Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest * (1995, Daniel Cerny, Ron Melendez, Jim Metzler, Nancy Lee Grahn, Mari Morrow) Classic Movie Review 5852

The evil spreads. Two surviving Gatlin, Nebraska, small-town brothers Eli and Joshua are adopted by a Chicago city couple, William and Amanda Porter, in director James D R Hickox’s gory and pretty silly 1995 second horror sequel to Children of the Corn (1984) and Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1993).

The evil younger brother Eli (Daniel Cerny) has bought some corn seeds and plants them in an abandoned warehouse’s courtyard, praying to He Who Walks behind the Rows and bringing him to Chicago. He possessing his high school buddies, and his brother Joshua (Ron Melendez) has to try to stop him’

It also stars Jim Metzler and Nancy Lee Grahn as William and Amanda Porter, Michael Ensign as Father Frank Nolan, Mari Morrow as Maria Elkman, Jon Clair as Malcolm Elkman, Duke Stroud as Earl and Rance Howard as Employer.

Dode B Levenson’s screenplay gains some fresh ground from the change in locale and urban setting, but otherwise it is a fairly uninspired and low-imagination script, which is based only very remotely on ideas from the Children of the Corn short story by Stephen King.

Also in the cast are Rif Hutton, Ed Grady, Garvin Funches, James O’Sullivan, Brian Peck, Gina St John, Yvette Freeman and Anthony Hickox.

Charlize Theron (born on 7 August 1975 in Benoni, Transvaal, South Africa) plays her first (uncredited) role, aged 18, as Eli’s follower, before her credited debut in 2 Days in the Valley (1996).

The film was shot from December 1993 to 14 January 1994 in Los Angeles.

The score is by Daniel Licht, who died of cancer on 2 August 2017, aged 60. He was also the composer of Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, all eight series of the Emmy-award-winning show Dexter and the popular video games Silent Hill and Dishonored.

It is the first film in the series made under Dimension Films and Miramax studios, who bought the rights and distributed the sequels.

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering followed in 1998 and then Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (1998), Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return (1999), Children of the Corn: Revelation (2001), and Children of the Corn: Genesis (2011). And a TV film remake, also titled Children of the Corn, was released in 2009.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5852

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