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Children Of The Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995)

DVD Cover (Echo Bridge Entertainment)
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Overall Rating 43%
Overall Rating
Ranked #4,876
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Connections: Children Of The Corn

Two young Gatlin residents are orphaned after the younger brother kills their father. So, the terror of Gatlin goes urban when the two boys are placed in the custody of two foster parents. The younger brother (who by this point is established as the "evil one") bought some corn seeds along for the road and plants them in the courtyard of an abandoned warehouse, bring He Who Walks Behind the Rows to the city. He winds up possessing his high school peers, and soon his older brother feels called to stop him. --IMDb
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Review by Crispy
Added: February 12, 2012
Is your rural-setting horror movie not going anywhere? Just send him to the city! Jason took Manhattan, and now He Who Walks Behind the Rows takes Chicago. And hey, Urban Harvest just so happens to be the film debut of one Charlize Theron.

Just outside of Gatlin, Joshua tears out of his trailer, with his drunk abusive father in hot pursuit. Out in the cornfield, he happens upon his brother, Eli, who's able to turn the man into a tortured scarecrow without Joshua's knowledge. Orphaned, the pair is adopted by William and Amanda Porter and relocated to Chicago. Needless to say, the two stick out of their new urban environment like a sore thumb, but Joshua seems determined to make the best of it; he starts dressing like a normal Chicago teenager, playing basketball, making friends, groping said friend's sister. Usual kid stuff. On the other hand, Eli will have none of this. He's disgusted with the blatant impiety that makes up their daily live, and even more disgusted with how willingly his brother has fallen in line. Sneaking into the abandoned factory next door, he plants a small cornfield: enough for He Who Walks Behind the Rows to call home. Backed by the demon, Eli starts a campaign to turn the children of Chicago.

Urban Harvest marks a pronounced shift in the franchise. The slasher elements have been completely replaced with voodoo, a direct result of the route taken with Eli. You see, Isaac and Micah were just prophets of sorts, a vessel through which He Who Walks Behind the Rows could communicate with his congregation, but Eli is much more. I'm not going to spoil the minute details, but he has a variety of powers, and he's obviously a big part of the cult and He Who Walks Behind the Rows, but this is never explored. He alludes to his true identity in one scene, but that whole scene hurts the franchise in my opinion. It would have been a lot stronger had they concentrated on building their story a little more originally.

For the most part, we're actually above the typical horror par when it comes to acting, which took me completely by surprise to be honest. I'm used to total schlock by most part threes. When it all boils down to it, though, the whole movie rested on Daniel Cerny's Eli. And here's where the whole thing fell apart. As usual, the problem with a franchise called Children of the Corn is that you're forced to work with children, who can rarely get it done in horror movies. Again, Eli is obviously an extremely important figure in this world, yet Cerny is not able to achieve the dominating tone, the unspoken menace or the straight-forward creepiness that a character like that needs to be effective. And since the entire film hinged on one single character, there was quite a lot of collateral damage to be found.

Cerny's lack of anything even remotely menacing aside, Urban Harvest is still the best one yet. Not that that actually means anything, it's still not really worth watching. 5/10. Also, I'm pretty damned disappointed we don't have corn in space yet.
Bill Wolford #1: Bill Wolford - added February 13, 2012 at 12:23am
My favorite of the series. But still I have a guilty pleasure for the first one as its one of the first R rated horror films I saw.
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