I'm not that familiar with the whole sequel-prequel-franchise of Children of the Corn, I only saw the first one, it must have been like 30 years ago, and I remember that one as pretty creepy. But I gather that with so many rip-offs the whole premise should have become pretty worn-out. Then I found this dvd "Children of the Corn: Genesis" in a garage sale and thought that, who knows, a more or less recent version dating from 2011 might have added something new and could be even scarier than the first, considering the nowaday standards for horror movies.Well, I was wrong. The most scary of this movie was the cover of the dvd-box, an image that in the movie didn't even pop up. The movie itself was tedious and had a snails pace, with endless conversations, no scares, and strangely enough no corn and no children whatsoever.A young and loving couple is stranded with their car in the desert and asks for help at a forlorn dilapidated farm. The unfriendly owner doesn't want to help, but when he hears that the girl is pregnant he reluctantly lets them in. Of course - as the conventions of the genre demand - actual help is only available the next morning, so they have to stay the night. Although this is a premise that we've seen for like a zillion times, it can usually vouch for a nice tension-filled rest of the movie. Not so here. The couple tries to befriend the strange owner and his Ukranian wife (why on earth Ukranian??) during an awkward dinner, evidently to no avail, and in the night the girl discovers in a barn outside that a young child is locked up. She constructs her own ideas of what is going on (child-abuse!!) and demands from her boyfriend that they call the police and expose the farmer. But this scheme falls flat when the owner finds out, behaves even more strange and hints that the child is locked-up for protection of themselves. Of course the couple doesn't believe him and after an endless night of talking and bickering they escape in a car the next morning. Really, this is actually all that happens. No scares, no flocking children with frozen gazes, armed with scythes, not even the usual (and for a Children of the Corn-version seemingly unavoidable) creepy cornfield, nothing like that at all. Only in a few dream-fragments of the girl we see hints of a few brutal children but in the rest of the movie we have to settle for just some people talking endlessly.I won't give the end away, but what happens during their escape in the car stands for the only real action and excitement of the whole movie (and by the way with very good special effects, and/or - I'm no professional - old fashioned stuntmens craftsmanship!).So I guess my old assumption was right: the theme of Children of the Corn is probably really too worn out for a decent sequel. At least this one is totally superfluous.

Excellent cinematography and sound. It's hard to make the eighth (ignoring the remake) in a series original and so this just makes it weird. At least it had a big budget modern atmosphere. It looked nice and there were some tense scenes of suspense but the story was really nonsensical. It had a really weak ending and nothing going for it except good technical aspects.

Genesis difference very much from the standard CotC movies, you will not find much corn and even less of children, almost no existent, and no Gatlin town, actually they are pretty much in the same cabin the whole movie, so it's different, doesn't have the CotC feel either, more like a possessed themed movie. But all that being said, the tension has probably never been better within the series, good acting (Billy Drago steels the show, possible the best performance of within all CotC movies), good camera-work and good effects, so it's a good crafted movie but, it's probably not what I wanted from a CotC movie. About the title Genesis, I didn't get much about that, it doesn't tell anything about the creation or beginning of anything, and towards the end I felt the plot was going nowhere, and when talking about the end, I didn't liked the ending at all. Overall, Children of the Corn: Genesis was better than expected, but confusing and different.

Children of the Corn: Genesis (2011) ** (out of 4) Direct-to-DVD entry in the never ending series has a husband and wife stranded in the desert after their car breaks down. The two spot a house in the distance and go there to get some help but end up having to spend the night with its weird owner known as Preacher and his wife. Soon the couple realize that they're in a very strange place after they discover a mysterious child being held captive in a shed behind the house. CHILDREN OF THE CORN: GENESIS comes ten years after the seventh film in the series but you could still consider this the ninth film in the franchise since there was a remake a few years before this. Either way, one really has to wonder why Dimension Films made this thing as it has very little connection to the previous films but if one had to guess it was made to cash-in on horror fans such as myself who are willing to watch anything. I must admit that I didn't find the film nearly as bad as some did but I think fans of the original 1984 film are going to be highly disappointed. Again, if you're looking for some sort of continuation of the series you're going to be disappointed but if you've sat through the previous sequels like myself then you know there's actually worse out there. The biggest problem is that there's simply not much that happens. Even with a 75-minute running time (minus the end credits) you can't help but feel the film drags along because for the most part we just see the husband and wife talking about what's going on or what they should do. There's never really any tension going on and I'd argue that you really don't care what's happened to the couple. There's really nothing here that draws you into the film and it certainly doesn't help that there's basically no body count for the majority of the running time. As a horror film there's very little horror going on not to mention there's really not many children and no corn except for a quick glimpse. The performances for this type of film are actually pretty good and the opening sequence is effective but outside of this there's just not enough going right here. It's far from a horrid film but it is a rather pointless one.