Customer Reviews

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return [VHS]

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

One must pity poor John Franklin. Having failed to find his niche in motion pictures, he (in apparent desperation) returns to COTC as Isaac, who awakens from a 19-year-long coma. It is also apparent that the years have not been kind to John; though he still has the stature of a child, his visage is is that of a middle-aged man. It is also clearly evident that his acting skills have not grown either, as he awkwardly spews out some of the silliest dialogue ever concocted for the screen. However, even a skilled actor would find it nearly impossible to do much with a script as dreadful as this. The greatest mystery here is how a talented actor like Stacy Keach could have allowed himself to become involved in a project as lousy as this one. However, his character (a drunken physician) is mercifully killed off fairly early; after watching this junk, many viewers will find themselves strongly tempted to start drinking, as well. The rest of the supporting cast are a sorry lot, with the lack of talent glaringly evident at every turn. In short, this is one of those third-rate direct-to-video ...fests which the good people in Hollywood crank out in an effort to milk an established formula for a few more bucks, with no regard for quality.

As a horror film, this one is a dismal failure; however for those who enjoy "bad" movies, this is a classic. Ed Wood may be long gone, but this film proves that his spirit is still around. This film is so cheap and cheesy that it evokes memories of the glory days of Poverty Row, a pure Grade-Z bomb. The most frightening thing about this film is that anyone wasted the time and (very little) money to make it.

I am a fan of the original Children of the Corn, and for the life of me I can't figure out how the five sequels could be so poor, for one, and for two, so poor, and yet have so many fans. I'm dumbfounded. This movie is terrible! I can't find the words to express how truly awful this movie is.

It begins with a young girl, Hannah, who is traveling back to Gatlin to find her birth mother. (Incidentally, they have the location of Gatlin all wrong -- It's not the original town.) On the way, her car breaks down and some old man, who has absolutely nothing to do with the movie, reads her some strange passage out of the Bible, then mysteriously disappears.

She gets to Gatlin, and we find that Isaac didn't die like he, well, DID in the first one, but rather has simply been in a deep coma for the last twenty-odd years. Hannah's mere touch awakens him, of course. And here's Isaac, once again, to wreak havoc on the sleepy little town of Gatlin as he once did before. But wait. I'm confused! Isaac is an adult now... Shouldn't he be sacrificed to He Who Walk Behind the Rows? Is Isaac suddenly immune to what he taught? Also, since when did the children in the original reproduce? Isn't that supposed to be a great sin?

Well, I won't give any spoilers, but I will warn you: This entire movie is full of continuity blunders and, above all....The story is absolutely weak. I saw this movie in the hopes that it would be the one COTC sequel that I would enjoy. As it turns out, it's the worst one yet....Save your money on this one and buy a better movie. This one is horrible.

No other author in recent memory has had as much consistent success selling books as Stephen King. For roughly three decades the Maine writer churned out book after book, each one selling more and more copies. He's a world unto himself, the lucky fellow! He's so successful that he could throw out his pens, put away his typewriters, bury his word processor six feet under, never write another word in his life, and STILL have enough money to wallpaper the Great Wall of China five times over. In many respects, it's Stephen King's world and the rest of us are just living in it. But, and this is a gigantic but, an enormous number of metaphysically bad films based on his novels threaten to put a serious dent in his legacy. We all know the good ones, the ones that not only scared audiences stiff but also helped propel King's career to even greater heights. "Carrie" is probably the best example, followed by "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Dead Zone." These are wonderful, magical films that one can watch again and again without wearying of them. Then there are the rest: the truly wretched refuse that reminds one of dental plaque or the junk that washes up on the shores of a filthy river. Welcome to the Children of the Corn franchise.

"Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return" introduces us to Hannah (Natalie Ramsey), a young lady heading back to the now infamous Gatlin, Nebraska in order to answer some important personal questions: why am I drawn to a town out in the sticks? Who is my mother and where is she? Will accepting this role in a schlock, straight to video clunker enhance my career opportunities? You can quickly grasp the metaphysical importance of such ponderings. In quick succession, Hannah runs into a string of problems. Pushy town cop Cora (Alix Koromzay) gives her sass before she even arrives in town. Doc Michaels (Stacy Keach), the town quack, insists on imprinting his own weird impressions on the girl. But the most bizarre occurrence confronting Hannah during her first visit to Gatlin is the sight of a short man hooked up to a slew of machines in a hospital. This figure is none other than Isaac (John Franklin), the original apostle of "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" in the first film. Apparently, the boyish preacher did not perish at the end of "Children of the Corn," although it sure looked like it then, but slipped into a deep coma that has rendered him helpless for all these years. The arrival of Hannah, however, fulfills an old prophecy that will see Isaac out of his coma and possibly bring about a reemergence of the corn demon.

