Pedro Pascal’s next live-action game adaptation is weird as hell
What’s grandma hiding? Pedro Pascal can help
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What’s grandma hiding? Pedro Pascal can help
In a Deadline interview from a while back, when asked about his least favourite movie adaptations of his work, Stephen King said, “I could do without all the Children of the Corn sequels.” It’s difficult to imagine the horror author changing his mind if he ever gets round to watching this new instalment.
Writer/director Kurt Wimmer’s adaptation of King’s 1977 short story marks the eleventh (yes! eleventh!) film in the series, reimagining the original story while keeping the familiar tentpole of murdery children who form a strange cult around a small town corn field in Nebraska.
The problem? This bunch of murdery children aren’t creepy enough, their town takeover doesn’t really make sense, and the whole thing lacks the shock factor that made Fritz Kiersch’s original 1984 adaptation a success.
There are no shortage of creepy children in horror movies — or in King’s work for that matter. One of the reasons the trope is constantly used is because it can be so effective and unsettling to see violence and threat in the hands of young people, ranging from gory classics like The Exorcist to more recent (and very scary) examples like Z and The Innocents.
Children of the Corn won’t be joining them anytime soon. Despite the film’s main antagonists being children, their all-important creepiness is sorely lacking, with the movie leaning too hard into a gory slasher vibe and sacrificing any tension in doing so. To be clear, the fault isn’t with the acting — the child actors all do a solid job, with Kate Moyer being particularly effective as their tiny, psychopathic leader Eden Edwards. The problem is, the script doesn’t give the kids enough to work with. The dialogue isn’t unsettling enough, there are barely any jumps, and we pretty much know exactly what’s going on and where things are headed from the outset.
Oh, and the monster that all the kids worship looks like an Ent made of corn. Sorry.
In the original 1984 movie, the opening scene showed a cafe full of clueless adults being suddenly and brutally murdered by a group of well-armed kids and teenagers. The scene was effective because it was shocking but also semi-believable, as the kids a) take the adults by surprise, b) come armed with sickles and meat cleavers, and c) include some older kids among their ranks who can manhandle the grown ups to the floor. Is it a bit farfetched? Yes. But it felt like it could have happened.
Wimmer’s Children of the Corn, meanwhile, quickly takes a scythe to any semblance of believability, with the children terrorising the adults in a way that’s so unrealistic it quickly becomes noticeable. How do these kids manage to round the grown ups all up and put them in a jail cell, for instance? Why don’t the adults try to escape when the cell door is opened? How do the children even go about moving the adults around once they’ve captured them?
Yes, OK, the children are armed, but seeing 10 grown men cowering under the gaze of a tiny child still feels kind of silly.
In the film’s defence, it’s clearly not taking itself too seriously. Children of the Corn relishes in gore and hammy special effects, and if you go into it looking for a bit of light entertainment you could probably do worse. The acting is decent enough, too, Wimmer’s direction is solid, and Andrew Rowland’s cinematography includes some undeniably beautiful sweeping shots of seemingly endless corn fields — the kind that are so expansive you could really imagine people getting lost in them.
If you do want a film about people lost in a field, though, you’d be better off watching Netflix’s Stephen King and Joe Hill short story adaptation, In the Tall Grass.
Or, better yet, just watch the original Children of the Corn.
Children of the Corn is in theatres from March 3 and available on demand from March 23.
A Dead by Daylight movie is on the way. Production studios Atomic Monster and Blumhouse are teaming up with gaming studio Behaviour Interactive to oversee the film adaptation of the multiplayer horror title. In addition, the companies are beginning their search for a director and screenwriter as Hollywood (perhaps naively) hopes HBO’s excellentThe Last of Us ushers in a new era of video game adaptations worth watching.
“We couldn’t be more thrilled to work with Jason Blum and James Wan, two giants of the horror film industry, to further expand the Dead by Daylight universe,” said Stephen Mulrooney, Behaviour Interactive’s executive vice president. “At Behaviour, our motto is to create unique moments, together, forever. Atomic Monster and Blumhouse are the ideal partners to craft Dead by Daylight’s killer entrance onto the big screen.”
The game has been a horror / survival staple since its 2016 launch. The one vs. four multiplayer title splits teams into either survivors or the killer; the survivors aim to activate generators and escape while the killer seeks to hunt them down. It’s added DLC monsters through the years, including Freddy Kreuger, Pinhead, Leatherface, Evil Dead’s Ash Williams and a surveillance-happy tech executive. Strangely, it even has a dating-sim spinoff arriving later this year.
Mulrooney will co-produce with Atomic Monster CEO James Wan (who also directed The Conjuring and Insidious) and Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum. Blumhouse, which made Paranormal Activity and The Black Phone, is set to merge with Atomic Monster; the deal was announced last year and is expected close this summer.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/dead-by-daylight-film-adaptation-in-the-works-193426871.html?src=rss
Right now, Prime Video is on a pretty good streak with adapting various properties to TV. Between Critical Role, Jack Reacher, and Invincible, plus its various original series, the streamer is good about finding something for a particular niche.
Not to be left behind in any trend-chasing, Hollywood is scrambling after the promise of artificial intelligence. In this case, one movie is banking its premise on the promise of AI-driven deepfake tech.
Adapting any story from one medium to another is always going to be fraught–there will always be changes to make the story work in another medium. But while some adaptations work, others don’t, and Cowboy Bebop director Shinichioro Watanabe said that Netflix’s adaptation of his legendary anime just doesn’t work in a new interview with Forbes.
“For the new Netflix live-action adaptation, they sent me a video to review and check,” Watanabe said. “It started with a scene in a casino, which made it very tough for me to continue. I stopped there and so only saw that opening scene.”
“It was clearly not Cowboy Bebop,” he continued. “I realized at that point that if I wasn’t involved, it would not be Cowboy Bebop. I felt that maybe I should have done this. Although the value of the original anime is somehow far higher now.”
After only airing three episodes, the Nier: Automata anime adaptation has postponed production due to a COVID-19 related issue.
Nier: Automata Ver1.1a only started airing January 7, with the second and third episodes shown the subsequent two Saturdays, but now the official Twitter account for the series has announced that the rest of the season has been postponed. The tweet notes that broadcasts of the upcoming episodes have been paused due to something related to COVID-19, though didn’t provide any specific details.
“Thank you for your continued support of the ‘Nier: Automata Ver1.1a’ TV anime,” reads the message. “Due to the impact of COVID-19 on production, we have decided to postpone the broadcast and distribution of episode 4 and all subsequent episodes. Information regarding the broadcast and distribution schedule for episode 4 and beyond will be announced on the official anime website and official Twitter soon.”