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Hercules Says Syfy’s Saturday Remake Of STEPHEN KING’S CHILDREN OF THE CORN Might Be Worth Your Valuable Time!!
SPOILER ALERT !!
I am – Hercules!!
Zeus knows how. Somehow I don’t recall ever sitting through the 1984 Linda Hamilton-Peter Horton big-screen version of “Stephen King’s Children of the Corn.”
I have to say I was surprised how much I enjoyed the Syfy remake airing Saturday night.
King apparently had a hand in scripting tonight’s new TV-movie version though I’m not sure how big a hand; the horror master shares teleplay credit – in the second position – with director Donald P. Borchers.
The first half of the movie has an agreeably talky, old-school “Twilight Zone” feel as it explores the troubled marriage of the motoring couple and the motoring couple explore the bizarre patch of Midwest madness they’ve stumbled onto.
David Anders (Sark on “Alias”) and Kandyse McClure (Dualla on “Battlestar Galactica”) this time play the marrieds who encounter bloodthirsty underage religious fanatics in rural 1975 Nebraska.
Both leads are terrific. If their characters seem shrill and unpleasant as the story begins, viewers are likely to relate to them better as their backstory unfolds and the stakes grow. The fabulous McClure, especially, nails her last bit of dialogue in the final act.
The action kicks in nicely for the second half. Anders’ character is a former U.S. Marine who saw action in Vietnam, so there’s a nice supernatural “Die Hard” meets “Deliverance” vibe.
It’s amusing how the movie goads the viewer into hoping the manly jarhead brings grisly deaths to the bible-thumping tykes (played by a bunch of really cute kid actors).
“Corn” does over-stretch a slight story, and it is not anywhere near as good as something like Frank Darabont’s excellent adaptation of King’s “The Mist” (which also features evil violent religious nutjobs), but I thought it held together better than a lot of King adaptations. And, to damn it a bit with faint praise, it’s certainly more compelling than any other Syfy (or SciFi Channel) original movie I can recall.
9 p.m. Saturday. Syfy.
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time the scifi channel ever made a movie worth watching
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when will you or someone else at aicn admit that The Mist sucked.
Thomas Jane is cool but he's just not that great an actor. He's the weakest link on Hung and he's the weakest link in that movie. Which is cheesy and annoying and depressing as fuck. Am I as crazy as Marcia Gay Harden in that movie or does The Mist continue to get a free pass from AICN because it loves monster movies and Frank Darabont? A failed King adaptation if there ever was one. -
thomas jane is great in boogie nights. and he's very good in stander, which is a movie i first read about on aicn, so i'll give u guys credit for that. just one of many great movies you guys have turned me on to. but you're still not selling me on the mist being a good movie.
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Mirajeff! Is that really you? Loooong time; no post.
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It always seems so weird to have religious/"Christian" crazies as the bad guys, given that anti-religious/anti-Christian - crazies (Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Castro, etc.) are by far responsible for more violence and murder than anyone else in the past century. Then I remind myself, there's a reason it's called "fiction."
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Sorry, man. To each his own, and all that, but: while I felt Jane was good in Stander, I found the movie as un-engaging as all get out. The Mist, however was fantastic! Even Marcia Gay Harden (who overacts as much as she can, as often as she can, ESPECIALLY in the craptacularly overrated Mystic River)turns in a good performance! Have you tried watching the B&W version? It makes a difference. Give it a shot.
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I always thought the short story (which runs about 30 some-odd pages) would have been best served as a half-hour episode of an anthology series (like that Nightmares & Dreamscapes series that ran on TNT a while back). King's short stories are awesome, but they tend to suck when padded out to feature length.
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children of the corn!
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watched it twice because I thought maybe I was missing something. But real people just don't act that way. They just fight off a giant tentacle and lose a bag boy and the black guy just thinks they're trying to make him look stupid. What the hell? Yeah we just killed a kid and made up a giant tentacle story to cover it. Stupid.
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Sep 26, 2009 9:33:41 AM CDT
Isn't the whole "WACKY CHRISTIAN" shtick alittle tired?
by puppiesandicecream
I mean seriously, we've seen it a thousand times before, maybe more. How about making a movie about a bunch of blood thirsty Muslims? Or is that asking too much?
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Sep 26, 2009 10:30:30 AM CDT
Stephen King's hostility towards Christianity is well-known
by theghostwholurks
So Christians as "evil, bloodthirsty nutjobs" show up pretty frequently in his work. Yes, it's tired, completely biased and nonsense but apparently folks like Hercules — judging from HIS review comments — eat that anti-Christian hate stuff up.
