What better time than the recent zombie movie renaissance, with people debating the virtues of walking zombies versus running zombies, to bring to light what seems to be a neglected specimen of the genre, and possibly declare it a "zombie classic".  It's a movie that has, wrongly I feel, been derided as an obvious cash-in of Night Of The Living Dead, whose shuffling zombies this movie's feature creatures seem to resemble to a small degree, *cough* invisibleinvaderslastmanonearth *cough*  but beyond that, I fail to see a parallel with the first five-sixths of Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things and anything in the Romero Universe.  Children makes a poor fit in the convention created by Night Of The Living Dead, where quarreling humans ensured their own doom, when they should have easily escaped the slow, staggering, mindless,...  Well, okay, it's pretty much the same in that respect, but Children is certainly a lot more flamboyant in getting it's point across.  It might be a comic homage to NOTLD, assuming it was meant as a comedy.  But it's got zazz, man!  It's got more than people quarrelling: it has flaming fashion victims quarreling in blazing color!  It's not the nihilistic statement of NOTLD by a long-shot.  It's got people disguised as zombies being attacked by real zombies!  It doesn't just have character development, it has totally excessive character development, in form of over an hour of cloying, ludicrous dialogue delivered by insufferably obnoxious characters, all climaxing (none too soon) in a rather colorful zombie coup d'état .  It's like a perverse version of The Blair Witch Project, (and just think of the undeserved attention that movie got) except that something actually happens onscreen at the end, and thank god for that, because these people are really begging for it.

My affection for this willfully bad movie with the memorable title began when I caught it on Shock Theater once as a kid.  I somehow avoided many of the most famous modern horror classics like The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night Of The Living Dead at an impressionable age, and can't brag and go on about having become obsessed with fear of the devil and chainsaw families.  Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things was one of those movies that were in their place, in my mind, as a horror classic.  As a scatterbrained brat I must have been a bit perplexed and bored by it all, up until the much provoked blue and green zombies crawled out of their wormy graves and surrounded the campy campers in a run-down cottage.  Sweet!  They were E.C. comic-book zombies in live-action!  This was sufficient to burn a satisfactory concept of the walking dead into my brain.  And that's all I remembered about the movie when I first picked up the video some fifteen years later: Those blasted, shiny/happy zombies.  Upon viewing it again I was dismayed to find that the part of the movie I'd somehow not absorbed into my young, sugar-ravaged brain was comprised of scenes of nonsensical bitching and bickering, bladder-control issues, flagrant desecration of the dead, and revolting allusions to gay necrophilia.  To top it off, the zombie payoff that followed wasn't half as nifty as my fond, childhood memories had conveyed.

Somewhat put-off, I figured maybe it was just a case of time-distorted nostalgia until some years later when DVD came to prominence.  By that time, my tastes in horror cinema seasoned by shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Reel Wild Cinema, I avidly sought "bad" movies such as this.  And at $6.99 I wasn't risking much.  Upon viewing the movie a third time, I finally recognized what was so special about it beyond the magically shlocky finale.  It's a story of avarice, pride, lust, gluttony, unbridled sassiness, grave-robbing-for-the-arts and profoundly bad fashion with a feel-good ending, since it's impossible to feel anything less than joy watching the utterly infuriating cast of characters get eaten by zombies.  Quirky dialogue is what Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things has, the way some films have 3D.  Why it's never become as famous for it as The Rocky Horror Picture Show is beyond me, aside from the fact that it doesn't have any musical numbers.  Or music at all, really.

The opening scene of our trite little horror fantasy pans through a foggy cemetery at night.  A curmudgeony caretaker with a lantern appears and, noticing a mysterious figure in black loitering near one of the graves, naturally assumes that it's a walking corpse.  More galled by this than unnerved, he goes to accost this restless resident, and show him the direction back to his dank hole in the ground with a swift kick in the ass.  The man in the top-hat does indeed appear to be dead.  Wheeling around, fangs bared, the phantasmal figure pounces on the caretaker, and the drippy, green letters of the title zoom into view as we're treated to a sample of the disjointed, tuneless, hideously amateurish boingy-boingy synth/theramin noise that passes for a sound-track.  Whoa to you, oh bad-horror-film watcher!  Turn back now, I implore you, lest your very soul be blasted by a spectacle so terrifying that parental guidance has been recommended!

