Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering and Shock Waves



Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (1996) manages to have even less to do with Children of the Corn (1984), ditching He Who Walks Behind the Rows for an all new enemy. All that's left is kids, a rural setting, and lots of people getting killed with farming implements.


Maybe kids today are desensitized to violence.

Grace (Naomi Watts!) returns to the rural town where her agoraphobic mother and little sister still live just in time to help the local doctor deal with a strange plague that's caused all the town's children to develop high fevers. Then all at once the fevers break, and the kids seem okay, at least until they start pulling out their own teeth and performing dark rituals to resurrect Joshua, a charismatic child preacher who was murdered years before and whose body contaminated the local water supply. This plot is just an excuse for lots of gore effects, the movie can't even decide if the kids, Joshua's zombie corpse, or some kind psychic force is committing the murders. Who cares, right? Just so long as some guy gets a scythe through the midsection, I suppose.

In Shock Waves (1977) a group of people on a chartered pleasure cruise around the Caribbean are stranded on a remote island. It soon develops that the only person living on the island is a Nazi commander (Peter Cushing) who is keeping an eye on a sunken ship that contains immortal aquatic soldiers the Nazi's engineered. The zombie soldiers escape their sunken grave and drown everybody one by one.

Shock Waves is very low budget and shoddily made, yet it's impossible to dismiss completely because the image of the underwater Nazi zombies popping out of the water is genuinely creepy. This movie is one of those few that is most scary when things happen in full sunlight.


"Wait! I thought underwater Nazi zombies only killed naked women!"

But beyond the soldiers, there isn't much to like. Peter Cushing wasn't being paid enough to put on a consistent German accent, and John Carridine does duty as the boat captain, though all he does is react with crusty hostility to everything, and I mean everything, anybody says to him. ("Captain, you won a million dollars!" "Shut up! I'll keep my own council on how much money I've won, thank you!") The script gives the characters little to do but run around and look for a boat to get off the island, until an ending that pointlessly repeats the movie's opening.

Posted: Sun - August 1, 2004 at      

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