Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

For the hardcore B-horror movie junkie, I thought I'd pass along some interesting trivia related to this movies promotional scheme. This flick came to my town on the drive-in circuit and somehow managed to talk several area restaurants into offering a special menu for kids (!) that hawked the movie and simultaneously grossed out parents. The menu featured the individual restaurants usual fair, but with new titles... blood shake.. flesh strips (french fries)... brain delight (jello). The half rotten skull visage on the cover of the menu was enough to send most parents into fits. I wish I had kept it. Talk about a collectible! It's a great film, though. Enough tongue in cheek to make its sick theme tolerable. That menu made it impossible for me to see it. Had to wait until I found it on video many years later.

This campy, offbeat Night of the Living Dead variant (on a far smaller budget) is creative and truly frightening. Alan Ormsby is a flamboyant, tryannical director who drags his rep company to an island for mean-spirited pranks in the cemetary. The actors, wishing to keep their jobs, play along. The "fun" climaxes when Alan uses an unearthed corpse named Orville in a mock Satanic ritual to raise the dead. What starts as an amusing (if slightly unfocused) comedy makes the transition into dark character study, revealing the truly dysfunctional relationship between Alan and his actors. He drops any pretense of fun and starts badgering, berating, and abusing the troupe--who, employment or no employment, are pushed to the breaking point. But the night isn't over yet. It seems that the ritual actually worked, and in a truly breathtaking sequence, the dead rise from their graves and close in on the living.

I saw CSPWDT on videotape, alone, as dusk melted into night. When it ended, I was shivering. This is true nightmare material. Though not as graphic as some, it's a strong PG, with surprising bursts of gore and implied necrophilia. The performances are thoroughly convincing--though subtlety may not be the actors' strong suit--with standout turns from Anya Ormsby (Alan's wife, resembling a demented Lynn Lowry) and sarcastic Valerie Mamches. The grainy, unpolished photography and claustrophobic atmosphere make it all the more effective. A deserved cult classic, this is perfect for Halloween and a must-see. Kill the lights and find out why Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things.

Interesting tidbit, I used to live in the house where the movie was shot. It belongs to my ex-mother-in-law. And trust me she is much scarier than any zombie! The site is located in Coconut Grove in Miami, Fl. She actually purchased the property with the original house that appeared in the movie but prior to her being able to start renovating the original house it burned down. She later built a new home on the same site. Interesting enough after Hurricane Andrew blew by in 1992 it knocked over a huge avocado tree in the backyard and my ex-brother-in-law and I dug up tons of old turn of the century bottles that had been buried under the tree. Even more interesting the late Marjorie Stoneman Douglas the great conservationist champion used to frequent the home which was once owned by the Deering family and would summer there. The home she lived in until she passed away is just a few blocks away... Yes a very interesting piece of land with a very interesting history. And don't get me started on my own personal ghostly experiences at the house!!! Really!

This is how they should do horror movies nowadays. This one is not as good as other zombie movies like "Dawn Of The Dead" or "Zombie Flesheaters" but it has it´s potential. A group of people come to a remote island and start to do satanic rituals to wake up the dead. The whole satanic ritual thing seems to fail but who knows what awaits them. The whole movie is dark and scary. This is how i would like to see movies being made today. What about the ending??? Yessssssss i like it very much. He he he he.........

Bob Clark was always more interested in comedy, even when making horror. The problem has always been, for me at least, that his sense of humor was too stupid and infantile to ever be funny, or even believable when coming from the mouth of anybody over the age of ten. And so in 'Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things' we have a bunch of grown adults behaving like elementary school children – pouting, whining, giggling and taunting their way from one pointless scene to another. Though the characters' childishness is supposed to be a plot point (hence the title), it's so tedious, repetitive and irritating as to make the first 2/3 of the movie almost unwatchable. Writer Alan Ormsby, badly miscast as the lead character, delivers one of the most embarrassing and cringeworthy performances I've ever seen. And don't get me started on the ridiculous caricatures of two gay men that pop up half way through.

It's worth sitting through all the Scooby Doo bullsh*t for a final act that seems like it was plucked from another, and far superior, movie. Sure, it's a complete rip-off of 'Night of the Living Dead', with everyone trapped in a house under siege by the undead hoards, but after such an appalling first hour, even blatant plagiarism is a welcome relief. But anyone expecting Tom Savini-style blood and guts will be sorely disappointed – 'Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things' is rated PG for a reason.

The hand-held camera-work is a nice touch, and the dark and grainy film stock lends a certain low-fi analogue appeal, but such aesthetic niceties are rendered redundant thanks to Orsmby's incompetence as both a writer and actor. There are a couple of scenes that are genuinely arresting – the sight of the undead scrambling out of their graves to the accompaniment of a raucous ambient industrial soundtrack works well, and one of the final shots, of zombies tumbling in to an upstairs bedroom in slow motion has a certain raw and gritty realism about it.

'Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things' is an ultra low-budget, played-for-laughs, light-hearted zombie flick whose great final act is not compensation enough for an hour of risible and tedious nonsense. But maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe Clark intended this to be the first ever zombie movie for kids. As such, it may be of great value as a preschool introduction to the genre before advancing to better examples.