As "Children of the Corn 666" progresses, not so much in a linear manner but in a serious of jerky fits and starts capable of inducing whiplash in the viewer, more of the "storyline" emerges for our consumption. It appears that many worshippers of "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" survived the Peter Horton induced apocalypse at the end of the first film and grew up. They've been waiting all these years--raising their own children and acting like responsible adults--for Isaac to awaken from his slumber and call forth the demon. Why? I don't know. Since cult members always considered anyone over the age of eighteen the enemy, I can't imagine why grown people would welcome the malevolent corn god with open arms. Wouldn't he just pop up out of the earth and rip every person with age wrinkles and five o'clock shadow into bloody pulp? The whole subplot involving Hannah's reunion with her mother Rachel (Nancy Allen) withers when confronted with fundamental questions the movie refuses to ask, let alone answer. It should go without saying that numerous individuals find the idea of a possible Isaac/corn devil reconciliation an unpalatable situation. These are the people who end up on the wrong end of scythes and other sharp objects.

What we have here is such a mess of a film that it easily ranks as the worst entry in the franchise. So many characters parade past the screen, from Gabriel (Paul Popowich) to Jake (William Prael) to a dozen others that it's impossible to keep it all straight. Only the presence of the attractive Natalie Ramsey and the very gorgeous Sydney Bennet in the role of cranky Morgan help keep this film down on stomachs made queasy with banalities. John Franklin, who also co-wrote the script, doesn't do much beyond what he did in the first film. Sure, he issues the usual biblical mumbo jumbo pronouncements to adoring audiences, but his middle age mug and rougher voice tell us this isn't the Isaac we remember from the first film. Is it possible for the chief apostle of a demon to collect Social Security checks, particularly when said demon makes it a point to hype the virtues of youth? Like I wrote earlier, there are more questions here than answers. By the time the film shudders to a halt, all I could bring myself to praise was the gore, and there is precious little of that floating around compared to other entries in the series.

The DVD contains no extras, which is just as well because that would require the viewer to spend more time with this no account film. I suggest you skip, forget, overlook, reject, condemn, avoid, cast off, jettison, exile, dump, burn, pass over, disregard, denounce, discard, and abandon "Children of the Corn 666" as quickly as possible. Rearrange your sock drawer, change the furnace filters in your house, or reattach those plastic thingies to your shoelaces--do anything you can think of to avoid this atrocity. If you must see it, good luck and may god be with you.

this one should be the 2nd COTC.they shouldve wiped off the other 4 becuz the 1st and this one are both classics! This one is about a girl named hannah in search for her birth mother in Gatlin. she is stopped and taken to the hospital and sees isaac (john franklin) in a 19 yr coma. however her touch woke him up and hes back to spread the wwisdom of He Who Walks Behind The Rows.but while hannah is looking for her mom she doesnt realize she is making a prophecy come true.If youve seen the other COTC but not this 1 SEE IT! Not to give it away but it shows H.W.W.B.T.R! This movie includes blood and a few curses. it shows hannah fooling around but it doesn't show nudity just her kissing with a guy she fell in love with (his name is Gabriel) however there were r a few parts i didnt get like the begining it shows someone walking and then someone falls down half dead and in the 2nd COTC one boy said Isaac was dead not in a coma.? i dunno but i must say this a great sequel with excellent acting from everyone. especaill Isaac(john franklin)Hannah(Nataile Ramsey) and Gabriel (? ). So get some popcorn sit back oh and leave the lite on!

Avoid this at all costs. This is one of the worst films ever made. Absolute, dreadful (...). For a slasher/horror flick their's not much killing or gore... untilt he very end. So you have to sit through an hour and a half of hilariously confusing monologues to get to the good stuff. The sotry doesn't make sense and the acting is ridiculously over the top (this is Children of the Corn part 6, not Schindler's List). Watch parts 2, 3, and 7... those are fun, gory, entertaining, well made (ok 3 and 7's FX (...)) flicks. Avoid this film like the plague.

Well, looks like I'm about done with this. The past two viewing tend to suggest that I'd have been better off if I'd stopped with 4, but then I would just spent the remainder of my life wondering what might have been. Much like in 5, I don't know if their is anything too terribly grating or stunningly incompetent about the film as a whole, it's just rather uneventful and fairly dull. As you may have surmised, Isaac is back, and he's still a jerk. This is kinda fun, but John Franklin's mere presence isn't worth too much, and he really doesn't do much of anything. Another plus is that the film is occasionally slightly atmospheric. Only occasionally, and only very slightly, but it's somethin'. Unfortunately, CotC 666 lacks the laugh out loud hilarity of the better portions of 2 and 3, and the slightly intriguing plot and decent gore of 4. So, we aren't left with much. The climax is passably involving, and amusingly nonsensical, but overall it's a long journey to nowhere. That, and where's the killing? This film has only got a single sexy teen, rather than a pack of them, so we have very few preliminary killings. (Well, the protagonists in the CotC films usually weren't very sexy, but you get my meaning.) A few of those would've spiced things up substantially, but this is all we got.

I had an okay time watching this, but I really can't think of any reason why you ought to see it unless you have some bizarre compulsion to see all the CotC films. Not that I'd know anything about that.

