Movie Review: Corn

Corn
Director: Dave Silver
Released: 2004

My Analysis: Not good at all.

This one is really pretty bad. Not unwatchable, though - it has pretty good acting (stars Jena Malone) and actually isn't half bad for a good stretch right there at the beginning. But it's all for naught - the film suffers an irreversible collapse about an hour in.

This film is eco-horror. I'm a little skeptical, but eco-horror has a long tradition. Godzilla was eco-horror. So was The Blob. Hell, you could argue that Poltergeist was eco-horror. There's a lot you can do with the genera. This film, though, doesn't actually do any of it.

The basic premise of the film is that genetically modified corn has gene swapped with a common weed which is then eaten by sheep. The sheep become violent - bity and aggressive. There's some potential there - we saw a preview for Black Sheep, and it looks pretty good. So the film could have run with the dangerous sheep thing. But it doesn't.

Apparently the director decided they could do better than scary angry carnivorous sheep with nasty sharp teeth. Even more scary, they must have thought, would be lambs that - if you ate them - might tend to increase the risk of certain birth defects.

I, personally, find the threat of a possibly tainted food supply slightly less immediate and visceral than the potential to be eaten alive by mutant sheep, but I'm prepared to play along. Unfortunately, what little tension might exists is undermined by the fact that the entire threat - the connection between the GM corn and the weed, the connection between the weed and the sheep behavior, and the connection between the sheep and the birth defects (all 3 cases) - is based entirely on the gut feelings of the main character.

Interwoven with this mostly incoherent and unconvincing eco-horror plot is a subtle but no less incoherent, unconvincing narrative about the main character's relationship with her step father. It's deeply weird. Up until the last 15 minutes of the film or so I thought there was going to be some surprise ending where we discover that the character's fixation on sheep and GM corn was a symptom of some sinister and mysterious condition caused by some awful repressed memory involving her dead mother. Or something.


So, no - don't watch this film. Not worth your time.


Btw - at some point I'll post things at aren't movie reviews. I swear.