The fact that they're not afraid to do it, but ARE afraid to mock and insult Islam (because they know what might actually happen to them) just shows how full of crap these people really are. -
I don't mind a tragic ending in a horror story, but that felt contrived and artificial. King's story did not have a happy ending, but at least it ended on a note of hope. I heard he said that he wished he had come up with the movie ending, but I love the fact that he left the story's ending open to interpretation. Just like The Shawshank Redemption - I always felt that the movie should have ended with Red on the bus, his two simple words, "I Hope" the last thing we hear. That last shot of him finding Andy weakened the story, as far as I'm concerned.
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A pox on bannings! Bring him back!
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When a group of humanists start killing people you will have a point.
All of the people you mentioned were meglomaniancs, they were anti-religuos because they want/order people to effectively worship them instead. North Korea is also an example of this.
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Usually one just has to ignore the drivel SyFy airs on Saturdays. Maybe the novelty of not airing shit will catch on...
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Still spelling Sci-Fi like the corporation tells you huh?
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Haven't seen the movie, but in the original story, it's made quite clear it's a -perversion- of Christianity; there's a painting of "Christ" drowning sinners in his eyes, and a Bible that's had its New Testament censored to shreds.
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Thanks for the heads up! If I've got nothing to do tonight maybe I'll try watch this, and either way, I'll probably DVR it. If you're recommending it being at least worth my time, I'll make some time. And The Mist fucking rocked, including the ending. Ballsy stuff. And I disgaree with the guy who said people don't act that way. Maybe you don't, but have you seen the world we live in? I really don't find it that hard to believe some of the people in that grocery store would believe just about anything was going besides what really was going on. People are frightened and delusional when it comes to their own safety.
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he hates zealots...and for good reason i wish hbo would remake salems lot and do it right
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Filmed in shitvision.
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not a mini-series but an actual season long stint, each book would get its own season. plenty of character development,story arc, etc. dunno just a thought
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Not quite true. But each of those *were* about control, same as the Catholic church, Islamists, etc. Seems weird that the down-your-throat types in fiction today are almost exclusively Christian when history teaches us it's actually more common in recent decades among non-Christian beliefs (including atheism). Of course, it probably helps when those creating the fiction tend to be sympathetic to some of the mass-murdering monsters...
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David Carradine and a yong Eva Mendes was decent.
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but "Mist" has way too many problems to declare it an excellent adaptation
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And, if I remember right, there was a monster in the corn that the children worshipped. And it was the monster that killed the guy in the end, not the kids.
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and it was terrible. other than the creepy kid playing isaac, and a young linda hamilton, almost no redeeming value. especially the two "cute" kids who narrate the story who are incredibly annoying and stupid (and not in the king story). let's not even mention the cheesy fx at the end. so hopefully this remake will be an improvement. if the one guy is vietnam vet, does that mean it's a period piece?
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are dumb. you can't compare CotC or films like that to pol pot, or hitler, or stalin... those were political figures who commanded armies and militias. CotC is about a CULT and cults are by definition religious, and most of the ones in the US have been christian... the branch davidians, heaven's gate, jonestown, etc. so anyone writing a horror story or film about a cult is probably going to make it a christian cult, because that's what people in this country are most familiar with. if you want a movie about non-christian or non-religious killers like pol pot or stalin or hitler idi amin, there are plenty of movies about those actual people. you don't need fictional horror stories for that.
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Hell, the swastika is a version of the cross. But Christian groups try to gloss that over and rewrite history.
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because the hot chick from BSG is starring in this! I'll give it a shot but talk about a downgrade for such a hottie!
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Sep 26, 2009 9:34:47 PM CDT
They can't do Dark Tower as a long-form TV series...
by nasty in the pasty
...because any actor playing Jake would age out of the role within a year or two. The ONLY WAY to do Jake's role right would be to film ALL of his scenes from the entire story within a six-month window, and I can't see that happening.
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Sep 26, 2009 9:42:04 PM CDT
damn it i wanted to see something laughably bad tonight
by supercowbell5thecowbellhasspoken
anyone ever see heatstroke? hilarious sci fi channel classic
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atheism is far from a belief, this is a common error, but an error nonetheless.
A lot of people have put it more eloquently than I can but, for instance the absence in belief of elves or the zodiac do not define anyone, its the same with the absence in belief of Santa, Jesus or Ganesha, it doesn't define anything.
I am a humanist that would define what I value, Stalin wanted power and control and was incredibly paranoid, thats the way to describe, assses him.