But at least this flick kicks in with some instant zombie action.  A zombie wearing phony plastic vampire fangs, granted, but it's certainly, at least, a dead thing, if the title is any indication.  And there is even some blood on the zombie's hands following the assault.  Brutal zombie murder.  What more do you want from the first sixty seconds?  There is another zombie, sans fangs, lurking nearby, and he helps Zombie A dig up another coffin and summarily evict the current occupant: a chap we will come to know and love as Orville, who looks like a zombified cross between Vincent Price and Art Garfunkel.  The graveyard is being hijacked!  Or is it a mutiny?  But next the fanged corpse lies down in Orville's coffin, so maybe he is a vampire.  Zombies don't traditionally return to their coffins, do they?

Whatever the case, the stage has been set to introduce the "children" of the title, as they arrive by boat to the fog-shrouded set, which we are informed by the poorly matched stock footage is actually a lush, Floridian island without a hint of fog.  This Ship of Fools is commandeered by Alan, evidently the tyrannical child-king of the local theatrical arts community (though it's never stated for certain who he is) who has seen fit to to drag his troupe of theatrical lab-rats to this place of "unadulterated imagination", an island cemetery, for some sort of morbid, method-acting gulag.  In spite of the fact that the island looks creepy and apparently smells bad,  Alan deems the island "perfect", and -  after Alan immediately establishes what a charming guy he is by sexually harassing one of the students, Terry, in a way that would be considered grounds for castration by road-flare in this day and age - they depart with their luggage.  I'm tempted to point out that Alan is carrying an identical lantern to the one the zombies were carrying before, but then I'd have to acknowledge that zombies like these, whose eyes have no doubt long ago rotted away, couldn't make good use of lanterns in the first place.  And, hey, it's just a low-budget movie.

Alright, fright fans, it's time for Eerie Exposition. "The island has a history," imparts Alan, who looks for all the world like Doug Henning leading the Partridge Family on a jungle expedition.  Would you believe it's a burial ground for the rogues and vagabonds spit out by the Florida penal system, a good many of them recently interred?  Alan implies to that the vengeful spirits of the malefactors might be ogling them even now, probably a little hacked off that they would all so callously trod over the graves like that.  Alan seems to know of what he speaks as, unbeknownst to his quintet of performing stooges, one of the zombies from earlier is seen lurking in the foliage, eavesdropping.  I say!  That's certainly curious behavior for a zombie, don't you think?

Alan's Pants add to the unease.  Wearing pants like that to a ruffian resting-ground is just asking for gore-strewn retribution.  Not that his minions are dressed much better, mind you, with Anya in her casual, commune muumuu, Val dressed in a red, Maria Ouspenskaya/barfly number, and tubby Jeffrey in his infant pajama-top and vaudeville pants.  It's as if TV's Laugh In went on a tour of island bone-yards.  Yet this multi-colored harlequin mockery of the dead is only the beginning, oh my children.  Alan has several irons of sacrilege burning in his fire of the damned.

They arrive at the Caretaker's Crib, a dilapidated, boarded-up two-story a headstones-throw away from the cemetery.  It seems the first caretaker killed his whole family here (And wouldn't you if you were the caretaker of a pauper's graveyard on Zombie Island?) and got tossed into an institution for very nervous people.  They settle in after the vaguely handsome wussy actor Paul is terrorized by some off-screen "spiders" (Actual arachnids evidently weren't in the budget), and they make the acquaintances of the resident, adorable kitchen rats.  (How sad that no one washed the caretaker's dishes...)  For some reason, Alan orders babyman Jeffrey to fix the window that they broke breaching this unholy haven.  Hmmmm...

Alan reveals that the second unfortunate caretaker actually committed suicide here.  Alan is, perhaps, bullshitting everyone about these tragedies, but it's interesting that he never says anything about the last caretaker, who we saw walloped by the putty-faced ghouls at the beginning.  Apparently satisfied that Alan is having them on, Paul and Terry go downstairs, where Jeffrey is building a fire in the hearth and Anya is establishing herself as official kook of the bunch, expressing her solidarity with rats and the dead.

