Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest(1995)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

SHORT VERSION:
Joshua and his friend Malcolm eventually figure out that Eli’s bible for He-Who-Walks-Behind-the-Rows (HWWBR) is his weakness, so they drive over to Joshua’s father’s cornfield in Gatlin on the night of the Harvest Moon to look for it since that is where Joshua last saw it. Though the search ends up costing Malcolm his life, Joshua manages to find the book and heads back to Chicago to confront Eli and his cult of possessed teenagers, one of whom is Malcolm’s sister/Joshua’s girlfriend Maria. Meanwhile, Eli meets up with his cult in his corn patch, located in the abandoned factory behind his foster family’s house, to do the Harvest Moon ceremony, and his and Joshua’s foster father, William, eventually appears, having just returned from celebrating over a deal he made with some financial backers to mass distribute Eli’s unique strain of corn (not knowing how sinister this corn is). Eli thanks him for getting the ball rolling on that, then kills him with a sickle.

Moments later, Joshua appears with the bible in his hand, and he tells Eli that he has figured out that he needs to kill him and destroy the book at the same time if he is to be brought to a permanent end. Eli attacks him and demands for him to give him the book, but Joshua resists, and Eli soon takes Maria hostage and puts his sickle to her throat in order to force Joshua to comply with his demand. Joshua throws the bible over to him, and when Eli picks it up and holds it in front of his chest, Joshua takes his own sickle and drives it through the bible and into Eli’s heart, causing him to perish in a bright explosion of light and turn the cult members back to normal. However, HWWBR suddenly emerges from the ground in the form of a monstrous tentacled beast, and it kills most of the teenagers and swallows Maria whole when she tries to attack it. Thankfully, Joshua manages to get a hold of another sickle and cut Maria out of the monster’s stomach, and after she picks up a sickle of her own, they kill HWWBR by cutting its root. They then walk away from the factory with the rest of the surviving teens.

The movie ends showing a shipment of Eli’s corn making its arrival in Hamburg, Germany, the first of what will soon be many shipments all over the world.

LONG VERSION:
Eli (Daniel Cerny) eventually succeeds in converting many of the teenagers at his and Joshua’s (Ron Melendez) school into followers of He-Who-Walks-Behind-the-Rows (HWWBR) by having them secretly ingest kernels of the corn that he has been growing in the abandoned factory behind his foster family’s house. However, his foster mother, Amanda (Nancy Lee Grahn), becomes very unsettled by his corn patch after it causes her flower garden to die out, so she eventually orders her husband, William (Jim Metzler), to destroy the corn. When William goes over to the corn patch with a set of hedge clippers to carry out the task, he is surprised by Eli, who lets him try out an ear of the corn for himself. After noting to Eli how it smells sweet and tastes great, William also takes notice of the fact that this corn is growing out of season and in horrible soil, is ready to be harvested after being planted just four weeks ago, does not require much water, and is immune to blemishes, bugs, and pesticides. He thus starts to think that this strain of corn could be very profitable on the commodities market, so he starts to seek out an investor for it. A day or two later, Amanda notices that William did not cut down the corn stalks, so she takes the hedge clippers and heads over to the factory to do it herself. Unfortunately for her, Eli – who is presently at school – is fully aware of what she is about to do, so he makes the corn attack her. As she tries to get away from it, she accidentally trips on a piece of metal piping on the factory floor and falls backwards onto a water pipe behind her, and a broken spout on the pipe gets driven into the back of her head and into her brain, killing her.

Meanwhile, Joshua becomes close friends with Malcolm (Jon Clair) and gets romantically involved with his sister, Maria (Mari Morrow), but Malcolm tells Joshua that he doesn’t want his sister getting mixed up with him because of his ties with Eli. Also, he enlightens Joshua about how more and more of their classmates have been following Eli. Their principal, Father Nolan (Michael Ensign), also becomes seriously concerned about Eli, both because of what he is doing to the students and because he has been haunting his dreams at night. One day, he tries to warn other members of the faculty about Eli and his intentions, but they refuse to listen to him on account of the fact that, thanks to Eli’s influence, delinquent behavior has greatly decreased.

