"Nasty, brutish, and short," a phrase coined by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes to describe life under anarchy, aptly describes Bob Clark's 1972 horror-comedy Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things.
In a swift 87 minutes, Clark introduces six members of a theatrical troupe before dispatching each one with ruthless efficiency. A large part of the entertainment value comes from the fact that this isn't exactly the brightest bunch.
Their first mistake was to align themselves with troupe leader Alan (cowriter and effects artist Alan Ormsby), a goateed, stripy-pants sadist with nothing nice to say about any of them, but if they refuse to go along with his scheme, he'll give them the boot, so they dutifully board a boat to a remote Florida island famed for a cemetery filled with the corpses of ruthless criminals.
Alan waits until they've disembarked to inform them that the original caretaker murdered his wife and child before landing in an insane asylum. When they ask about the last caretaker of the abandoned cottage where they'll be staying, he replies matter-of-factly, "He killed himself," implying that there isn’t anything especially foreboding about these details.
Once they're settled in, Alan tosses a robe around his shoulders, draws a pentagram on a headstone, and reads a spell to wake the dead. Even for a laugh, it doesn't seem like a particularly good one. Alan also tasks two actors who arrived separately to freak out the rest--he's just that kind of guy. When the spell appears to fail, they retire to the cottage along with Orville (Seth Sklarey), a corpse Alan had his minions dig up. He positions the dead guy on a couch and makes jokes at his expense.
While the gang is joking and bickering, the dead rise from the ground, hungry for humans. The actors spring into action to board up every entrance, but the zombies keep coming. Finally, Val (Valerie Mamches) locates a spell to send the dead back to their graves, but they neglect to return Orville to his resting spot, a key part of the spell, and everything goes haywire again.
Just as Clark and Ormsby, who wrote Paul Schrader's Cat People, took inspiration from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, it seems likely that Lucio Fulci took inspiration from Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, since he concludes 1980's Zombi in similar fashion with zombies on the move towards civilization.
Though shot in two weeks for $50,000, Clark's second feature would become a cult favorite, helping to launch one of the movie world's more unusual careers, since the native Floridian directed slasher classic Black Christmas (which predated Halloween by six years), holiday perennial A Christmas Story, and infamous sex comedy Porky's.
This 50th-anniversary edition is jam-packed with extras including cast commentary from 2007 and a 2022 interview with Ormsby. Sadly, Clark was killed by a drunk driver in 2007. Considering how little he thought of his early work, this lovingly compiled two-disc set would surely have taken him by surprise.
What kind of film collection would this horror comedy be suitable for?
Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things would be suitable for film collections specializing in low-budget horror, horror-comedies, and horror films set in Florida and other Southeastern states, like George Romero's Day of the Dead.
What kind of film series would this horror comedy fit in?
Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things would fit with a series dedicated to low-budget horror films of the 1970s and zombie films of all kinds, especially zom-coms, like Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead and Life after Beth with Aubrey Plaza.
Would this film be suitable for a public screening?
This is the kind of film made for midnight screenings and horror bills, particularly around Halloween. Though it features genuine scares, the PG rating makes it more acceptable for general audiences than the R-rated zombie films to come.