Dr. Frankenstein had an experiment go awry and now he's in the burn unit, which is difficult because he was supposed to host the all-monsters pool party later this month and no one wants to ask if his skin grafts will be healed up enough for him to keep the date.
Maybe I'll just throw the little demons in the van and take them to see a volcano instead.
Speaking of summer fun, this week's Thursday Thriller is Children of the Corn.
Fritz Kiersch directed this 1984 adaptation of a Stephen King short story.
Burt and Vicky (Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton) are a happy young couple on a cross country drive through Nebraska. They decide it might be fun to take the back roads instead of the interstate. Instead of adventure they find corn, miles of it, and angry Christian radio.
Their vacation turns to the stuff of nightmares when they get lost, and while checking the map, run over a kid who was standing in the middle of the highway. Turns out the kid had his throat slashed right before he wound up in the road, so they didn't kill him, but they're determined to find help anyway. Burt is compelled to do the right thing in the face of all common sense.
You know what they say. No good deed goes unpunished.
Instead of help, they find a town full of children who murdered all the adults one Sunday after church by poisoning the coffee at the diner, then cutting them up with knives and cleavers. One old guy gets his fingers cut off in the ham slicer.
What motivated these ghastly crimes? Were the children seeking retribution because the adults named them all after Old Testament characters? That might have been part of it, but the official reason is that they've been listening to Isaac, who brought them a message from a new deity called He Who Walks Behind The Rows.
They also crucified a police officer and refer to his corpse as The Blue Man.
John Franklin plays Isaac, the prophet and the spiritual leader of the child cult. He steals the show because he's awfully sinister and fluidly verbose for a 12-year-old. That's because he's not 12. Franklin has Growth Hormone Deficiency. He was actually 24 years old when the film was made. Isaac's enforcer is an equally sinister ginger kid named Malachi, played by Courtney Gains.
It's a decent flick, not especially bloody. As Stephen King adaptations go, it's not exactly The Shining or Carrie, but it's as good as Cujo or The Dead Zone.
Children of the Corn streams on Netflix and Hulu.
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