Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972) Directed by Bob Clark

In the past I have watched Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things on the third day of October, so I stuck to that once-tradition this year and I'm glad I did. This was good a viewing as I've had for the film in some time. I'm a big fan of this. I put together a review for the film to commemorate another worthwhile experience with this oft-criticized film. It is the humor and dialogue of the film, I guess.

 *** ½

"Hey, Alan, who’s your travel agent…Count Dracula?"

"Something is going to happen tonight…I can feel it."

"I peed my pants."

"I’m gazing at the scroll of immortality"

"Poor Anya…any second now I expect to see her float off…"

"They all must be out to lunch"

"It’s customary to carry corpses over the threshold."

The work of Ormsby (perhaps not the acting, although it was purposely campy considering the morally bankrupt sleazebag he was, but the makeup work) itself is reason enough to highly recommend Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things. If you really look at this film—a film that has a cult following but seems to have remained only favorable to a certain few faithful (including myself) who really like it—it is for a good deal of time an ongoing one-upmanship between a tyrant with money on his side and a struggling acting troupe needing the financial assistance he offers to keep working. He lords over them with this until only survival matters. An “island of the dead” away from a metropolitan city, separated by a body of water during a darkened night, is the setting for this little, low budget zombie film that is really not far removed from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (just three years to be exact). The actors and the tyrannical “paycheck” (Alan Ormsby, just a vile dirtbag really) continue to bicker and insult each other for the duration, but I can say that while many of zingers that is shared throughout are rather lame, many either amused me or did make me laugh out loud. But, make no mistake about it, this film builds its rep on that awesome ending when the undead rise from their graves and descend upon the troupe holed up in a caretaker’s ramshackle cabin (not a sturdy, held-together structure to be protected from a determined brood of flesh-hungry zombies). These folks are just flat doomed. Getting to the boat is shut down when one among them tries to run for the boat while the others fend off the zombies in the front of the house. Too many of them to divert attention from the poor actor and his found being munched on by a female ghoul with a bloody mouth and hands tells us that all bets are off.

 

The film has Ormsby and company (including his wife, Anya, who steals the film as an absolute, bug-eyed loon) disturbing graves and basically catering to their theater company slave master, demanding them do this or that in the process of reading from his Grimoire so he can awaken the dead to be obedient to him. He seems to believe in this, the egomaniac, and when the dead don’t rise after his reads from a passage, Ormsby is quite upset. It doesn’t help matters that his main rival (an actress of certain strength compared to the fresh actors who don’t have a breadth of work to back them up), Val (Valerie Mamches) mocks him by performing her own “conjuring” in a theatricality that emasculates him somewhat. Anya seems quite smitten with the occult and “communing” with the dead. The troupe just lets her do her thing, not encouraging or defying her madness. Jeff Gillen is best known as the Santa Claus in Clark’s A Christmas Story, here a jokey, pot-bellied, clown-haired goof who doesn’t allow the antics of Alan to get his feathers too ruffled while the pretty Jane Daly (who would also appear in Clark’s Deathdream) and Brando wannabe, Paul Cronin (who would star in Ormsby’s The Great Masquerade) find that their boss takes the grave disturbance a bit too much. Oh, but it is Seth Sklarey as Orville, a dug-up corpse Ormsby likes to “keep company”, that has the most memorable final seconds that leaves as much (if not more; damn this guy is creepy) an impression as the chatty cast gabbing it up the entire running time. 

The whole point of the film was to have Clark, Ormsby, and their friends offer a film to the viewing public in the hopes of launching careers. Horror has a tendency to be a platform for that. It is a jumping-off point, a start, to something hopefully more substantial. The actors I appreciate are those actors like Danielle Harris who recognize the genre isn’t just a way to get your foot in the door but continues to work in horror because it offers the means to push yourself.

I kept seeing these great shots of Anya, and my eyes were just drawn to her. I guess it is like what Adam Stubbs says in May (2002): I dig crazy chicks. And Anya sure is crazy.

Ormsby’s underrated as a makeup artist. To take what little money he had and really provides us with some unsettling zombies, accompanied by this spooky soundtrack and some effective lighting/camerawork, is quite an accomplishment. The script has a lot of talking, though. I didn’t mind it, and I don’t consider the cast all that amateurish although some of the zingers do land with a thud. Some might find the performances lacking, I guess. I wasn’t all that bothered by them. You get that with films that didn’t cost but like 50 grand. Many of them didn’t have long careers, most not making it far out of the 70s or 80s, and then it was either directed by Clark or Ormsby. The cast, though, feels so distinctively early 70s, and I am appealed by that, to tell you the truth. And this film fell right there as the world was trying to recover from Vietnam and Charles Manson.

When the dead rise, I am under Clark and Ormsby’s spell. They take that low budget and seem to manufacture a lot out of little. I mean, the opening moment in the film has a caretaker interrupting two gay stage hands of Ormsby’s to freak us out, as if they were themselves ghouls, only to later confirm that they are quite alive…until Ormsby’s black magic spell reanimates the dead, that is.

 

Ormsby has this really strange moment where he lying with Orville and talking with him intimately. Anya lays in a casket to soak in the moment (???), later begging Orville to have mercy on them. She seems to be aware that something’s off while the others are just wishing they were anywhere but on this godforsaken island after midnight. When Orville rises from that bed, and the dead break open the door, with Ormsby caught in the middle with nowhere left to run, Clark slows the film down and it is damned effective. I think right before this is just as chilling…Ormsby pushes Anya into the zombie horde so it affords him time to get upstairs. It isn’t long before he sees that Orville isn’t a docile object to poke fun at and ridicule any longer. The whole “marriage ceremony”, sitting up Orville on a cross in the graveyard, talking about how the dead are inconsequential to the living, the entire nine yards no longer matters because Alan is now face to face with his executioner. Then the boat ride by the dead for more fresh victims…a city awaits!

Night of the Living Dead is the obvious influence here, and why wouldn't it be. However, those involved made sure to give a reason for the dead's rising. Fooling around with the dark arts can be your undoing. The siege on the troupe with a great distance between them and the boat to safety only establishes that there's little hope of escape. A precursor to Fulci's Zombi II, the dead leaving the island for a city full of fresh victims is kind of the punchline to the 80 minutes that led to their release to walk among the living. The attack on the two crew members of Alan's, as the dead outnumber them (with the unfortunate caretaker still tied up and bound with no chance of running), is a lead-in to what happens to the others...this is their fate. Also, the cast call each other by their real names...way before this was a staple in the found footage genre.

The "look out..there coming" vibe to it all, the impending doom that is palpable, this foreboding that is thick and rich, and the seemingly quick upending of the living by the dead remain attributes that put this particular zombie film over. It has its faults, but I think it is a winner.