REVIEW: Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)

Remember A Christmas Story? You know, the one with little Ralphie and Red Ryder, "You'll shoot your eye out"?

As it happens, the man behind the camera for that beloved Christmas tale also made a zombie movie early in his career. (He also made Porky's, but that's a review waiting for next Boobtober.) Right now, we'll have to turn our attention to Bob Clark's one and to date only zombie feature, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. (In hindsight, he also made one other movie that might be construed as a zombie film. If we really want to define, I'll say no flesh or brains eaten = no zombie film. His movie Dead of Night might be called a ghoul film, instead, because while the guy came back from the dead, he was still pretty normal except for the sucking the life out of people. I know some people that are like that in real life.)

First off, I love the title of this movie. It's not only catchy and easy to remember, but it doubles as practical lifestyle advice: children really should not play with dead things. I remember walking into Movie World's Castle of Horror when I was a kid, and spying this awful, ugly video box. I thought to myself, "You know, they're right. I shouldn't play with dead stuff." Then I went and rented Children Should Be Familiar With The Constitution's Establishment Clause, and my fate was sealed.

What we have here in terms of plot are zombies, which are the titular dead things, and a troupe of actors, none of which are children but they're actors so they all have the mentality of nine-year-olds. Leader Alan (played by writer Alan Ormsby) takes his cast of players on a mysterious trip to an island cemetery (?), in order to prance around like idiots and test out a book of satanic spells on the dead. Their plan is to find a suitable corpse and revive him -- that's that's the entire plan, which, in terms of a zombie movie, is pretty short-sighted. I don't know what they'd planned on doing with their zombie pet afterwards, but I guess Alan and Co. really just want to see if the whole thing worked at all and then they'd figure something out. It's just like actors to come up with retarded and impractical plans like this.


So, off on the fog-enshrouded island, Alan, Val, Anya, Paul, Terry, Roy, Jeff, and Emerson go ahead and dig up the grave of Orville Dunworth. Alan is almost the embodiment of everything I hate about every actor I've ever met, and what mind-crushingly unbearable traits that his character doesn't cover, the rest of the cast makes up for. Alan is completely over-the-top flamboyant, and I'm as surprised as anyone that he doesn't constantly leap gracefully around the set singing "I'm a great artist! I'm a great artist!" There are many subtle allusions to his sexuality (including his marriage to Orville's body), but the horrendous gay jokes are mainly covered by Terry and Emerson, the fabulous duo who argue about cemetery life: "I can't imagine why you'd want to bury yourself in a filthy little hole." Get it?

Eventually, they manage to drag Orville's corpse out of the grave, and invoke the powers of Satan in order to coax him back to life. There's a halfway decent scene after Alan reads his spells and nothing happens, so Val bitches him out for (I guess) not invoking Satan flamboyantly enough; the number of alternative names for "Satan" she comes up with is impressive. Too bad for the running time, this still doesn't make people come back to life. The kids "walk" Orville over to a half-boarded up cabin, where Alan continues his asshole diatribe about how useless everyone else is, how easily he can replace them in his troupe, and how they're all like slabs of meat hanging in the corner to him, and probably some more stuff but I couldn't quite make it out due to the incredibly loud sound of my fist pummeling the TV screen trying to murder everyone in the movie.

Then....fiiiiinally, just before my knuckles crack the screen, the spell kicks in. Either there was a time delay, or the spell didn't actually work at all and Satan just decided to raise the dead because he getting too goddamned annoyed with these people. I thank Satan for this either way.

What follows is the good stuff: the zombies lurching about, hungering for human flesh. It's the one actually effective part in the movie, mostly on account of the creepy music. They use a kind of long, wavering electronic droning noise -- bordering on outright dischordant -- and I think that it really works in context. (I hear it's a Moog device, but that's not confirmed.) I've seen this movie more than once, and it's solely for this music; it elevates the scene -- not quite to "scary," but at least up to "uncomfortable in an vague, unarticulated way."

Once the troupe realizes that the dead are coming back to life, they quickly board up the house and come up with a plan: they need to send someone for help, so they'll try to distract the zombies in front while a few kids run out the back. The plan works flawlessly until the kids in back run directly into a horde of backyard-grazing zombies. Then it all kind of falls apart, as the undead chew excitedly on the actors as if they somehow realize that they're doing the world a great service.

Alan, being the fearless leader of the gang, realizes that if his spellbook can bring the dead back to life, it might be able to put them back down. He flips through the grimoire looking for the antidote spell, and finds that there is one -- but it requires getting the original corpse (Orville) back into his own grave, which is deep in the undead-filled graveyard. I think I heard even the zombies snicker at this plan. Before Alan and Anya (who I think are the only two remaining actors at this point) can figure out plan B, the corpses come crashing in. Anya does her weirdo hippie thing and basically gives herself to the zombies, while Alan does the cowardly actor thing and exits, stage left. Stage upstairs, to be more precise, right to...yep, right to the room where he was canoodling with Orville only forty minutes ago.

Orville is now awake, and he wants revenge. Not so much for the off-screen hinted-at violations, but for Alan just being Alan, I think. I think his personality is more offensive than anything he could do to my body, so I'm right there with Orville on this one. In fact, I'm still punching Alan's flickering TV-image, in case he gets the upper hand on our dead protagonist.


And then...roll credits. I think the movie sets itself up for a sequel, as what appears to be a group of zombies boards a boat, presumably heading towards the mainland USA in search of other theater groups to eat. I wholeheartedly wish them the best on this quest.

You can pretty much avoid this picture, unless you're really keen on Moog synthesizer music. I'd include the chance that you might really enjoy watching bad actors get devoured mouthful by mouthful, but that also entails sitting through the first hour for your Hate-O-Meter to rise enough to make the end worth it. You'll also have to contend with some of the ugliest fashion and hairstyles that 1972 could provide, as well generally shoddy make-up and special effects.

I keep thinking about this movie, trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the acting. Was Alan (playing Alan) trying to do an impersonation of a crappy, pretentious actor, or was that just how he was? The script pretty clearly treats the actors as complete boobs, so does that make the zombies the protagonists, and the actors the villains of the movie since they were the ones defiling the dead? Are they all bad guys? WHY ISN'T THERE ONE LIKABLE CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE?

I hate when movies get all meta.

Stick with Bob Clark's two or three better pictures, despite their lack of zombies.




Oooh, I hate Alan. But I'll forgive him because he also wrote this book, which I had as a kid:


But then I'll un-forgive him because according to this interview with Orville I found over at Badmovies.org, his performance was really him playing himself. Just take a look at him, and you'll understand:



Ugh.