Worth Mentioning - What a Nutty Bunch of Fruitcakes

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Killer kids, zombies, cults, and total morons.

CHILDREN OF THE CORN V: FIELDS OF TERROR (1998)

Ethan Wiley made one of my favorite genre sequels when he wrote and directed House II: The Second Story, but he's not infallible. Eleven years after the release of House II, Wiley wrote and directed one of my least favorite entries in the Children of the Corn franchise, Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror. With a group of poorly written, dimwitted, obnoxious youths at the center of the story, this one feels more like a stereotypical slasher than any of the previous installments did, and is so disappointing and underwhelming that it can't even be saved by the fact that its cast includes David Carradine, Fred Williamson, Alexis Arquette, Eva Mendes, and a couple Zappa kids.

After the fourth film took a bit of a detour, Fields of Terror brings the story of the franchise back to He Who Walks Behind the Rows, the evil "god" that lurks in cornfields and corrupts children. The film begins with a kid named Ezeekial (Adam Wylie) taking a stroll through a cornfield and happening across a fire burning in the middle of the field. A strange supernatural light blasts out of the fire and into Ezeekial, apparently possessing him, making his eyes glow green. Take note of that green glow, because it comes back in the ridiculous final shot of the film.

Jump ahead one year and Ezeekial is now the leader of a new cult of homicidal teens, including Diva Zappa and hulking enforcer Jared (Matthew Tait). They're set up in the town of Divinity Falls, where they work on the farm of Lucas Enright (Carradine)... and if you've seen any Children of the Corn movie, you know it doesn't make much sense that He Who Walks Behind the Rows followers would be living on a farm with an adult. He is not a fan of adults. But stick around, the whole Luke thing gets much weirder than you'd probably expect. A fire burns within a silo on the farm, causing a smell like burnt popcorn to hang over the entire town of Divinity Falls, where the children permit adults to continue living, with some of the locals being a bartender played by Hodder, a sheriff played by Williamson, and Gary Bullock as a farmer who describes Ezeekial and his pals as a "nutty bunch of fruitcakes".

The characters we follow into Divinity Falls are the aforementioned dimwitted youths, who roll into town in two separate cars. In the lead car is Ahmet Zappa as a character who is directing his friends into Divinity Falls with blow-up dolls he leaves taped up around the countryside, pointing toward the town. In the second car are a bunch who want to bring the ashes of a friend to his favorite hangout, a bar that happens to be in Divinity Falls. There's Alex Arquette as Greg, Greg Vaughan as Tyrus, Eva Mendes as the dead guy's girlfriend Kir (who has sex with other guys to deal with her grief), and Stacy Galina as our heroine Alison, whose brother Jacob (Dave Buzzotta) ditched their family so he could join the He Who Walks Behind the Rows cult. It's just a coincidence that the cult is stationed in the same town Alison has come to.

Ahmet Zappa's character Lazlo and his girlfriend Charlotte (Angela Jones) are taken out early during a stop to set up another blow-up doll (and to pick some corn from the nearby field), and their friends find themselves stranded in Divinity Falls when Greg crashes their car because a deflated blow-up doll smacks into the windshield. These characters are pretty awful, with Mendes turning in an especially cringe-inducing performance with the questionable lines she was given. Watching this, it isn't apparent that Mendes was destined to have a high profile career. Arquette tries to liven things up with some reactions and line deliveries, but can't make this group seem any more appealing. It's rather painful to have to spend time with them, and we're stuck with them for the whole movie.

The friends seek shelter in an abandoned house that used to belong to a farmer that Ezeekial murdered - and while doing so, he demonstrated some major supernatural abilities that he doesn't use at any other point. Alison visits Jacob and finds that he wants out of the cult. Kir acts like an idiot. And it all builds up to a climactic slasher action sequence where our heroes have to fight for their lives against the followers of He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

Taking a step back and looking at Fields of Terror element by element, I can see that Wiley might have been trying to have a solid dramatic story at the heart of the film and to keep things interesting with his own unique take on the He Who Walks Behind the Rows, but the execution didn't work. The finished film feels flat and uninspired, and it's populated by characters who are dumb and annoying.

I have watched Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror many times because I'm a completist, and when I marathon my way through the Children of the Corn movies, which I do from time to time, I have to include it. But I never choose to just watch it on its own, and have never enjoyed it very much.

But I still love House II!

CARGO (2017)

The directing duo of Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke made their feature directorial debut with this zombie film, which was written by Ramke and is an expansion of a short film they made together a few years earlier.

Best known for his roles in comedies and large scale films about Hobbits and superheroes, Martin Freeman stars as a man named Andy, who has been surviving the zombie apocalypse on a houseboat with his wife Kay (Susie Porter) and their infant daughter Rosie. Things completely fall apart for this little family within the first 30 minutes of the 104 minute running time. Kay is bitten by a zombie while investigating a sinking boat, and the rush to get her some medical assistance goes terribly wrong. Kay dies, Andy ends up bitten himself, and now he has to find a safe new home for Rosie before he becomes a zombie himself.

