Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995)

Stephen King’s original short story, Children of the Corn, combined two tried and tested tenets of horror lore: “Little Kids Are Creepy” and “Country Folk Are Weird”. Both were mixed up to create a nifty pagan twist on the Logan’s Run creed of death to anyone who reaches adulthood.

As the subtitle suggests, by the time the series reached the third entry the horror had switched to a less taxing and no doubt cheaper city location, but the endearingly goofy premise at the heart of it remained intact – that sweetcorn is a tool of the devil.

That’s certainly the belief of creepy Eli, a young Amish-style kid who operates as a pint-sized high priest for He Who Walks Behind The Rows, the tongue-twisting demon lord of sweetcorn-related evil. Eli murders his stepfather – crucifying him with the help of some sentient corn plants – and heads to Chicago with nice-but-dim elder stepbrother Joshua. Eli’s plan is to use their adopted parents home as a place to start growing more evil sweetcorn, and to manipulate his new daddy – who conveniently works as a corn exporter – into distributing his demonic crop around the world.

By slipping his corn into the school meals, Eli is able to create an army of brainwashed youngsters to help him out – though Joshua seems immune, as he’s fallen in with the streetwise boy from next door and rejected the old ways. Apparently those hip black kids ain’t down with no corn jive, sucka.

After more corn-based fatalities than are strictly plausible, it all comes to a head as Joshua rebels against his loopy brother, who is eagerly preparing to summon He Who Walks Behind The Rows from his agricultural netherworld. Sadly, this god-on-the-cob isn’t the Jolly Green Giant but merely a crudely animated monster that bursts out of the ground and kills pretty much anyone it can get its plasticine tentacles on.

It’s during these gripping climactic scenes that you should keep your eyes peeled for a young and uncredited Charlize Theron. She plays one of Eli’s brainwashed young followers and, despite not having any lines, she does get a few recognisable close-ups – notably during Eli’s sermon in the school chapel, and again as he delivers his fire and brimstone in his derelict factory cornfield at the end.

She even meets a messy end as the jerky monster runs amok, though the scene is so confusingly edited that it’s much harder to pick her out from all the other nameless blonde actresses roped in for the slaughter. Given the carnage on display, it’s safe to say she doesn’t make it out alive.

Need to know: Urban Harvest was directed by James D.R. Hickox, son of Doug Hickox, director of the great Vincent Price shocker Theatre of Blood, and brother of stalwart genre director Anthony Hickox, whose films he often contributes to. Indeed, the grand finale of Children of the Corn III bears a remarkable similarity in both tone and execution to the scene from Anthony’s 1992 movie, Hellraiser III, in which Pinhead massacres the patrons of an LA nightclub.

Also worthy of note, the priest-cum-principal of the school who twigs Eli’s demonic origins earlier than most, and pays the price for his awareness, is played by Rance Howard – father of Oscar-winning director Ron and his B-movie brother, Clint.

And Charlize is far from being the only respected actress to start her career being menaced by the gibbering terror of satanic sweetcorn. For more cob-related horror, see: Naomi Watts, Eva Mendes.

Availability: Urban Harvest is available in the UK as part of the Children of the Corn DVD boxset, which collects the first three movies in the series.