Highly Overrated But Still Good

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

"Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice" follows a reporter and his estranged son from New York who are traveling through Nebraska in the aftermath of the first film's events; naturally, he wants a story. The price? Perhaps his life.The original "Children of the Corn" installment is not what I'd call high art exactly, but it is a fairly well-put-together horror film from a rather disreputable company (New World). This film picks up immediately where the first leaves off, shifting to new characters. Cue mysterious children, a "normal" girl-next-door love interest for the teenaged boy, and a few outrageous and violent death scenes (including one grand guignol scene in a church ceremony). "Children of the Corn II" is at its core a fairly unoriginal film, but worse, it's actually quite dull and aimless. The script takes a hard right turn in the final act with a rather absurd ecological explanation for the events taking place, which itself is wrapped up in commentary on indigenous peoples and European settlers. The problem is that none of these things really seem to cohere as the film clunks toward its finale. Terence Knox seems bored, as does most of the cast here, and there is a fair amount of soap-opera acting throughout. It's not entirely bad, though—I do think genre fans will find some amusement here with the death scenes and early-nineties stylistics. As a time capsule and a kitschy slasher oddity, it's amusing; as a sequel, it's unexciting, and dare I say anticlimactic. Oddly enough, I may prefer the successive sequels that followed it. 4/10.

Arriving in Gatlin, Nebraska, a news-reporter and his son get wind of a story about the youth in the town murdering their parents finds that a series of brutal murders are revealed to be worshipers of the corn-stalks and try to stop them before they carry out their plans.While not a completely worthless sequel, it does have enough to make it interesting without being all that terrible. One thing it does do right is play around with the supernatural better than expected and did have some good moments to it featuring this. The very first attack in the cornfield is really fun as the howling wind and strange lightning blasts befalling the reporters while they're in the corn rows before the huge tree falls into the area, while other really good action moments are packed in amongst the other supernatural occurrences here as house-falling sequence and the scene in the church provide some fun since they involve a great amount of suspense. There's even a few other really good scenes that come from the different meetings held among the corn-stalks, and a really tense moment later on where a couple make a particularly gruesome discovery among the corn that provides a good shock that comes out of nowhere. Even better than that is where the remaining adults are trapped inside a burning building, which is one of the better scenes in the film with the fire and the panic providing plenty to like.The last big plus is the finale, which is just all sorts of good cheesy action-packed fun, some wonderful ideas and an overall really great way to end the film. All-in-all, this is just cheesy good fun. This one wasn't that bad, but there were a few problems. The most obvious one is the flaw concerning the back- story. It's implied to be a continuation of the first one, where the survivors are bused into foster homes of a neighboring town, yet that raises a few problems. Firstly, it's never stated whether or not this was true despite giving plenty of evidence that this was the case. The events of what happened there were well-known, yet the children here are allowed to go away without being questioned, as well as having a method of still getting in touch with each other quite easily which simply makes their rampage later on seem all the more out-of-place when it echoes what happened before in the the other town. Those doesn't make any sense at all and are quite annoying. There's also the fact that the pacing is a little off, as the romance angles cut into the middle of the film when the mysterious stuff starts happening, and way too much times goes by before anyone thinks anything is going wrong. The biggest one, though, is that it's way too cheesy. The film's concept and several of it's big action scenes do reek of cheese, and the film as a whole does reflect this. These really keep the film down somewhat.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, Brief Nudity and mild sex scenes.

Children of the Corn II is not all that bad. They did try to stick in the vein/tradition of the original film - which is good. We have our reverend or preacher Micah who is a lot like Issac of the first film but not exactly like him. I found this to be done fairly well just not as good as the original.I wasn't crazy about the father and son drama - but it was okay - it filled out the story. What I did find funny was the father and the son both finding a girlfriend because it was not necessary to the film it was just more time filler scenes.I also was not crazy about the silly deaths in this one - they really went overboard with the campiness here. I much prefer the original because the film took itself seriously whereas this film went for campy humor.Overall this is not to bad of a 2nd film but it could have been a lot better than it is - the potential was there.6/10

Watching this movie makes it all the more obvious that the people who were involved with the previous movie simply were not capable enough of making a decent genre movie. As an horror movie this movie is actually quite a good and effective one.The movie works out way better than "Children of the Corn", from 1984. It's not only due to the better written story that the movie works out but also because all of the elements in it do. The children are far more convincing and kind of scary this time, because they actually get to do some very evil stuff this time. There are quite a few killings in this movie, of which some are quite graphic to watch as well.I can even say that this movie is more Stephen King like, even though Stephen King was not involved with this movie or its story at all, unlike the first movie, which got based on a novel by him. This movie its story, characters, horror and even humor reminded much more of King's style than the first movie really.The movie also does a far better job at explaining stuff. In the first movie basically nothing what happened got explained. In this movie we get to learn a bit more about the past and why things happened the way they did in the small town of Gatlin.I also like how the actual corn in this movie does play a prominent role. The corn in these movies should always be an evil and perhaps even scary thing, you don't want to go into, during night or daytime. The corn is actually a part of the movie its horror. I also liked the score by Daniel Licht, which was simply a great one for an horror movie. He's a composer that has never really broken through yet, though he's getting some fame and attention now for his work on the hit-series "Dexter".Really much better than the first movie.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/