Bless me if I'm not getting an Evil Dead vibe from this part.  It's the same sort of rustic, seat-of-the-pants production.  We have kids, we have dark, spooky woods and a ramshackle cabin.  Literally anything can happen from here.  All we need is a Necronomicon.  And, as luck would have it, Alan opens up his box of fun and reveals an eldritch grimory of black magic mumbo-jumbo: just the thing to liven up any island cemetery soiree.  Plus, he packed himself a kicky little magician's cloak, which clashes perilously with his orange silk shirt and red scarf, and inspires him to lord Old Testament over his subjects once again as he lays out his abominable scheme.  He will use incantations from the book, and the "consummate evil" of the cursed locale, to RAISE THE DEAD!  And then, uhhh.  Well, it's bound to be mostly improvisational from that point on.  Suffice it to say that in his Amazing Technicolor Dream-coat the dead will find Alan to be strictly visible in case they want to relay some kind of message from the other side.  If it were me, I'd shout "DEAD MAN WALKING, HERE!" a lot.  That just cracks me up!

So our weasely warlock ventures back into the cemetery with his dim acolytes and orders them to uproot one of the slumbering islanders.  The viewer who is not too observationally impaired might notice that they are excavating the same grave we saw emptied before.  Can you dig it?  It might be a good time for the squeamish, pregnant or those who have had recent surgery to cover their eyes.

Ordered to peel the familiar stiff out of it's coffin, the giant toddler Jeffrey's bladder is quite naturally unprepared when the corpse grabs him by his ample neck.  As part of a coordinated zombie attack, the dead-head we saw prancing around behind the group earlier swoops down on the fleeing Terry.  It's GHOULS GONE WILD!  Like any big boy, though, Jeffrey fights back, something the corpse evidently wasn't expecting.  The zombie squeals in protest, rather effeminately slapping at him to get off.  The other zombie is seen running cravenly from Paul, who, armed with an ax, has actually come to Terry's rescue.  And most upsetting of all, Alan is laughing like a Grand Guignol villain.  This pandemonium has gone awry!  Yep, it was all just an elaborate hoax by the merry prankster of pantomime with whom the "zombies" are in cahoots.  Alan has invented Scare Tactics!

When the coffin corpse pulls off his mask, the group recognize the bogus zombies as fellow acting troopers Emerson and Roy, who are either quite gay, or are doing a fair job of portraying Fire Island zombies.  Roy has sustained a bloody nose from bully-boy Jeffrey, and is, for some reason, being rather bitchy about it.  Considering he's been buried alive for an hour in a used coffin, you'd think a punch in the face would be downright refreshing.  Hmmm, you know, this sort of thing is probably why they have actor's unions now.

Lo and behold, the Caretaker still lives, though he's been tied up and seated against a tree alongside of Orville.  Kidnapping. What a senseless thing for children to do.  All so that Alan could laugh incessantly about Jeffrey soaking his ugly pants.  It's beginning to look a lot like Alan also has invented the reality show, as well as Simon Cowell, apparently.  And we've already seen what a terrific Donald Trump he makes, as far as threatening to fire people goes.  Still, Paul again insists upon taking a stand, and is again humiliated after Terry submits to take Alan's abuse in order not to lose her "job".  Ah!: "The Importance of Not Losing Your Job".  Somehow, it's hard to imagine that a human pimple like Alan would pay these guinea pigs anything at all, or that there would be enough money in the world to pay them not to extract his colon for a feather boa after pulling such a contemptible stunt.  The only explanation is that they are too gullible to live, or they're all masochists for the revolting kind of torture that only a twisted hell-geek like Alan can administer.  Could that explain why Terry's nipples seem to be erect after being dragged out to an island cemetery at night and attacked by gay zombies?  As for Paul, Alan explains to him that he's a piece of meat, which Paul doesn't contradict, though his nipples also don't become visibly erect at the suggestion.  Maybe Alan just has an extremely good dental plan...