Joshua soon comes to suspect that Eli killed his father back in Gatlin before they were adopted, but his suspicion gets confirmed as fact when a courier shows up at William’s house and gives him (Joshua) a package meant for Amanda that contains a bunch of newspaper clippings from Gatlin that were found and sent to her by Samantha (Yvette Freeman), the social worker who arranged Eli’s and Joshua’s adoption. Joshua looks at one clipping from October 1964 and spots Eli at his current age in the headlining story’s photograph, and he sees that the other articles are dated in October of subsequent years and that they all talk about adults being murdered and their children being orphaned, and he notices that each of the killings took place during the Harvest Moon, which will be happening tonight. After paying Malcolm a visit at his house and presenting these clippings to him, he tells him that they need to speak to Father Nolan because he overheard him voicing his concerns about Eli to the school’s head counselor and thinks that he might understand what is going on. Unfortunately, by the time they get around to searching for Nolan in their school’s chapel, Eli has already confronted him there and mortally injured him. However, before he dies, Nolan is able to tell Joshua and Malcolm that they must destroy “his” bible (since he deduced during the aforementioned confrontation that that is where Eli is vulnerable). Joshua soon realizes that the bible that he is referring to is Eli’s bible for HWWBR, which lies in his father’s old cornfield back in Gatlin, so he and Malcolm immediately start driving over there. Meanwhile, William finds financial backers for Eli’s strain of corn, and Eli brings Maria under his control and uses a few cobs of his corn to kill her and Malcolm’s parents as the first sacrifices to HWWBR.

Around the same time, Joshua and Malcolm reach Joshua’s father’s cornfield, and Joshua tells Malcolm that Eli buried his bible at the foot of one of the two scarecrows there. Joshua finds the bible at the foot of the one that he checks, but suddenly, the scarecrow transforms back into his father (Eli had turned him into it in the opening scene) and then into a demonic-looking combination of both his father and the scarecrow. He attacks Joshua and Malcolm, but after a short fight, Joshua manages to kill him by taking a sickle and cutting him in half at the waist. As the guys start to take their leave from the cornfield, Joshua realizes that he dropped Eli’s bible on the ground during the fight, so Malcolm heads back to retrieve it. Unfortunately, just after he finds it, the corn springs to life and gruesomely kills him. Accepting that there is no more that he can do for his friend, Joshua snatches up the bible, runs back to the car, and speeds off back to Chicago. While Joshua is making his way back, all of the possessed teenagers meet Eli and Maria at the factory for the Harvest Moon ceremony, and a drunken William soon shows up, having returned from celebrating over the massive profits that Eli’s corn will give him. Eli thanks him for getting the ball rolling on the mass distribution of his corn, then kills him by stabbing him in the heart with a sickle.

Shortly afterwards, Joshua returns, and he enters the factory grounds and confronts Eli and the cult. He tells Eli that he has come here to stop him, then shows him that he has his bible and tells him that he has figured out that he and the bible are one, so he needs to both destroy the book and kill him at the same time if he is to be brought to a permanent end. Eli throws a few fireballs at him and – in a demonic voice – demands for him to hand over the book, but Joshua resists, and Eli soon retreats into the corn patch. When Joshua goes looking for him, Eli throws a couple more fireballs at him, then appears holding a sickle at Maria’s throat and again demands for Joshua to give him the book. Joshua throws it at him and it falls to the ground, but when Eli picks it up and holds it in front of his heart, Joshua takes a sickle of his own and drives it through the book and into Eli’s heart. This causes Eli to perish in a bright explosion of light, and Maria and all the other teens return to normal.

However, HWWBR soon emerges from the ground in the form of a monstrous tentacled beast, and it starts to kill some of the teenagers as they all try to make their escape. Joshua tries to help them, but HWWBR quickly knocks him against one of the factory’s walls and then ties him up to it by the wrists. Maria picks up a sickle and uses it to help some of the teens, and when she notices that HWWBR is starting to threaten Joshua, she tries to stab it with the sickle. However, all that does is direct the monster’s attention onto her, and it subsequently snatches her up with its tongue and swallows her whole. After Joshua witnesses this, he notices a random sickle lying close to his feet, so he picks it up with his feet and swings it upward and manages to cut the restraint on his left wrist. He then puts the sickle into his left hand and cuts the other restraint with it, but when he starts to advance towards HWWBR to inflict damage on it, the monster hits him and sends him through the same factory wall that he was bound to. HWWBR then turns its attention back to killing more of the teenagers, and the distraction enables Joshua to regain his footing and get close to the beast. After he figures out where Maria is located inside the monster’s body, he hacks away at its flesh until he creates an opening big enough to get her out. He then tells her that they have to cut the monster’s root in order to kill it, and after she takes up another sickle, they relentlessly hack away at the root until it is completely severed, and HWWBR collapses, dies, and smolders away. Joshua and Maria then leave with the surviving teenagers.

The movie ends showing a shipment of Eli’s corn making its arrival in Hamburg, Germany, the first of what will soon be many shipments all over the world.