Completely Original Revolting Nightmare? Crappy Outing Relished by Nobody? Check Out my Review Now.
Horror fandom is a funny thing. What constitutes a successful horror movie seems so malleable to me. I mean, of course it changes from person to person, that’s true of any genre. I just feel like horror has so many different ways to be successful. Take a comedy: I might like a specific type of humor that you don’t find funny, or vice versa, but we can at least agree that being funny is the primary criteria for liking a comedy. It would follow logically, then, that in a similar fashion, that being scary would play a crucial function for enjoying horror. Yet, it simply isn’t, right? Like it’s nice to come across a scary movie, but I would guess I don’t get genuinely scared watching more than half the movies with positive reviews on this blog. Take a drama: Quality is of utmost importance. Quality of acting, quality of the script, quality of cinematography. In horror, its nice if one of those factors is high-quality, and its a real treat if it applies to more than one, but really it doesn’t matter that much. You might love an abject failure, precisely for the misguided manner in which it fails. You might love a movie for a handful of creative kills. Or for a cool concept. Or maybe just because it is fun to have on in the background while you carve pumpkins. With horror, you are a fan of the genre first and foremost, and any entry into the genre has a leg up just by identifying as a horror movie.
I offer that lengthy prelude as an attempt to explain how I could kind of pan the beloved and massively successful Saw in my last review, yet I am about to say generally nice things about the micro-budget C.O.R.N.: A Field of Screams, despite the fact that it is inferior to Saw in every objective category and destined to become a footnote of horror history in relation to the outsized impact of that movie. The story of A Field of Screams involves a brother and sister who are traveling with their soon-to-be step-dad and end up stranded in the middle of Nebraska. They end up making friends with the local community of teens/twenty-somethings and attending parties every night, until they stumble onto a party run by a secret society of artists and their patrons. Unfortunately for our protagonists, the medium used by the artists is dead human bodies, and the siblings are a perfect choice to restock their supply. Off the top, I’ll go ahead and say that A Field of Screams falls into some of the most common horror traps. The main characters make some inexplicable choices in service of keeping the plot moving, and the secondary characters are completely one-dimensional. At this point, those two failings are basically scary movie tradition, though, and easy enough to overlook. I found myself rolling my eyes early into the proceedings, but by the third act I was fully invested in the plot and the main two characters. The actors help a lot in that regard, and for the few characters that are more than broad sketches, they turn in charming performances.
The film’s biggest strength, however, is the overall concept. If the villain had turned out to be a deranged hillbilly who just wanted to stab people, for instance, or maybe a demonic scarecrow who just wanted to stab people, it would not be worth your time. I loved the glimpses we got of this high-society cabal of murderers, and the director was really smart to give us peaks of some of the internal politics and rules surrounding their “art” community. You really get the sense that this is the latest in a long tradition of these parties, and we just happen to be watching the one where the shit hits the fan. It’s a very cool, well fleshed out idea, and Robert Donovan is a treasure as the society’s chief organizer. C.O.R.N., by the way, stands for the Collective Order of Recreational Necrophilanthropists. I think that sums up what I admire most about this film: It is corny (pun intended) and kind of dumb, but I think the filmmakers are in on the joke, and they know they are not going to make some kind of masterpiece with the resources at their disposal, so they decide to make the best bad movie they can. So while it isn’t better than Saw, it is more enjoyable to me, and it is a movie I would consider watching again in the right circumstances. It’s on PRIME, so give it a shot, and even if you don’t like it you are supporting indie horror and keeping the door open for the next set of wierdos with a crazy idea to make their movie.
(hmmm, straight up can’t find a trailer for this one)
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