Confession time: Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest was actually the first film of all the Children of the Corn films that I saw, thanks to that local video store well-stocked with b-movies from my teenage years, and so for a long time it held a special place in my heart as I thought it was actually quite good in a cheesy b-movie kind of way. My tastes have, of course, matured and evolved since then (honest), but after Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, it would take a pretty herculean effort to be a worse movie than that, cheesy 90s themes and effects included.
In Gatlin, Nebraska, two brothers, Joshua and Eli, are escaping from their drunken and abusive father. Eli, however, is a devotee of He Who Walks Behind The Rows and kills their father by turning him into a scarecrow and taking a suitcase full of corn. The brothers end up in Chicago, adopted by William and Amanda Porter. William is a commodities trader who specialises in trading corn, and Eli soon wins him over by showing him the "miraculous" corn he has grown in less than a month in an abandoned warehouse next to their home with the special corn he brought with him from Gatlin. Joshua makes friends at their new school and starts fitting in easily, playing basketball and even getting a girlfriend; Eli, however, continues to stand out in his dark, simple clothes and Amish-like behaviour. Eli starts to build a new cult to He Who Walks Behind The Rows in the school, killing anyone who gets in his way or threatens to expose his secret origin. It eventually falls to Joshua to not only uncover Eli's weakness but also stop him and He Who Walks Behind The Rows before they start a new adult massacre in Chicago...
As I rewatched Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest for this review, a couple of things jumped out at me. The first was that He Who Walks Behind The Rows really has a type - dark-haired male children (matching dark eyes optional) who have a thing for preaching (although that might be a talent He gives to them). In this film, Eli is given a lot more screen time than Micah had in The Final Sacrifice, and that coupled with a genuinely unsettling presence (when he smiles, he seems quite innocent, which only adds to his overall sinister nature) lifts this sequel above the level of the last one alone. The second thing that caught my attention was the name of the director - James D. R. Hickox. Hickox... I'd seen that name before because his brother is Anthony Hickox, who directed (among other things) Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (things keep coming back to this movie, and it's starting to get a little disturbing). That at least explains why Urban Harvest's climactic scene in the abandoned warehouse felt remarkably similar to the nightclub scene in Hell on Earth, I guess, and why there's a scene in a chapel involving a crucified priest getting his faith battered as well as the rest of him.
And while we're on the subject of the film's climax... None other than Screaming Mad George was behind the creature makeup effects, because Urban Harvest is the film where we finally get to see He Who Walks Behind The Rows as something other than a Graboid or a bad graphics effect, and the best description I can come up with for it is "Audrey II as imagined by HP Lovecraft". That and a couple of other practical special effects stand out as being pretty decent, if stereotypically 90s, but... I've got to assume that at some point the money ran out, or time, or everyone aged 19 and over working on the film was sacrificed in a team-building exercise because a good portion of the climactic scenes involving He Who Walks Behind The Rows are very clearly models, and we're talking diorama and clay levels here. It's almost like that bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the cartoonist dies in the middle of animating a scene, only it's not in the least bit funny. It's bewildering to me how anyone involved in the production or distribution of the film was able to look at that and go, "Yeah, looks like two seven-year-olds playing with their toys, that's as good as we're gonna get it. Ship it, boys!"
Director James Hickox hadn't seen either of the previous two Children of the Corn movies before he agreed to direct this one, and it shows. Not exactly in a bad way, mind, but he does take the series and mythology in a different direction than the first two films, with the new focus on spreading He Who Walks Behind The Rows' corn as far and wide as possible, and giving Eli a backstory that neither Issac or Micah had in their films (plus it's actually not a bad wrinkle in the overarching mythology). And while it might be peak 90s horror with plot holes you could drive a combine harvester through (they live in a clearly upper-class Chicago neighbourhood... right next door to a derelict warehouse?) and a matching hole in the special effects budget, it's not without its charms, plus it's an improvement on The Final Sacrifice.
2 out of 5 stars.
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