But Val, the one among Alan's sitting ducks that nearly has enough moxie to face him down, comes to Paul's rescue, predicting that the warped warlock's design to raise the dead will end in disgrace.  One gets the impression that Val has seen Alan's penis, or harbors some other hideous secret about him.  This is taking on a Sarte-ian aspect, with Alan holding the others strangely captive, yet not being free himself.  Hell is Other People.  And this is a perfect cast of characters to illustrate that principle.

Like, who doesn't know that children shouldn't play with dead things, anyway?  Who should?  It's not simply a question of taboo, either.  I recall the time I went on a river trip and our boat came to an eddy where a dead cow's body was caught, and had been fermenting nicely for about a week.  I remember that the aroma was such that I was nearly incited to jump in the water and drown myself just to get away from the ghastly, horrid, smothering stench of it.  Dead things smell, by golly, and they're icky and leaky and squirming with cooties.  You reach a certain age, I'm certain toward the front end of childhood for most, when you were presented with the opportunity of playing with dead things and you said, "Oh, HELL no!"  But one fine afternoon, no doubt, Alan read Aleister Crowley and got the idea to dazzle his asinine apostles with some forbidden mojo.  And what better way to make losers think you're cool than raise the dead?

So, after coaxing creepygirl Anya out of the well-traveled coffin, they hang Orville up on his own cross (I'm fighting the urge to to make a Passion Of The Orville joke here), and Alan scrawls a pentacle in chalk, lights some black candles and produces an envelope of "dried blood from an unborn infant" for the ritual, assuring the thespian clutch that no crime was committed in it's procurement.  Convinced that an ancient corpse popping mysteriously out of it's grave beneath Paul's shovel is a good omen, Alan sprinkles some of his devil dust on it and they converge for the incantation"

Oh great diviner, oh master of the Three Worlds
Disciple who became master, lord of the netherworld
Lord of night, prince of darkness, despoiler of light
Diviner of powers, redeemer of passion, crucible of flesh,
By the blood incarnate, by the flesh made proud
By the soul devoured of itself, by these words we do implore
By these deeds we do supplicate and call upon the grace of thee
Lord Almighty of the underworld, to release the souls of all thy servants
Who lie here unredeemed, to release them to serve thy servant
Bending their wills always to his, thus to thine own
By the blood of babes unborn, by the inversion of the savior
By the bond of thine own hand, we do entreat thee
Deliver them unto us thus, to command in thy name
To serve our will and thine own
By Lucifer, Beelzebub, Mephistopholes, Arkades
And all the Underlords, we do entreat, let them rise!
Etc...

  Alrighty then!...  But after Alan's high-flown hocus-pocus mystifyingly fails to invoke the hoped-for zombie apocalypse, the Harry Potter reject launches a verbal assault against Satan for his rank unreliability.  The summation silliness continues after Val, to the great delight of her fellow serfs, recites her own vilification lampooning Alan's vilification.  Alan seems genuinely deflated by this screwy indictment of his spell-casting prowess, until he hits upon an idea for the supreme blaspheme.  He intends to make Orville his freak.  The others makes their usual protests against this new travesty, but follow along, his hired oompa loompas Jeffrey and Paul carrying Orville's corpse back to the cottage for a surprise wedding.  As they file back to the cottage for this bizarre betrothal, we see the uppity corpse from just earlier twitch a little, no doubt chomping at the bit to dispense some brutal zombie justice on this procession of reprobates.

Alan drops Orville face-first over the threshold, in the groomly tradition, and Jeffrey reads the zany nuptials.  After tying the knot with his breathless bride, Alan turns his attention to the young lovers, insisting that Paul join in on the debauchery, and challenging Terry to admit that she finds him DISGUSTING DISGUSTING DISGUSTING!  Of course, this is a big turn on for Terry the whipping girl, so Alan makes the poor casting-couch slut beg Orville not to fire her.  Wow!  This guy is a runaway train of loathsomeness.

But now the wigging is about to begin.  Anya has been fairly agreeable so far, in her own severe sort of way, but she is starting to fray as she begins to sense the evil stirring in the soil down in the cemetery.  Odd that while Anya appears to have completely lost grip of  her last, cracked marble of sanity, she turns out to be the one among them that possesses a perfect understanding of the situation close at hand.  She starts to alternately plead with Alan and Orville, dubbing Alan as "EVIIIIIL!" and begging Orville for forgiveness on all of their behalves.  Presumably, she receives a less than encouraging psychic reply from the decedent of the two, and her feeble sanity abruptly splinters.

