Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Boooooooooooooring.

I had wanted to check this one out for a while, because it was Bob Clark's first movie. Clark is best known for making one of the funniest movies and probably the best Christmas movie ever, A Christmas Story. But before that, he made two top-notch 70's horror movies:

Black Christmas, a classic proto-slasher movie and 2nd best Christmas movie of all time.

and

Deathdream, an ultra-low budget but rather effective horror movie / Vietnam parable.


Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things is a zombie movie that only becomes a zombie movie for the last 15 minutes or so, and for the rest of the time is a not very funny comedy. It's about a troupe of actors, lead by some asshole named Alan, wandering around a deserted island for fun, I guess, and jokingly planning on reciting voodoo zombie spells. And so 80% of the movie is about them walking around talking. And talking. And talking.

Actually, for a low-budget movie, the acting isn't terrible. It's passable. And really, the dialogue isn't bad either. It's just endless, and not very funny. In fact, the movie this most reminded me of was Death Proof, where you just wish everyone would shut up and get on with the story. It's not that the writing is bad, it's that there is way too fucking much of it.

The big finale, where shit finally (finally!) hits the fan isn't really worth the wait. It's pretty standard zombie movie stuff, nothing special. It is a little interesting to see a movie that had, up until the end, an all-around jokey feel to it suddenly turn deadly serious. And it's pretty ruthless with killing everyone off at the end. However, this ranks as mild curiosity at best, and does not redeem the rest of the movie.

Alan, I was amused to see, was played by Alan Ormsby, Bob Clark's sometime collaborator, and director of his own weird 70's horror film called Deranged. That one wasn't a good movie, but it was weird in a more interesting way. It was a loose telling of the Ed Gein story, seemed to jump back and forth between being a little corny and trying to be very dark and disturbing, and for some reason had a narrator that would actually walk into the shot and look directly into the camera. It also had one really great creepy scene of the killer wearing masks made from his victims faces and playing some creepy children's music box.

My point is, both Clark and Ormsby have some talent for this genre, but Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things is a complete turd. Stay away.