CHILDREN OF THE CORN II: THE FINAL SACRIFICE (1993) ** As a child of the Generation Gap, Stephen King apparently found himself a fine vantage point from which to interpret the intersection of the Manson Family, Ku Klux Klan, and Village of the Damned. He then smears this across a canvas of evangelical Christianity, which he would have us believe is responsible for it all. Of course King can't be entirely blamed for this, as he only wrote the original story which was then interpreted and expanded by lesser talents. It's not all that bad, actually, considering that the entire goal was apparently to offend both young and old (if any old bothered to pay attention) with melted wax faces and bodies repeatedly riddled by sharp objects and expanding swathes of ketchup; rather than, for example, creating something to be featured at the Museum of Modern Art. Very dark humor is at work, at the expense of the old of course, the older the better and darker. If you're not terribly offended, you're not taking it seriously, and so are probably doing it right. When I say that it's not badly done, I don't mean that it's really well done, either. The romance between Christie Clark and Paul Scherrer belongs in a completely different film, not because it's healthy and wholesome, but because it's so absurdly normal. If they want to be young lovers in this film, they should have had to do something ridiculous, be grotesquely sweet, or working with a combined IQ of seventeen, or walk around repeatedly dedicating their love to the combined works of Barry Manilow and Barbra Streisand, or something. You would have thought that Ms. Clark would have picked up some clues on "Days of Our Lives" about how to be Queen of the Night, or Empress of the Hidden Library Shelf or something.
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