This is an indie horror movie running on less than a B-movie budget (one can only assume based on lighting and music), with all the tropes that come with that and yet it still isn’t the worst movie I’ve seen, even this month. Long pauses with no sound or dialogue that should have been relegated to the cutting room floor (and would have made the movie much shorter and more coherent) are rampant throughout. The close up shots on the main characters are obnoxiously close, like “Hello there pores how are you today?” close. The lighting is either too bright, has an unexplained source, or is non-existent making it literally difficult to watch. The music is just plain bad, and adds nothing to the movie. But…there is some hope in there as we wade through the mess that is The Girl in the Cornfield to find a more interesting, if rather standard, story. – 2/5 (Genre)

Friends Heather (Briana Aceti) and Corrine (Tina Duong), while taking Heather’s sister Tiffany (Madeline Lupi) home one night, accidentally hit a girl on the road beside a cornfield. See where this is going? What follows is a pretty standard horror cliche of being haunted by a dead girl who wants revenge, and all the jump scares, and suspense drawn moments that entails. No one in this film provides a performance unscathed by the dialogue, directing, or probably both, but they try. They really do.

Characters pop in and out with little to no introduction. Such as Brandon, Heather’s (I assume) boyfriend. If you missed it his name was Brandon, seriously Brandon why are so Brandon like that Brandon? Did you get his name, good, now we’ll move on and let him be fodder. Or Corrine’s mother who gets absolutely zero introduction, she just appears and gives us all the context we need to figure out how not to grow corn. Seriously, it’s like this movie figured out the best drop-in/drop-out mechanic but for movies.

The Pastor (Ryan Callaway) was properly introduced, but fails to give Heather critical information he was sitting on until much later, which probably would have ended the movie early again. And despite all this, the movie manages to deliver a rather good suspense setup with nice jump scares, if you ignore the god-awful editing. Pretend that extra 10 seconds of nothing after the jump scare didn’t exist and you’ll see what I mean. And to be completely fair the end did catch me off guard, was a good “twist” even if done before, and might have made up for the other 70 odd minutes had it too not been laid waste to by bad editing. For crying out loud man, edit your movie down to a short and at least let us enjoy your vision, and the strong attempts to save it made by the actors. In case you didn’t know, the director, writer, editor, probably producer, and the one who cast the movie is Ryan Callaway (The Pastor). Never heard of him? Hmm, maybe we need to delve more into the B-Movie/Indie fair.

If you enjoy low budget B-Movies, or Indie movies with well, also a low budget, or just horror then give this a go. I actually found that in between laughing at the horrid attempts to setup scary moments there were actual scary moments, and an ending that was much more interesting than most high budget horror movies mange to pull off. It kept me interested, if not always entertained for its 79 minute run time. Though I will admit the first 20 minutes or so almost lost me, and I’ve only given up on one other movie before, so that is hard sell. But despite it all, The Girl in the Cornfield provides us with a movie that is slightly more than the sum of it’s parts, almost entirely due to its cast, and can keep us entertained even if not in the way it intended. 

Indie movies are always a shot in the dark, this one was a shot in the poorly  lit dark. Okay, that’s unfair. It’s so bad it’s good? Eh, leave your thoughts below.