The filmmakers tried to put their own twist on the concept of zombies; in fact, they didn't even call the flesh-munching creatures in their film zombies. They referred to them as "virals", which will probably stir up an "are they zombies or are they infected people?" debate among some viewers... but they're all zombies to me. The zombies here are disgusting looking things, as their eyes and mouths leak a yellow pus that turns to crust on their faces. A bite from one of these things takes a solid 48 hours to turn someone, so Andy knows exactly how much time he has to get Rosie to safety after he's bitten. He straps the infant to his back and starts walking off across the Australian outback.

Along the way, Andy crosses paths with other survivors, but they're not contenders to take care of Rosie. The films of George A. Romero taught us that other humans are a major threat during the zombie apocalypse, and Howling and Ramke included some people to watch out for in their movie as well. They also made the wise decision to make their film uniquely Australian with the inclusion of Aboriginal characters, most prominently a young girl named Thoomi (Simone Landers). Freeman turns in a good performance, but we know to expect that from him. What's a nice surprise is to see just how good Landers is in this, which was her first screen acting job.

Cargo is well made, interesting, and at times devastating. It was a great start for the feature career(s) of Howling and Ramke, and is well worth checking out.

DEATH OF ME (2020) 

The screenplay for director Darren Lynn Bousman's new film is credited to three writers - Ari Margolis, James Morley III, and David Tish - but the three of them together weren't able to make the story feel entirely coherent. Is it the latest take on The Wicker Man? Was The Serpent and the Rainbow the inspiration? Is it lifting from Rosemary's Baby? How about blending all of them together, with some extra weirdness and trippy visuals thrown in to really test the audience's patience?

When Death of Me begins it looks like it's going to be the story of a traveler's worst nightmare, a vacation gone terribly wrong. Maggie Q and Luke Hemsworth star as Christine and Neil, an American couple who are told they have to evacuate the Thai island they're staying on because it's going to be hit by a typhoon in twelve hours. Their attempt to evacuate fails when they realize they don't have their passports or Christine's phone, but the ferry does leave with their luggage on board. So now they're stuck on the island until the next ferry later in the day - which gives them some time to try to figure out why they don't have any memory of what they did the previous night. 

Video on Neil's phone just deepens the mystery, because after a waitress slipped them a drink that put them in a different state of mind, it sure looks like Neil strangled Christine and buried her corpse. Well, that could explain why she has a bruised neck and keeps vomiting dirt. That's when the troubling "What if I lost my passport and possessions while in a different country?" scenario makes way for supernatural horror, and it's downhill from there.

Most horror fans are going to know exactly where this movie is going as soon as we're shown that the locals don't believe the typhoon is going to hit their island - after all, there hasn't been a typhoon there for two hundred years - and that they're preparing to throw a festival. From very early on, the film has us twiddling our thumbs, just waiting for it to reach that predictable conclusion while it takes its time to get there, dragging out the running time with scene after scene of Christine hallucinating and questioning her reality.

Q and Hemsworth do fine work in their roles and put in their best effort to get the viewer invested in the strange journey their characters find themselves on, but neither the presentation of the story or the characters were interesting enough to draw me in. Death of Me is only 94 minutes long, but it feels like a slog - and when the presence of Alex Essoe (as a fellow American Christine and Neil meet on the island) can't liven up your movie, there are definitely some pacing and storytelling issues at play.

Kelly Bronwen Jones, Ingkarat Jaraswongkosol (a.k.a. Kat Ingkarat), and Chatchawan Kamonsakpitak make strong impressions as locals, with Jones getting some especially good moments. Unfortunately, their performances are stuck in a movie that eventually gets very tough to sit through.

If you're a fan of Bousman or any of the actors in the cast, give Death of Me a chance and maybe you'll have a better viewing experience than I did. I can't recommend it based on anything that happens in the story.

The review of Death of Me originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

12 HOUR SHIFT (2020)

Written and directed by genre regular Brea Grant (her acting credits include Rob Zombie's Halloween II), 12 Hour Shift takes place - as you might assume from the title - a chaotic twelve hours in the life of nurse Mandy (Angela Bettis). Mandy is not a good person - the least of her sins is the fact that she snorts drugs from the hospital supply; she also finishes off terminal patients with bleach and is part of an organ harvesting and trafficking scheme headed up by a crime boss named Nicholas and played by wrestling legend Mick Foley. And yet, the things that happen around her during this work shift are so crazy and most of the people around her are so dense and/or trashy, she still somehow manages to be the character we root for the most.

Things descend into madness when Mandy's cousin-by-marriage Regina (Chloe Farnsworth) fails to deliver a freshly harvested kidney to Nicholas. Nicholas threatens to take one of Regina's own kidneys if she doesn't bring one to him in time for an impending transplant, so she returns to the hospital expecting Mandy to give her another one. Of course, Mandy can't just immediately hand over another kidney... so Regina goes on a cold-blooded killing spree on her own quest for a kidney, knocking people off without even a hint of remorse. Regina is extremely stupid, the impression is that her brain doesn't function well enough for the concept of remorse to compute.

Regina's actions draw the attention of the local police, and there are also cops around because a murderer played by David Arquette has been hospitalized. Add in the presence of Nicholas's right hand man Mikey (Dusty Warren) and various other quirky patients and hospital employees, including a paramedic who keeps singing and dancing in the halls, and you have the recipe for an amusing, bloody dark comedy.

12 Hour Shift is an entertaining movie full of terrible people. It's a fun way to spend 88 minutes.