 Alan retires from this chaotic scene to the honeymoon suite with his spoiled spouse.  It's here that the viewer can be forgiven should  they start to to squirm uneasily in their chair, and glance about for the nearest exit/remote-control/concession stand/happy place, just for good measure.  I know I did.  I mean, no way am I going to watch this flake take a zombie in it's moldy man-gina.  My sensibilities not only disallow that, they sweep me aloft and carry me to safety like a great eagle of moral decency.  Necrophilia BAD!  NO!  Why aren't the zombies eating the bad man yet?  Happyplacehappyplacehappy-... 

But for the time being Alan is content to snuggle and whisper sweet-nothings in Orville's ear while, presently, the rumbles of dissent are beginning to mount outside this bedroom of unholy desires.  The children feel the tremble of Vesuvius, so to speak, and are ready to get their act on the road to Splitsville, before Alan's putrefactive predilections can bring down the thunderbolts of Zeus himself.  Val is considerate enough to inform Alan that he can forthwith refer to them as the wind, and he responds by casually terminating them.

Meanwhile, those silly birds Roy and Emerson are outside filling in the graves, when Roy decides to add larceny to the children's list of offenses by trying to pry the ring off of a corpse's finger.  Oh, no you DIDN'T!  Now it's personal.  Phony-baloney zombies, meet bonafide zombies.  All at once, the restless natives stage a necropolis uprising, bursting up from their plots in a rage.  Emerson runs for it, but is felled by a hand reaching up from the ground, and is swiftly munched.  Roy is badly mauled, but breaks away and flees toward the cabin.  In a scene that has haunted me since childhood, the helpless caretaker watches as the zombies crawl from their holes, praying that the risen dead don't notice him bound-up against the tree.  Which, of course, they do.

Roy reaches the cottage just as the others are about to make their exit., then collapses.  The surprisingly frisky stiffs are right on his tail, and they drive the stunned children inside.  Splitsville DENIED!  Could these be the same dead people that-...  Oops!  Heh-heh.... Uhhh...  Nice zombies!

And here is where the movie starts to look vaguely like Night Of The Living Dead for the first time.  But what else are a bunch of people cornered in a shack by zombies going to do besides conveniently find a hammer and nails and board up the door and windows?  Furthermore, these zombies are spry and make a lot of racket.  You can hear them coming!  They don't stagger around half-dazed, they really pursue their prey!  And we know how and why they are doing what they are doing.  No court would try these righteous ghouls.  The system failed them, and now they're taking matters into their own rotting hands, just like a rabid pack of Charles Bronsons.

Ironically,  now that these losers actually have something substantial to whine about, they pull together as something of a team , except for Anya, who is catatonic, and Terry, who turns out to be kind of a femme.  The zombie clamor suddenly ceases, and the gang takes a few minutes to get their bearing and deliberate the new nature of reality.  Pissy-pants Jeffrey, possibly relieved that the zombies aren't a hippie cult, questions whether they actually intend them harm.  Seemingly willing to relinquish some or all of his decision-making responsibilities for now, Alan isn't putting forward much in the way of leadership.  What they need is zombie bait, and Paul courageously volunteers.  The rest of the troupe creates a diversion for the zombies at the front door while Paul sneaks out the back.  Curious that he left the door wide open behind him, but this enables the crew to look out and witness with perfect clarity how their plan has evolved.  Not too well, from the looks of it:

So we bid a fond farewell to Paul the player.  He could have been a contender.  Some even called him the new Brando.  But, tragically, at the peak of his glorious career he made a wrong career turn and went the way of so many young, overnight sensations: through the greasy bowels of the Hollywood system (Here represented by zombies).  Kid, we hardly knew ya...

