Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

Fans have been trying to score some street cred for Bob Clark going on several decades now.  Despite pretty much inventing the American slasher genre with Black Christmas, the director remains a footnote for only the diligent of horror cinephiles…perhaps because he abandoned the genre to score mainstream success with Porky’s, A Christmas Story and Baby Geniuses (yeah, we all threw up in our mouths a little bit on that last one). But as with a lot of ambitious filmmakers, Clark found early success with a trio of titles – Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Deathdream and the aforementioned Black Christmas – that remain highly regarded to this day.

Shot in Florida on 35mm, but emulating the thrills of cut-rate zombie drive-in fare, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) is probably only essential viewing for its historical value, both as Clark’s first notable feature and a reaction to the undead wave unleashed by Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.  Clark and co-writer Alan Ormsby fill their film with wall-to-wall dialogue; petty insults, clever comebacks and college educated cut downs fly between a troupe of actors on a field excursion led by their egotistical instructor (Ormsby pulling triple duty, since he also designed the make-up) whose gag to raise the dead goes horribly wrong…or right, as the case may be.

 

Made with a curiously intellectual vibe, the zombie attack (which doesn’t occur until an hour in) is a shocking aberration rather than the focus of the film itself.  A pair of overtly gay side characters serve as a grave-digging Greek chorus, echoing the social and economic power struggle at work.   It’s a self-involved, overwritten mess.  But the film’s weaknesses (both narrative and technical) are part of its strength, shot in a sort of perpetual darkness that only reveals a few feet in front of the camera.  The resurrection scene finds things turning serious as Ormsby’s crude but effective make-up raises one of the more unusual-looking zombie armies.  Suddenly, the banter and bickering prove pointless as our self-centered thespians become dinner for the undead.

 

There’s a whole lot of Evil Dead at work here, from the Necromicon to the pancake-faced zombies…not to mention a finale on a sailboat that predates Fulci’s Zombie by almost a decade. And even if Clark doesn’t share Raimi’s penchant for visual razzle dazzle – or Fulci’s penchant for gore - he can certainly brag that he got there first!    

 

VCI Entertainment’s 3-disc UHD set should be the final word for Children on home video.  Print damage is practically non-existent and the extra resolution makes for a nice upgrade on a film shot entirely at night. Extras are packed as well, starting with a 90-minute documentary – Dreaming of Death – that focuses exclusively on Clark’s horror output plus a new Alan Ormsby fan Q & A video.  Repurposed special features include interviews, photos. Trailer, music videos and a nice set of liner notes.