Talk us through itGrace Rhodes is returning to her small Nebraskan home town in order to look after her agoraphobic mother June. Grace is a medical student who is able to get her old job back at the local medical center, apparently in Nebraska you don't have to hold a medical practicing certificate to be a Doctor. Actually Grace arrives just at the right time as all the kids in the corn farming community come down with a mysterious virus that could be Ebola or something worse. I blame the Aliens out in the corn belt personally, but no one ever listens. Seems an ancient, i.e. it was about in three previous movies, evil is stirring once again after being waken from it's slumber in a disused well. Only trouble is a body is needed and the person who supplies the body must have been lied to and have been abandoned. In one of the luckier breaks in a horror movie Grace's sister Margaret fits the bill, there's something of a family skeleton in the closet right there. Can Grace with the help of Donald Atkins overcome the evil of the "boy preacher" from hell, and what happened to that pesky "he who walks behind the rows"?
Review"Ready James? James? James?" - Grace RhodesScaryMinds is finding some strange bedfellows recently due to our Naomi Watts event that is current going down. While the Children of the Corn franchise isn't one we would normally butter up since Naomi takes the lead we're ordering corn chowder and ready to dig in. The Gathering is the fourth movie in the franchise and goes even further off the Stephen King beaten track than the three previous movies. Let's hit the Nebraskan cornfields and see how the current crop is doing. I'm not surprised The Gathering didn't get a cinematic release Down Under and am definitely not shocked that it's available in limited release via DVD, this movie redefines the concept of "bad movie". While the North Americans are not strangers to appallingly bad horror flicks they really have gone out of their way with this movie to produce something so lacking in merit that you have to wonder why they bothered. Considering Karen Black and the then rising star of Naomi Watts are involved I would have expected something a whole lot better than the misguided attempt to make a movie here. The whole premise of The Gathering makes you wonder if the Producers had bothered to watch the three previous movies before deciding they really wanted to make a film about murderous children out in the corn fields. Nowhere in the proceeding cannon of cornfield films has Josiah, The Amazing Boy Preacher, made an appearance. Yet here he is controlling the little ones and doing some kinetic farm implement mayhem. Actually when you get down to it Stephen King himself is probably wondering who the hell Josiah is and what particularly drugs he was on at the time that made him forget the whole boy down the well deal. Having established an entirely new reality, and thus conveniently not having to worry about any of the details in the previous movies, Writers Stephen Berger and Greg Spence further do nothing to enhance their respective resumes by completely forgetting about "he who walks behind the rows". You know the gopher on steroids that was the root, no pun intended, cause of earlier outbreaks of patricide and the ever popular matricide. If I'm going to sit through a Children of the Corn epic then I want my corn monster making an appearance at some stage, not supernaturally inclined Boy Preachers! Since the Writers collectively threw the corn dolly out with the bathwater Director Greg Spence decides that he really doesn't have to do much with the material in terms of atmosphere or anything approaching tension. We're talking lots of square miles of corn fields, derelict barns, and a strangely depopulated township, any Director worth their salt would have been milking this corn chip for everything he/she was worth. Long shots of the corn swaying in the moonlight, what might be out there? Medium shots of open barn doors leading into a dark interior, what might be in there? Empty streets during the day, is everyone over at the medical center? This should be bread and butter stuff, the setup basically should force the tone. What we get is a barely conceived use of the locations in anything approaching a coherent fashion. It really irks me when a Director takes a fundamentally scary situation and simply pisses it up against a wall, what a waste folks. While Naomi and Karen are doing their level best to get something happening with the dialogue, atrociously poor at the best of times, most of the rest of the cast are just going through the motions as a substitute to working late night Friday's at the local MacDonalds store. Some of the lines being delivered in this flick would be more at home in an episode of Scrubs, were we meant to take any of this seriously? Guess if the Director and Writers don't give a stuff then the cast shouldn't be rocking the boat by handing in anything like half decent performances either. I did appreciated the melodramatic parts though, it was like the local school drama club decided to throw on Death of a Salesman as envisaged by a Voorhees family member. 
Surprisingly for a movie that tries it's level best not to get out of first gear and is quite happy to sink into the swamp of mediocrity there's a fair amount of claret being flung around the place. Not entirely sure what that's all about, though I guess it's expected in a movie from this franchise. If you don't like watching sharp farm implements meeting flesh then this probably isn't the movie for you. I was actually quite surprised by the share amount of gore that came my way, it was sort of like the Monty Python troop doing a skit around the deaths in the first couple of Omen movies. Having pretty much nailed this movie as a non-performer that deserved drowning at birth there is one scene that still works, though one imagines this is in no way due to the efforts of the Director who looks like he might have indulged in a whole lot of corn whisky during shooting. Grace Rhodes, having deciphered that something foul is afoot in the state of Nebraska naturally checks in with a couple of old boilers who are like the oral historians of the town. During a candlelight scene the ladies regale their guests with tales of a Boy Preacher who could deliver a pretty effective fire and brimstone sermon. The other evil Preachers, any other sort in Nebraska? - kept the Boy Preacher apparently young by lacing his food with quick silver, or some such, but eventually abandoned him due to the bottom line being affected. This is told in gradually darkening conditions with a well past nifty use of a portrait to add some cool effects. I was pleasantly surprised by this scene and if you either catch The Gathering on late night television and can't be arsed to change the channel then it's something to look out for. Naomi Watts (Grace Rhodes) does the best she can do with a poorly written and illogical role. Watts as usual is doing her best to give the Audience some value for money but is almost brought undone by the slip shod nature of the movie makers involved. Karen Black (June Rhodes) clearly got into some of Spence's whisky and simply hams it up in one of the more misguided performance from a famous Actress you are ever likely to take a scythe to. For those wondering, yes this is a worse performance than the ones she turned in for Rob Zombie's first couple of half arsed flicks. Sorry folks no T&A to get you through the night here. Was going to make a joke about Naomi handling a corn cob like you have never seen before but that would be below the standard we set here at ScaryMinds. Besides which Naomi never gets up close and persoanl with any corn. I took zero notice of the score as I was pretty comatose to the whole movie. It probably has one, file it under "who really gives a toss". Sorry to the composer if it was like a work of art or something.
Summary ExecutionOkay so I have paid my dues in order to hit Naomi Watts goodness in subsequent reviews so am happy to sign off on The Gathering as an experience I would rather not repeat any time soon. The movie dragged like a lecture on medieval church philosophy and failed to engage me in any fashion what so ever. I managed to get through to the closing credits and am none the richer for doing that really. One of the worse movies I've stumbled upon thus far in 2010 even the remake of the original looks like it might have more merit.Surprisingly for one of the lesser of Stephen King's short stories, sorry King fans but he does occasionally miss the mark, there have been seven or so movies based on Children of the Corn that have steadily been going downhill since the reasonably interesting first instalment. I've managed to catch up with five of them thus far but am under no burning desire to fill out my dance card on this particular franchise. Simply nothing to recommend here, no one is really trying, and the movie at best is a slightly more gory midday movie than you may be used to. There's nothing here to hang your cinema hat on, either for horror fans or general movie fans. Don't wait to be told you have been corned holed with this particular effort.
ScaryMinds Rates this movie as ... Betcha Naomi has dropped this movie from her resume.
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