Halloween 2024: Day 6

Black Magic No. 2

• 2 oz Amaro Meletti
• 1 oz peated scotch
• 1/3 oz banana liqueur
• 2 drops saline

Serve on the rocks.

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest

“Let us give thanks to He Who Walks Behind the Rows, who protects our crops and keeps the infidel and unbeliever in the torments of hellfire eternal. Amen.”

A dramatic step down in quality in this direct-to-video sequel, which is a shame because there are the seeds of a good horror movie here that’s let down by the acting and cinematography and direction and visual effects and sound design.

The bones are there: a creepy child inspiring religious mania in disaffected urban youths as his brother starts to question the faith in which they were raised and the two drift apart. It just kind of gets lost in the fireball-generating sickle and bad stop-motion worm.

Speaking of which, Charlize Theron makes her (uncredited) screen debut in this, which I had heard about ahead of time. I had not heard that she is killed by corn monster tentacles in a sexually menacing way. It’s less lingering than Ellen Sandweiss’s similar scene in The Evil Dead, but it still feels gratuitous.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

“He’s inside me, and he wants to take me again!”

I have complicated feelings about the homoerotic subtext in this film. On the one hand, queerness as an evil monster that you have to struggle against and don’t want to talk about and if you let it out it will kill everyone around you but it can be overcome by embracing heterosexual love is incredibly problematic. On the other hand it’s there, and having a sweaty bisexual twink as the final girl is interesting. On the gripping hand, Jesse (Mark Patton) was a closeted gay man and took the brunt of the public blame for the movie turning out so gay, despite the writer (David Chaskin) admitting decades later that he had written it that way deliberately.

Overall I enjoyed it much more than the first; even the twist ending feels more earned.