Perhaps the reason you find this so difficult to understand is in your mind the default position is to believe in the supernatural. -
That was absolutely awful.
Not only is it not as good as the (not even vaguely good) original movie, it's probably not as good as most of the sequels, all of which are dreadful.
There was not a single moment in the entire movie which worked. Pure garbage from start to finish.
And yet, since I've got every other Stephen King-related DVD, I'll have to buy this one, recession or no recession. Curse you, anal retentiveness! -
What the fuck is Herc talking about this being good? This piece of shit dragged on forever. It is truly the cure for insomnia. Hell, you know they're padding things when they spend like 15 minutes just running through corn fields ("I'll go this way... and now this way... wait, let's go this way... okay, I've been over there, so now let's run into a little kid and start running another way.")And what I loved were the commercials they ran during this thing for the "unrated director's cut" DVD that apparently is coming out in another week or two. What the fuck, there's a director's cut for this? What, they think I want to see an even longer and more BORING version? Is that even possible? I mean, I can't imagine the "uncut version" has any good action or gore that got left on the editing floor since NOTHING ever happens in this shitfest to begin with.I swear -- no kidding -- the crappy Big Snake movies that SyFy usually runs on a Saturday night are a million times better than this turd was!
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You may be a Big Dumb Ape, but you know what you're talking about on this subject.
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I think it'll be interesting. The 1990 version is pretty fuckin' dated now.
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I'd love to see a new version of "It," but only as a series on HBO. It's just too big for anything else to do it justice.
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Sep 27, 2009 8:14:40 AM CDT
I'm still waiting for The Simpsons Halloween version of 'It'
by tangcameo
They never thought of asking SK to let them parody IT? I've been waiting forever to see Krusty The Clown in a stormdrain saying "Ya sure kid they all float. Now would you hurry up and shove your arm down here, the water down is here is freezin my beytse off."
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Me and my girlfriend were riffing it MST3k style. The boy priest was awful-I joked that he must of been the only kid to audition that didn't wet himself while reading the lines, there's no other explanation for picking someone that bad-the story was ludicrous, the conversation between the mush-mouthed 'cute-bait' kid and the redhead enforcer of the group was painful and lasted at least three minutes too long, and the lead appeared as though he was desperately trying to act himself into another movie. By the by, since the resident religious defenders brought it up--they always do-though atheists like Stalin and Mao (Hitler at least professed to being Christian, so you can stop using him as a straw man now) did unspeakable things, none of them did it in the name of atheism. Religious atrocities done in the name of religion are well known (crusades, inquisition, September 11th, etc.)
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Tired, familiar, stale, stiff, ugly, pointless crap.
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...it has the tainted touch of Mick Garris? Who's turned nearly every SK tv movie or miniseries into either a comic book or an bad epi of Tales From The Crypt?
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Getting totally fed up of these teasers etc that we can't view.
So, anyone - good? Bad? Uber-bad?
Which one was Dualla again? She the bird who tops herself?
Prob won't watch if it is, she can't act.
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Adam Munroe AND her?
Erm, no thank you - this must be shiter than shit! -
tangcameo, if it tells you how bad this movie was, it might have actually been improved had Mick Garris directed it. And that's coming from someone who will almost never pass up an opportunity to talk about how untalented Garris is as a director. Yes, it was THAT bad.
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we need a balls to the wall 'IT', a twelve-parter on HBO. I want to see the Bradley Gang. I want to see Hockstetter. I want to see Adrian Mellon under a bridge. Better not be that two hour reimagining we heard about a while back...
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Sep 27, 2009 6:35:41 PM CDT
The cross is an ancient symbol, too dumbasser!
by flurryofchocolateglazedkrispykremedonuts
It predates Christianity by thousands of years. Probably became a symbol when prehistoric man noticed two sticks rubbed together created fire. Naturally not knowing what friction was, the crossed sticks themselves were thought to contain mystical power.
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Isnt that the platform of the ENTIRE republican party? To use the name of Jesus to justify murder, war, idoltry, greed, pedophelia, corruption, hate, revenge, anger, un-forgiveness, NEVER turn the other check, LYING on a nearly daily basis to the sheepeople. Nope, with such glowing examples as Palin, the C St. clowns, Blackwater, etc. it is starting to look like the American Conservative Party has done more to destroy Christs mission than any Anti-Christ could do.
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Rent the documentary JESUS CAMP. Its the real deal.
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I haven't seen either movie, but the short story is one of my favorite King short stories, it scared the shit out of me
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