Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

A gaggle of young actors, and their asinine, irredeemably annoying leader, Alan (Alan Ormsby), arrive on a remote island graveyard in order to perform an arcane ritual. After much mumbo jumbo, a blasphemous good time is had by all. But, wait! Something has gone... all too right. Something has caused the subterranean residents to stir. Tonight, the living had better watch out. CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS is a surprisingly effective low-budget horror movie, w/ a beautiful, slow-building atmosphere of dread and doom. In spite of some overt cheeeze, there are some genuine chills to be had here. Ormsby's William-T.-Shatner-on-speed performance is at once jaw-dropping and totally infuriating! His presence also makes the whole story work. Without his arrogant idiocy, the sting of what unfolds would be nowhere near as potent! Annnnd, the finale is... to die for! CSPWDT stands as a unique entry in the realm of living dead cinema...

"Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" is a waste of a great title. You'd think with such a wonderful name for the film that it would be a lot more interesting--but it really isn't. In fact, it's interminably dull and the characters are hateful at best! The film is about a group of jerks--led by a bigger jerk who is supposed to be a prankster filmmaker. He takes a group of unsuspecting folks to a cemetery that looks MORE fake than the one in "Plan 9" and plans to scare them with a fake resurrection. The problem is that he is 100% annoying and won't shut up. And, you keep waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen. However, they are so annoying and stupid that you finally just give up and change to a better film. You keep wanting them to die (especially the main character--Jeez is he annoying). But, if you do wait, the predictable happens and you see the crappiest looking zombies in film history--and the payoff just isn't enough for having to listen to these idiots talk and talk and talk. All in all a cheapo film that isn't enjoyable because the acting and writing (if there is any) is so gosh-darn bad. My advice--stick to a William Grefe, Arch Hall, Ray Dennis Steckler or Ed Wood film--at least these are bad and fun to watch!

Back in the old days, there was a place called a video store. This place held things called videotapes. One day, while hunting around for a good horror movie, my eyes fell upon a copy of CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS. And picking it up, I wondered to myself: Is this a zomedy (zombie comedy) like DEAD ALIVE? Is it filled with tons of living dead and gore? More than thoroughly intrigued, I rented it, got home and popped it into something called a VCR. Guess what? This movie qualifies as one of the worst zombie films ever made! And justifiably so, in my opinion. First off, none of the characters is vaguely likable. They spend more than an hour just talk, talk, talking until they're all blue in the face, pulling pranks on each other and repeating such memorable lines as "I peed my pants" a thousand times. Finally, when the undead do rise, thanks to these idiots using sorcery, they're all holed up in a house (hm, how original!) and are then killed one by one. Is it a bad sign that I cheered every time a character met his or her fate? That was the first and only time I will ever watch the movie. Still fifteen years on, I remember that experience like it was only yesterday. Shocking to think that Bob Clark, who made the wonderful Christmas classic "A Christmas Story" directed this crap! By the way, the zombie make-up is pretty bad, easily on-par with BURIAL GROUND and ZOMBI 4: AFTER DEATH. Even treating it as an unintentional zomedy might be testing the limits of your funny friends and humor. Just be happy they never made a sequel, I guess. As Ebert said "For every bad movie, there's a good movie counterpart." That movie would come seven years later when Lucio Fulci released ZOMBIE. Both cover zombies brought about by sorcery (or voodoo) but ZOMBIE is infinitely scarier!

A flaky theatrical group led by the arrogant and obnoxious Alan (deliciously essayed with lip-smacking hammy brio by co-writer Alan Ormsby) go to a small island. Alan inadvertently resurrects the moldy old corpses from a nearby cemetery after reciting a spell from a grimoire. Director/co-writer Bob Clark does a bang-up job of creating and sustaining a genuinely spooky and unsettling misty midnight-in-the-graveyard gloom-doom ooga booga atmosphere, further jazzes things up with a wickedly funny line in spot-on sardonic humor (the biting, barbed, insult-laden dialogue is often quite amusing and definitely keeps things buzzing throughout), and really pulls out all the stops with the supremely grisly and harrowing climax with the angry zombies attacking the group as a large seething mass. The remote island setting adds an extra unnerving feeling of vulnerability and isolation. The zombies are truly scary and hideous-looking. The game cast have a ball with their colorfully quirky parts: While Ormsby clearly dominates the whole show with his gloriously over-the-top scenery-chewing histrionics, he nonetheless receives sturdy support from Anya Ormsby as the kooky Anya, Jane Daly as the sweet, lovely Terry, Valerie Mamches as the sarcastic Val, Jeff Gillen as dim-witted lunk Jeff, Roy Engleman as the mincing, effeminate Roy, and Seth Sklarey as ghastly ghoul Orville Dunworth (there's a nicely icky suggestion of necrophilia in the scenes between Alan and Orville). Both Jack McGowan's rather rough and grainy, but still occasionally striking cinematography and Carl Zittrer's odd, droning score are up to speed. Although a tad slow in spots and certainly ragged around the edges, this movie overall sizes up as essential viewing for devout fans of 70's oddball horror cinema.