The original cinematic adaptation of Children of the Corn was one of the early casualties of the early Stephen King explosion. Like a good many of the man’s early texts, the story is a crazy-quilt of different fabrics and textures, an uncanny divorce from reality tethering together themes and questions without always trying to develop them. King’s story is a vision of corruptible children and generational trauma that also examines a wheezing, necrotic marriage and triples as an early exploration into a genuinely cosmic horror. In its short span, though, you mostly get the sense that King himself simply wasn’t sure about settling down into the pleasantly banal domestic sphere that, the story suggests, was at once a conduit for unholy forces and a way of denying them.

The presence of so many themes does not, as it would in another author, suggest a truly deliberate mind exploring the interweaving truths of many seemingly separate terrors. Rather, if they remind us that King could turn almost anything into horror, they also suggests that horror, somehow, wasn’t what he was most interested in after all. King was not a man tormented by suggestions of otherworldly forces, as say, H.P. Lovecraft was, or terrified by humanity’s capacity to channel them, as was, say, Mary Shelley. This was a man deeply bruised by alcohol and unsure of his relationship with the people who ostensibly loved him most. “Horror” could, for all the man’s reputation as a hell-raiser, often simply be window dressing for essentially sentimental stories that happened to channel emotions that slipped into the darker side of the world and didn’t pay too much attention to the reality principle. What, precisely, was horrifying is whatever happened to enter King’s mind that day. If parts of Children of the Corn could be filed next to Cujo as among King’s most quotidian horrors, its abutment of the inexplicable and the mundane are also indication enough that the author was willing to treat the genre more as a playground, or a toolkit, than a mission statement. His horror was, finally, an act of bare survival, not an existential vision.

That pragmatic texture also happens to mean that many of the most interesting King films – 1980’s The Shining – are those that radically divorce themselves from King’s own vision, treating the piece as a canvas to hollow out and refashion as a monolith to the kind of Sheer Art that King himself never had much interest in. He remains, when all is said and done, a dumb guy, and I mean that in an entirely neutral and descriptive sense of the term. The film adaptation of Children of the Corn fails because it is dumb by circumstance, and thus boring. Its eleven-years-later-second-sequel? Its idiocy is a matter of energy and vision, and the film is thus, in its own way, accidentally quite smart, even if its intelligence is, and excuse the pun, always thornily undercut by the dangerous waters in which it plays.

Perhaps because King himself had no reason to care about a straight to DVD horror picture directed by James D.R. Hickox and written by Dode B. Levenson – this was, of course, the era of films like The Shawshank Redemption bearing his (kind of) name  –  the text is liberated, more than anything, a void of interest for the writer and director to mess around within the confines of a general concept. While King’s fixation on religious fanatics is never far, the abject body horror and the frankly mean-spirited fascination with the various ways that the forces of nature can invade the flesh and interfere with our constructions of bodily sanctity are very far from King’s usual wheelhouse, and certainly has nothing to do with the original Children of the Corn. The creators of this film simply didn’t have to heed much, and they really do, within the confines of their idiom, go for it with Urban Harvest.

In this case, of course, going for it entails sloppily gnawing at almost anything. In a narrative that has roughly three or four minutes allotted per whatever theme happened to get picked out of a hat that particular day. At the beginning of the film, pre-teen Eli Porter (Daniel Cerny) and teenage Joshua Porter (Ron Melendez) travel to Chicago under the care of Maria (Mari Morrow) and Malcolm Elkman (Jon Claire). While Joshua adapts relatively quickly to teenage life in Chicago, Eli is clearly displeased with what he construes as an affront to sacrilegious living. He’s also all too happy to lend his services to performing the lord’s work of channeling the frustrated energies of unsuspecting teenagers who feel adrift on the currents of late-capitalism and susceptible to a younger child who is actively antagonized by modernity write large.Within this simple premise, Urban Harvest mounts an exposé of agrarian subterfuge chthonically connecting and unraveling modernity’s civilizational aspirations, an exploration of racial tension, a garden-variety critique of capitalism, an interrogation of demonic offspring, and an articulation of the totalitarian undercurrent of unreconstructed religious zeal.

Children of the Corn III has a lot on its mind, I was about to say, but, really, it just has a lot in front of its eyes. One doesn’t get the sense that it is thinking through any of this, that it is constructing any elaborate metaphors for the dialectical tensions it notices, or even that it has relinquished itself from its own thoughts enough to see better than we can. It absolutely feels like a film that was designed, simply, to make money by dismembering bodies. I have no belief that it was trying to achieve any of this, but that’s the peculiar alchemy of try-hard, low-cost filmmaking. The film is, in its limited way, up to something, over and over again. In its breathtakingly wacky abutment of suburban house, liminal garden-corn maize construction, and abandoned factory as, essentially, one contiguous unit, Children of the Corn III stages a palimpsest of American history, a fever dream version of a century of speculative capital unmooring life from the notion of an organic community, generations and concerns squished together by a film that is mostly just interested in seeing how much blood will gush out of America’s head.

This is hip-fired filmmaking, then, an unwholesomely unmodulated text. The first film was a minimalist exercise in suggestion that, finally, was not ethereal enough to turn its spartan emptiness into a reflection of late-20^th century disarray. Urban Harvest, conversely, is a maximalist macabre, a Grand Guignol abattoir with an absolutely perverted fixation on vegetation-penetration and a belief that bodies are transgressable entities. Urban Harvest stages a society’s inconsistencies in miniature, its absurd improbability finally revealing not so much a success or failure of intent on the filmmaker’s part as an accidental glimpse of the contradictions of the society that produced it. It didn’t matter if it really hit with anyone, so it is free to tear, and masticate, and brutalize.

To that end, the film’s raison d’être is undoubtedly special effects maestro and unholy conduit Screaming Mad George. He is less the film’s secret weapon than its patron saint. The film, in a very literal and meaningful way, simply would not work without him, and it very clearly doesn’t work with him, but it is spirited in its inability to fit together. Far be it from me to suggest that the time and effort spent, on, say, constructing an absurdly elaborate sequence where a teenager’s head is pulled up fifteen feet in the air without severing it from its spinal cord, is anything other than a desire to show off, but it is also, in a very obvious and frankly unapologetic sense, more of a labor of love, craft, and consideration than anything in most of a given year’s Oscarbait slate. That the child is also Black can’t but comment on a nation’s history of feeding on African American bodies and displaying their flesh as a horrid monument to historical violence and a scarecrow to frighten the future away. Again, Urban Harvest is hardly aware of these conundrums, but that doesn’t make the experience of watching them play out any less probing or flesh-crawling. The film can’t complete itself – it ends with a brutal Bacchanalia that the editing and directing (and presumably the budget) badly let down, even though there are some spirited images skulking in between the attempts to hide them – but for all its overzealous confusion, Urban Harvest is a dark culling with a morbid fascination with picking at the scabs of America’s underbelly. Trying to defend it is probably a waste of one’s life, but, then, I’m reviewing Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, so I made my grave a long time ago.

Score: 7/10 (or thereabouts)