On a darker note, we get another reminder of "The Importance of Closing the Door" when Terry, understandably shaken by the sight of her mutilated lover (even if he was a complete knob), stands in the open doorway sobbing, perfectly prone to being promptly plucked away by a passing cadaver.  Mother clearly didn't teach these children to keep all doors closed at night, particularly on the one night of the year that pissed-off, undead hoodlums are going on a no-holds-barred, flesh-eating rampage outside.

So, the zombies drag Terry off to certain death, employing an effective rush strategy against the cast's lead tackle: the fat guy.  Is this what we, the audience, really wanted?  The two most beautiful people in the movie have just been wolfed down by zombies!  Can there be much doubt regarding the fates of the others?  Thankfully, we have enough hate invested in the rest of the characters at this point that we simply take this as an appetizer to the main course, to which Alan's grisly demise will surely be the just desserts with a cherry on top.  But what if the zombies can't get into the house?  Oh, the suspense!

Val, strangely enough, blames Alan, who is now about as useful as hair on an eyeball, for this miserable turn of events.  But Jeffrey has a winning idea: Let's see what the Book of Evil says!  Call it Plan Z.  But the only counter-spell calls for the impossible task of returning Orville's body to the grave.  Can the spell work?  Upon reading it, the trio notices that the zombies do appear to be losing interest.  In a few moments, the dead have all shuffled off into the gloom.  Satan has taken pity!  The zombies probably decided to mellow out and get with the times, daddy-o.  It's all good.

Anxious to get back home to their mommies, the children venture out in the direction of the boat.  PSYCHE!  The zombies all jump out of the bushes and attack!  Beat THAT, Romero!  Your fucking zombies don't even know what a bush is!  These zombies have read Sun-Tzu!

Yep, they're all over our children like blue on Pittsburgh zombies.  Having sadly never expressed their unrequited love for one another, Val and Jeffrey are pulled down by the hordes and eaten.  Now it's only Alan and poor, whacked-out Anya retreating back into the house.  They're a bit too slow, however.  The zombies push aside the door and back the two unlikely survivors up the stairs.  Alan picks this moment to give his remaining ingénue her big death scene, shoving her rudely in to the arms of the momentarily disoriented corpses.  Anya is gently borne away by a couple of the zombies, and the others grimly resume their pursuit of their arch-nemesis, Spell Boy.

Hey, whatever happened to Orville, anyway?  Well, it just so happens that it's time for his true acting debut.  For you see, Alan has nowhere left to run besides the honeymoon suite.  And there he finds that Orville is now alive, and ready to get jiggy with it!  Desperately trying to hold the door closed to the zombie tide outside, Alan screams like a well-bred bitch-boy as Orville bears down on him.  Orville's famished friends then spill through the door in creepy slo-mo.  Later on, we see the dead piling onto Alan's boat, and it's Zombies Ahoy!  Will they go to Mardi Gras?  Maybe check out some of the Spring Break action, where there are acres of hot, young, un-decayed flesh.  Thanks for the ride, SUCKAS!

So that's the story of the children who shouldn't have played with dead things.  It may not be your idea of a classic, admittedly.  Certainly, there are some crucial elements missing to quite push it over to greatness.  Like sex.  It would have been helped abundantly by some kind of female nudity.  Val even!  Come on, guys!  But, ironically, they felt they had to go for that vaunted PG rating.  And they got it!  Can you imagine what parents in the movie theater were thinking as the first suggestions of gay necrophilia started creeping into the story?  That is, if they hadn't already marched their kids up to the lobby in a huff during the satanic ritual.  It's kind of curious that there were no drug references, either, though there is no saying what Alan is smoking in his pipe.  Where are the adult beverages?  And may I have a funky proto-disco score for my 1972 zombie movie, please?  At least something that doesn't make my nose bleed?  Finally, there is nothing like the gore effects that the genre would propagate after Dawn Of The Dead, of course, though the zombie make-up by Alan Ormsby (who played Alan) was at least presentable for the time.

But as a stupid, subversive little trailer-court production, Children borders on something akin to prodigy.  It brings to mind other, inspired shoe-string fare like Equinox, The Evil Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes.  It rightfully should have been a midnight movie staple, and for a zombie movie completist, it's at least worth a spin.

Aw, what the heck....

ZOMBIE CLASSIC

You heard it here.

Review Written By Steve Ring © 2004