Grade: D+

To be honest, I rented this out of sheer desperation a couple of years ago, having seen virtually every other horror movie for rent in town (this was before everybody started stocking a dozen new horror titles a month, a welcome development). I'd seen 2 or 3 of the earlier installments and not been impressed and given up on the series. I'm not trying to bash them, I know alot of people really love the whole series, but the original and the first sequel just didn't do anything for me personally. I'm not sure whether I even saw "Urban Harvest" or not - I guess I couldn't have cared for it too much if I did. But I took a chance on this one, breaking my own rule of Never skipping ahead in a series (3, 4 and 5 weren't available) and was certainly glad I did.

Very few times have I gone into a movie with such low expectations and been so totally blown away in surprise. "Children Of The Corn 666: Isaac's Return" is an absolute treasure find! It involves a young woman in search of her past and ending up in the farm town central to the series, notorious for events that happened there previously. The town's cult of children are apparantly in remission, maintaining a facade of normalcy in a community where adults now live as well, the children of the cult biding their time and waiting for some kind of promised dark messiah. I don't really know how closely this fits into the overall series continuity; after seeing this I decided to see all the other chapters but have only seen the follow-up, "Revelation", a good movie but not on par with this one and quite unconnected to it. The previous chapters can't be found for rent and I've already decided I'm going to have to eventually buy them sight unseen (the only reason I haven't done so yet is there are about 500 other movies on my personal 'waiting-to-be-bought' list) but haven't seen them yet, so I don't know if everything fits together or not.

A soaring high point of the movie is a romantic angle which I won't go into too much here, occuring as it does later in the movie. It includes one tremendously sexy scene that achieves its appeal not by being especially overt (not that I'm opposed to other, more openly sexy scenes in different movies), but through the high romanticism and beautiful tenderness. And yes, the female character's limited clothing in the scene certainly doesn't hurt things either, although it would have been gorgeous even without that added benefit.

Intelligent, suspenseful, and well-acted, this is highly recommended for either longtime fans of the series or those who (like me) never were into it before. I might even give the original another try someday and see if there's something there I missed. My only grievance is the ending - this isn't giving anything away, but it could have gone in either of two directions and I would have preferred the road they didn't take. That's purely subjective and doesn't mean the final minutes weren't just as well realized as the rest of the movie. I hope there's a direct followup to this entry with the same characters - the next sequel was a totally different path and different people. Still good, but this one is awesome.

Just when you thought they were through making those stupid, boring, pointless COTC movies, they throw this one at you! The script is stupid and a waste of time. It really does not follow the whole COTC point. In part one, when they reached a certain age, they were supposed to die. And now, however many years later, Isaac returns, as an adult, and they think nothing of it... All I can say that is good about this movie, is Isaac's voice is not nearly as annoying as it was in the first one..That would be the only good point to it. Bottom line: Stay away from this whole series. It's not worth it!

Before I watched the film, I already had an excellent plotline going on. First, I rumored that Isaac would return yes, and then try to gether his once followers and basically realizes that He Who Walks Behind The Rows does not exist and his talk was nothing but a bunch of lies, and rebels against his own religion. And in the end he burns the corn down and in the background Of course, it did not go that way at all. The plotline was stupid, about a girl named Hannah who wishes to know the whereabouts of her mother and goes to Gatlin. The plotline didn't make sense, the clues to find her mom went nowhere and truely the writers were probably stumped themselves, even though the clues were going to the hole, she still found out about her mother. And by our future series, we know what was going to happen to Isaac. But the plot could've been better, dont you agree? the whole movie should be a remake. The Gore scenes were weak and the movie felt like a boring History lecture. The only "good" parts of the film was in the ending where they start to kill each other off. And what was up with that old man who had nothing to do with the movie? Seriously, people, my thought on the movie was better then this mess. It was just a movie made to burn off money. Even Stephen King could've shaken his head at this. It simply killed off and made a bad movie out of a wonderful King talent. Too bad that King never directed or wrote the screeplay. For all I know, he could've spiced up the film or gave it a new meaning.
The acting was alright and that alone sorta "Saved" the film, but honestly if this was a COTC film, where the hell were the children? Sure, I saw this odd kid but that was it. The once followers are adults and He is a teenager. For starters, Gabriel is better then that potato that I saw in COTC 3. I'm not trying to flame someone off, but my opinion was that this movie wasnt worth a damn!

The first one [was not very good], and from there on they some how got the idea to make sequel after sequel until it got so blown out of proportion that it makes you want to vomit. I swear this movie is terrible, slow, boring, and pointless.

If it weren't for the fact that I am very liberal with the way I view movies I would never of have picked this up. Here is the basic idea, the children form the first are grown up. In the mean time the daughter of one of the origional children returns to find her birth mother. The birth Mother is played by Nancy Allen for a whole 15 20 minutes. Issac also returns to raise hell. There is a new prophecy, the first son and the first daughter of the origional children will mate and then he who walks behind the rows will be reborn. Yes it is that dumb sounding and that's what they made....