Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		0.5
Audio		2.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		1.0

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return Blu-ray Movie Review

Never mind "666." For this Blu-ray, it's "SOS."

Reviewed by Martin Liebman March 29, 2021

This Blu-ray release of 'Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return' is currently available from Echo Bridge in a two film bundle with 'Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror' as well as in several other multi-film releases from both Echo Bridge and, now, Paramount.

The Children of the Corn film franchise began life with the 1984 film, which was itself an adaptation of a 1977 Stephen King short story. The franchise has, now in hindsight perhaps predictably, continued on in perpetuity, releasing countless sequels and spawning remakes and what not. It's a typical path for Horror which is apt to milk a name and a concept for all they're worth, and then some. Here is the sixth film in the franchise, a visually bleak, aurally bland, and hopelessly laborious film that feels much longer than its otherwise brief runtime that clock in at under 85 minutes. Oh, and the Blu-ray is an unmitigated disaster, too. Yikes!

A young lady named Hannah Martin (Natalie Ramsey), en route to Gatlin, Nebraska (site of the story from the original franchise film) to find her long-lost mother, stops to help a stranded motorist who needs a ride. He’s a preacher who lectures her on her name’s Biblical origins from the Old Testament. When she arrives in town, she discovers she may play a pivotal role in fulfilling another religion's prophecy which involves Isaac (John Franklin), a character from the first film who did not die but who has rather been in a coma for years, who has been awakened by Hannah’s return home.

Slow, dull, and needlessly complex. Perhaps for the filmmakers Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return was a labor of love, but for the audience it's just a laborious watch. The film was made on a slim budget and with but modest technical expertise. It's never capable of satisfying even the most fundamental, the most essential, of cinematic needs, struggling to settle on a style, an aesthetic, a pace, a tone, or anything like that. It's like the cinema equivalent of a bipolar film: slow and slogging here and overactive and over imaginative there. The script is too confused and complex, the actors can't figure out what to do with it, and the film's aesthetics are a mess. Maybe hardcore franchise fans will find the silver lining(s) here but casual audiences just looking for a time killing DTV Horror film will only find a film in a state of distress and probably walk away from a screening stressed for having endured it.

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The amber tinted sequence under the opening titles inspires no confidence whatsoever in Echo Bridge's 1080i Blu-ray presentation of Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Revenge. Severe macroblocking is immediately in evidence and there's no alleviating it at any point for the duration. The picture is in an obvious state of extreme distress from beginning to end. The transfer almost looks like one is viewing it through a mesh-y filter. The entire thing is riddled with extreme macroblocking, some of the worst ever to befall a Blu-ray. Details are resultantly poor. Everything is always broken up and on the verge, it seems, of a digital collapse; it's surprising when the picture doesn't literally crumble in various squares and rectangles to the bottom of the screen. Colors are awful, too. Who knows if the murky brown and amber color temperature is filmmaker intended or not, but there's almost literally no color beyond here. It looks as if the movie was shot through an extreme filter to give everything that nasty tonal inclination. Ugh. It's just awful.

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Revenge features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless soundtrack. The track is not particularly forceful. It's not fully confined to a center image location, but it does favor that area. Neither music nor ambient fill stretch all that far from center, but it's nice to find an effort to engage more broadly along the limited channel selection at the film's disposal. Certainly, lifelike clarity is absent but the track is well capable of delivering essentials in a fundamentally clear, if not somewhat stale and sometimes mildly hollow, manner. The track lacks force and vigor, never even hinting that the sound design itself, never mind the Blu-ray output, is wanting to engage with any meaningful potency. At least dialogue is clear enough and favors a center imaged placement.

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This Blu-ray release of Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return contains no supplemental content.

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Here's the final verdict for Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return: the movie barely holds together and the Blu-ray's 1080i video is a disaster. The audio is, more or less, acceptable. No extras are included. Skip it!