1980s classic look, incorporating plenty of beautiful tracking shots and fixed angles, the story is clichéd and a textbook representation of a by-the-numbers horror movie. Naturally, the ending is left wide open for another entry but here’s hoping they put the series out to pasture, this time for good.

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