How One Bonkers Children Of The Corn Sequel Makes Use Of Leftover Bad Boys II Footage
In the world of motion picture filmmaking there's only one thing we know for sure: Children + Corn = Profit. But there's a trick to it. You can't use just any old corn. It's gotta be murder corn. That's how Stephen King envisioned this, and we gotta stay true to his original vision.
Everything else about Stephen King's original vision for "Children of the Corn," however, has long since been chucked — excuse me, "shucked" — out the window. What started as a 1977 short story in the pages of "Penthouse," about a bickering couple who wanders into a small farming town where the children were all cultists who believe in killing all adults, became a hit movie in 1984, and eventually devolved into an impossibly long-running straight-to-video franchise. 11 films and counting! (12 if you include the 1983 short film "Disciples of the Crow!")
You don't keep making that many movies if you aren't making money, and you don't keep a franchise with that rudimentary of a premise alive without at least occasionally doing something weird. And the "Children of the Corn" franchise never did anything weirder than this: They took footage of the epically expensive car chase centerpiece in Michael Bay's most personal action film, the 2003 blockbuster "Bad Boys II," and passed it off as the climax of the epically low budget 2011 straight-to-video sequel, "Children of the Corn: Genesis."
Let's get corny
You don't need to be an expert in the "Children of the Corn" movies to watch "Children of the Corn: Genesis," and frankly becoming an expert in the "Children of the Corn" movies isn't recommended, unless you like being a film-lover on hard mode. The film stars Kelen Coleman and Tim Rock as a couple whose car breaks down on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. They stumble across an isolated household, where a creepy preacher played by the late, great Billy Drago runs a creepy household, with a creepy wife who's being controlled creepily, and a creepy kid with creepy superpowers in a creepy barn, where creepy cults do creepy cult stuff, in creepy old ways.
It seems as though help is on the way after our heroes get stuck in creepsville when a cop arrives, but then he's suddenly rocketed straight up into the sky, in a moment so odd it's genuinely funny. When they finally have an opportunity to escape with a creepy truck driver, our heroes decide instead to steal the cop's car and flee on their own.
It's at this point that the creepy kid with superpowers is given — for reasons which are ... reasons — a toy of a big rig truck with a car-carrying trailer. The superpowered kid starts playing with the truck and drops the cars out the back, just as a real-life big rig truck with a car-carrying trailer pulls in front of our heroes and tosses cars back at them, resulting in a massive freeway accident.
It comes out of nowhere, it has nothing to do with anything, and unlike the rest of the clearly low-budget movie — which takes place mostly in and around a small cabin — it looks expensive as hell. Because it was from "Bad Boys II." Look for yourself!
Whatcha gonna do?
If you watch "Children of the Corn: Genesis" and you haven't seen "Bad Boys II" lately, you might miss the connection. But sure enough, the big rig car-carrier is exactly the same, the white car it tosses out the back is exactly the same. It crashes exactly the same way, in exactly the same spot on the freeway, next to exactly the same building. All "Children of the Corn: Genesis" does to disguise the shot is to zoom in slightly, so that the image of the chaos filmed from inside the vehicle frames out some specific details on the dashboard. There's a piece of paper clearly visible in the foreground in "Bad Boys II," but all we can see is the corner in "Children of the Corn: Genesis."
Oh, to be a fly on the wall when somebody, presumably director Joel Soisson — a straight-to-video impresario who directed two sequels to "The Prophecy," two sequels to "Pulse," and has screenwriting credits on "Mimic 2," "Hollow Man II," and "Hellraiser: Hellworld" — came up with the brilliant idea to add production value to this cheap horror sequel by awkwardly retrofitting a completely unrelated action sequence into the climax. Nobody can say this movie doesn't end with a bang. Or at least a crash, bang, smash 'em up, it's smash-up time, my friend.
On one hand, it's odd that nobody talks about this. If the ending of "Saw 3D" had just suddenly used leftover footage from "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," it'd at least be a widely known trivia tidbit. But "Children of the Corn: Genesis" wasn't a widely seen motion picture, and it's unlikely that most people who did watch it decided — as I did — to compare the two films shot-by-shot.
But now you know this factoid, and you can never unknow it now. You're stuck with this "Children of the Corn" kernel forever.