From this point on I'm going into the Children of the Corn series blind, as I've never actually seen any of the films beyond the third one. I'm not really sure why that is - perhaps my 90s brain decided after seeing Urban Harvest that nothing could possibly top what I saw in that film and to just not bother, or perhaps it was a defensive mechanism because I subconsciously knew things weren't going to get any better. Regardless, here we go with Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering.
Medical student Grace Rhodes returns to her hometown of Grand Island, Nebraska to take care of her mentally ill mother, who suffers from agoraphobia and paranoia and has recently started having recurring dreams of being attacked by mysterious children. Her return to the town is timed just right as well, as shortly after she arrives all the town's children fall ill with high fevers at the same time - including Grace's younger siblings, James and Margaret. The town's children all seem to recover from their fevers as quickly as they fell ill, but afterwards, they start to act strangely, claiming to be long-dead children of the town before starting to attack and kill various adults. The children are all being influenced by the evil spirit of a boy preacher named Josiah, who was born illegitimate and taken in by travelling preachers. When he turned out to have a talent for preaching they tried to keep him a child forever through various means before "giving him over to darkness", at which point Josiah killed the preachers and the townspeople retaliated by burning him alive and sealing him in a well. After the well was broken open Josiah's spirit awakened and he started using the town's children to be reborn into a special body, a "like child". Will Grace be able to stop Josiah from being reborn and save her family from his sinister clutches?
If you were to subtitle movies with the first thing someone said when they started watching it, Children of the Corn IV's would be Bloody Hell, Naomi Watts Is In This. Another possible title, after watching the film though, could be This Film Felt Longer Than 80 Minutes. Even now, after having watched it and having both the IMDB page and the Wikipedia page open, I'm technically drawing a blank as to how to actually describe and review this film, because it just feels so... flat. Yeah, sure, things happened, and there were some gory-yet-improbable kills (who makes a hospital bed with a retractable blade anyway?), but in between those brief moments it's just overlong scenes of kids getting their temperature taken, or blood tests, or Naomi Watts looking troubled as we wait for the final act plot revelation that most of us had figured out pretty early into the film.
And here's perhaps the biggest kick in the teeth for a film in the Children of the Corn series: there's no actual connection to any of the previous films, aside from there being evil kids, corn, and Nebraska. Apparently, there was a scene where we're told that Josiah was sometimes called "He Who Walks Behind The Rows"... but they deleted it. Why? Honestly, if things didn't seem to be claiming otherwise, I'd have believed that we were seeing the same thing that we saw with several of the Hellraiser "sequels" - completely unrelated scripts being taken and forced into place like a toddler trying to get the square block through the round hole.
There's also a subplot involving one kid who's a haemophiliac and his father, falsely accused of killing his wife (it was, of course, the evil possessed kids), running around the town with a shotgun trying to save his son before Josiah forces him to slice his hand open in a ritual and inadvertently bleed to death, but it doesn't feel tense at all because deep down, we all know no kids are dying in this movie, and I couldn't find it in me to really care about the father. He really felt like he was just there to drive Grace from one exposition spot to another - an exposition Uber, if you will - and provide her with a shotgun loaded with mercury shells (no, I don't know how that would work) because it turns out to be Josiah's one weakness and she'll need it for the inevitable showdown.
The Gathering is a dull non-starter of a movie. It adds nothing to the Children of the Corn series, and if not for the title you probably wouldn't even know it was part of the series because they decided to cut the one connecting reference to it. Everything else about it has been seen before and done before, and so unless you are a Naomi Watts or Karen Black completist, there really is very little to recommend it.
1 out of 5 stars.
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