Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)

After seeing this film, and then immediately watching Michael Jackson's "Thriller" music video, it is plain to see that Landis lifted his entire graveyard scene, and most of his zombies directly from this movie. Children Shouldn't play With Dead things was the first film to feature a mass rising of the dead from a cemetery. If you watch both sequences side by side, without sound, you will know that the earlier one was STOLEN from the other.

Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)** 1/2 (out of 4) Absolutely bonkers film from Bob Clark has a group of people being led into a cemetery where their leader Alan (Alan Ormsby) plans to use black magic to bring to life a corpse he has dug up. Soon the kids begin to have a little party and before they know it they're under attack by the living dead.This film deserves to go down in history for having one of the greatest titles ever to grace a movie. I mean, who couldn't read the title and not either be amused or never forget that you read it? As for the film itself, it's really a mixed bag because it's really not all that good but at the same time it's just so crazy, so weird and so..... I don't know. So silly that you can't help but be entertained by it.What's so strange about the movie is that for the first hour there's really not much that happens. There aren't any zombie attacks or anything else as the people pretty much talk about silly things and do weird black magic rituals. Director Clark certainly builds up a strange atmosphere during this hour but considering this is a horror movie it's pretty gutsy not to have any horror moments. Once we get to the zombie attacks they certainly aren't what you'd call scary but at the same time you can't help but have a good time with them.Performances are pretty decent considering this was a $50,000 movie. Ormsby is certainly a character here and you can't help but be entertained by him. The gore and zombie make-up effects aren't the greatest but they work. Orville, the zombie that they dig up, is also quite memorable. CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS isn't really a complete success and I must admit that I probably won't ever watch it again but at the same time I can respect Clark and company with what they made.

Judging by its title I was not going to expect any award winning movie but seriously this is surely one of the worst horror movies I have seen. I thought it was going to be at least a bit funny or entertaining but not it was a bore and a drag from start to end. The only reason I kept watching was because it was part of a Challenge I'm participating in. The 1 point I'm giving it is for the nice make-up of the zombies and the sequence where they come out of their graves that was cool. For the rest the movie is basically one hour of nonsense of how a group of young hippie people will wake up the dead which is supposed to be funny. The lame jokes didn't even give me chuckle. Than we get less than half an hour of zombie invading the cabin which looks like a bad parody of Night of the Living Dead. Not scary, not funny, not entertaining. At least those losers did what they deserved in the end but it's a long long wait. Puzzling that this one still rates above 5 on average. I'm amazed they almost filled 1 and an half hour of film for such a lame story. Erotic horror parodies are surely more entertaining to watch than this one. Maybe some nudity would have helped this one, but I sincerely doubt it. Maybe a very trimmed version of it would have worked as an episode of a comedy horror show.

"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!