Violence/Gore: Very little, although bloody corn, some CGI maggots, and a very plastic-looking severed head might qualify for minor gross-out potential. There’s also a zombie-like apparation that seems to have dropped in from another movie. Tiffany’s death by corn stalks in the tub isn’t exactly gory, but the strange choice to intersperse her death with shots of her wheelchair-bound neighbor pounding on the wall and telling the “whore” to shut up while she screams in her death throes is a bit of unnecessary misogyny that makes one cringe.

Sex/Nudity: There’s a half-hearted attempt to up the skin quotient with some underwear shots featuring Tiffany, the stripper with a heart of gold, but it doesn’t go any farther.

Best Line: “Cornfield’s back.” (another massive understatement)

Score:

In this, the seventh (!) installment in this inexplicably profitable horror series (hey, they wouldn’t keep churning them out if they weren’t making money for somebody), the lazy pacing and uneventful plotting that made the first COTC such a classic has been lovingly preserved. Unfortunately, the makers of this chapter in the saga seem to have slipped up, because they cast a genuinely decent actress as the main lead, thus raising the bar just a tad above the original forgettable outing. Oh well, better luck next time.

Jamie is a resourceful young woman who discovers that her grandmother, the only survivor of a religious revival tent fire 60 years ago, has vanished from the bizarre little tenement building in which she was living. As it turns out, the tenement was built on the very ground where the fire occurred decades before…and there’s a strange cornfield growing all around it as well. Can’t be good. Add to this subtle set-up another batch of creepy kids over-acting with vacant stares and pasty make-up, and you have the ingredients for a truly mediocre horror film. Just to be sure we know how eerie it all is, the entire thing is shot through a bright green filter. Nice touch.

With just a bit more coherence in the plot than the original CORN, this seventh outing tries hard but can’t rise above its direct-to-video origins. Armbrister, Jamie’s cop-on-the-make sidekick, is just another pretty boy would-be actor who thinks he’s doing a really good job pretending to be a police officer. Although he shows up at the end to save Jamie from the clutches of the evil corn - yup, evil corn - he’s otherwise a fairly useless addition to the cast. And there’s someone else who looks like he could’ve given the whole project a miss too…

Perhaps to make this movie more attractive to video distributors, the film-makers hired genre vet Michael Ironside to turn up for about five minutes’ total screen time as a weird priest who spouts exposition and then disappears from the proceedings when his day’s shooting is over. He’s the only character to utter the names of “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” and Gatlin, Nebraska, thus providing the paper-thin connection between this movie and its progenitor. But he’s wasted in this meaningless role, and besides, since when does Ironside guarantee a larger number of Blockbuster rentals anyway?

The kids aren’t scary at all, the preacher boy Abel makes you yearn for the subtlety of Isaac, and once again everything ends with a lousy effects sequence featuring lots of CGI corn stalks and some admittedly decent moaning faces floating up to the heavens in wisps of smoke as the tenement burns. Earlier in the movie, Ironside tells Jamie that “evil walks this place, and it wants you.” Well…it can have her.

DVD Extras: None…whew.

ATB