Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972)
A decade before rising to fame as the director of A Christmas Story and two years before making the superior, seminal proto-slasher Black Christmas, Bob Clark delivered this weird, flawed, occasionally creepy, often funny, and consistently delightful cheapie zombie romp. A troupe of actors follow their awful director/even worse human, Alan, to an island where dead criminals are unceremoniously buried. Is this an ensemble building exercise? Is it some sort of devised performance creation process? Is Alan just a jerk who wants to freak out the people working for him? Door number three is looking good.
Alan makes them dig up a corpse to play games with and after forcing the actors, under threat of being fired (seriously, he’s paying them anything at all?—it’s hard to believe), to do humiliating things with said cadaver, he takes out a grimoire and casts a spell to raise the dead. That happens and everyone on the island is basically doomed.
The film swings between wildly different tones. Often, it is going for pretty silly high camp comedy, but it veers towards a real home run of a downer ending as everyone is killed and the corpses set off for the mainland to find more live flesh to consume. The cast is uneven in acting chops, but there are some standout performances, such as Valerie Mamches as Val, a spacey new agey type who really snaps under the weight of the evening’s horrors.
The film was made in 2 weeks for a budget of $50,000 and it shows. But while the cheapness of some of the settings is evident, as is the fact that some people were probably not actors per se (it’s rarely a good sign when everyone is playing a character with their own first name, as if they wouldn’t know who to answer to if you changed it), you can see the early potential of the film making and there really is pleasure in the surprisingly strong DIY “Let’s make a movie, guys” ethos. There’s some atmosphere, the gore effects aren’t bad, some of the comedy lands, and the film knows when to occasionally take itself more seriously, and when it does, it generally earns it. It’s not a classic of horror cinema, but it is worth checking out an earlier film of a director who just two years later, made just that.