Realrockerhalloween An interesting take for the series after three successful movies where kids are getting sick with a mysterious fever and granting them godlike powers.What seems strange is that this entry doesn't involve child ministers, corn or even mention he who walks behind the Rowe. Originally this was a script sitting around at the studio they dusted off and slapped the brand name on it without further thought.Though some may argue the host boy seen briefly is the demon himself. Yet the movie added A lot of filler without any further thought into how it connects. Even of it had been released under its untouched format doesn't seem to mush.It wants to be shocking, scary and dark, but without any guidance or revelation to what it all means it ends up falling flat.Naomi Watts looked stunning and gave a great performance and it takes true talent to shine when almost everything else in production stinks.The music wasn't bad, the picture looked great and was enjoyable even though the plot was all over the place.Not the worst corn movie yet, but you can start to see the rot.

Toronto85 Children of the Corn 4 is much more thought out than the rest of the sequels. The cut version that I have on DVD separates itself from the original story of "he who walks behind the rows" giving a fresh look to the franchise. A lot of question marks are raised throughout the beginning, but nothing is really answered until the later half of the film.Grace Rhodes comes to her hometown of Grand Island, Nebraska to take care of her mother June who is having nightmares of sick children. June has also become to paranoid to leave her front yard. In addition to looking after her mother, she has to take care of her younger siblings. June's nightmares also include a young boy dressed in a preacher like outfit, and we later find out his name is Josiah. Anyways, June's visions of sick children comes true. All of the kids in Grand Island start becoming ill with high fevers and pretty soon their teeth begin to fall out. And that's when some of the adults in town begin dying off in gruesome ways.The big plot reveal (told to viewers near the end of the film) is that Josiah was taken in by some travelling preachers as a child and eventually became a very gifted preacher. Over the years, Josiah never grew out of boyhood and stopped aging. The travelling preachers gave him over to darkness to stunt his growth, but when word got out, they abandoned him. Josiah killed the preachers and then the townspeople burned him alive and sealed his remains in a well. Grace also finds out that Josiah can control all of the children in the town by finding a child like himself (a lie child). That child is Grace's "sister" Margaret. The lie surrounding Margaret is that she is actually Grace's daughter whom Grace abandoned years ago. It's up to Grace to destroy Josiah and save the children. Children of the Corn IV is a step up from part III. The films itself looked a lot cleaner and sophisticated then it's predecessor and I liked the franchise returning to the rural setting. There were some gory moments and genuinely scary scenes which was missing from the third film. I recommend it. Acting was great (Naomi Watts), had a good story...definitely one of the better sequels in the franchise.6/10

sol1218 ***SPOILERS*** The 4th installment of "He who walks behind the Rows" who's never even mentioned, much less seen, once in the movie. We do have a corn filed in it that has really nothing to do with the plot but has the local town's sheriff Biggs of Grand Island Nebraska, Richard Gross, slaughtered in it while out at night looking for runaway Marcus Atkins, Lewis Flanagan III. Marcus went a bit nuts after he was infected with a mysterious illness that made him forget who he is and start thinking that he's in fact someone else. Like all the other kids of Grand Island who were infected by it.We have pre-med student Grace Rhodes, Naoma Watts, traveling home to Grand Island to visit her crazy mom June, Karen Black, and her 14 year old brother James, Mark Salling,and younger sister Margaret, Jamie Renee Smith, for the summer. It's then that Grace gets a job with the town physician Doc Larson, William Windom, whom she worked for before going away to collage. It's at Doc's clinic that strange things begin to happen with it suddenly being overcrowded with children who came down with high fevers and suffering from mercury poisoning. No one knows what's causing these strange maladies until we get the low down towards the end of the movie from the elderly and almost senile Nock sisters Jane & Rosa, Salle Ellis & Marietta Marich, about some boy preacher named Josiah who was kept young by his followers by stuffing him with mercury in order to stunt his growth.It's seems that the preacher boy was later burned at the stake by his disappointed, in him growing up, followers and is now back seeking revenge by getting the children of the town to slaughter all the adults for what they, or their parents and grand parents, did to him. There's also the side story to who's to replace this Josiah who's to come from the same background that he came from: In being abounded by his or her parents.Very confusing story especially in what the purpose in it is of showing grasshoppers or locust as evil messenger's of the devil without explaining why. We do in fact have some very shocking slasher, with the use of a scythe, scenes in it that makes the movie worth watching if you have the stomach to see them through. Even these scenes get a bit overdone with in one case poor Doc Larson who was cut in two earlier in the film getting shot to pieces by his assistant Grace, who didn't recognize him, with a shotgun as his other half, the bottom part of his body, was lying in state.***SPOILERS*** It's Mr, Donald Atkins, Brant Jennings, young Marcus's dad who finally finds the magic bullet, filled with mercury, that can put an end to this horror. Atkins together with Grace drives down to the old Spelling Barn where the possessed town children are holding a rally, or human sacrifice, in order to save them from themselves. Even though Donald did the driving through the corn field it was Grace who did the blasting with her shotgun who finally put an end to this bloody, with all the kids cutting their hands open and dripping their blood into what looked like a wooden punchbowl, insanity. That's until the next cornball "Children of the Corn" flick comes to video store of theater near you to start it all over again.

udar55 Bless me father, for I have sinned. I saw this year's ago and decided to revisit it. Please forgive me. Totally dismissing part three's open ending, the filmmakers set this one in a small Midwestern town with a kid-to-parent ratio of, let's say, twenty to one. When a young girl (Naomi Watts, who hasn't done anything noteworthy since this...ha!) returns to look after her ill mother, things start to go wrong. A ghost boy that lives in a well begins to slowly seize the minds of the town's children. Overcome with boiling fevers, the children eventually turn into bloodthirsty cob gobblers. You can guess where this all goes, right?While watching COTCIV, a rather intoxicated friend quipped, "Well, I see children and I see corn and that's about it." I couldn't have said it better. Bearing no connection to the other films other than those facts, this is just another mid-90s shameless Weinsteins direct-to-video victory parade to cash in on Stephen King's name and any semi-successful property they owned. I seriously suggest King starts spinning now because he is going to be doing it eternally once he is seven feet under. There is some decent Sam Raimi-esquire camera work and the film is surprisingly gory. But can't make up for ridiculous bits like a Sheriff following a kid into a spooky cornfield in the middle of the night. Let him rot in there with the scarecrows! It is past his bedtime anyway. Director Greg Spence also puked out THE PROPHECY II for Miramax/Dimension before deciding to end his career as a helmer (he recently was associate producer on HBO's JOHN ADAMS; I'm waiting for Spence to announce JOHN ADAMS II: THE RECKONING.) I quit the series cold turkey after this one.