Customer Reviews

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things! [VHS]

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I own multiple copies of every version of this film available on VHS, LD and DVD. VCI's version on VHS and DVD is the most complete version I've seen (running 87 minutes, 1 - 2 minutes longer than previous pre-records) AND it's letterboxed, and nicely packaged.

CSPwDT is one of those rare horror films that is truly terrifying. I've often tried to pinpoint exactly what frightens me the most about this film: the atmospheric, creepy setting; a remote, island cemetery where tufts of mist sweep across an eerie graveyard, or the weird electronic synth music with shrills and screeches, and human moaning in the background, or the incredible 'revival of the dead scenes' with some of the most effective make-up ever committed to celluloid, or the wild cinematography and lighting, ...

It all works together to create, in my opinion, an impossible-to-forget masterpiece. Reportedly the film cost $70,000 to make in 1972, but it has more scares and is more effective than any recent big-budget horror film that I can remember. I'd give it 6 stars if I could. Watch it tonight alone with the lights out!

I saw this at the theater when it first came out. It was great then and it's still great now. I've read reviews complaining about the picture quality on this DVD but I really don't think it can be much better than it is. It was obviously shot cheap and this is what you get. The mood and the atmosphere that this sets up at the very beginning is genius. The film really delivers at the end. In my opinion there were so many great horror movies made in the early seventies and this is one of them.

I'd hesitated in purchasing this DVD because of the 1.5 rating the quality had received, and another review that had bashed its inferior transfer. I finally caved in and spent the bucks--and found it to be EXACTLY like the old VHS version--only letterboxed!--Which is great, and yes, the quality is dark and smudgy at times, but that's ONLY BECAUSE of the original film stock used!! Remember folks, this is/was a low-budget (somewhat independent) horror film, and the original master has suffered some fade, but it's exactly what I remembered it as being when the film was the "Million Dollar Movie" on Channel 9 YEARRRS ago. It's a great addition to my DVD collection, and a great source of some really chilling sequences! For the first hour, it's all talk-talk-talk, but there's atmosphere!--And the dialogue is pure camp--the clothes are SO 1970's--but the last half-hour (when the zombies arrive), the hair really starts to rise. Have fun with it!

Got this Friday and I bear bad news. But first, I'll give the good.

This film has NEVER looked better on DVD or on any other format in the U.S. - the colors are vibrant, black levels are deep, hues and skin tones are even - the only flaw in the whole transfer is once in a while the film jumps a bit. Considering the age and the lack of preservation prints must have, this is probably the best VCI had to work with. Hey anything beat their atrocious 1999 DVD.

The extras on the disc are great, a full length commentary, two featurettes, 3 music videos, a trivia section, a trailer and a still gallery. All bearing their own merits of awesomness!

Now with the bad...the film is cut...by nearly 5 minutes. There's only one snippet of zombie footage missing, the caretaker's death is cut and the close up on Emerson's dead body is missing as well, and the rest missing is dialogue from the beginning. Now most of you might be saying that's no big deal since the film moved slow anyways but c'mon people, we've been waiting nearly 10 years for this disc and it's cut!? What is that???? The scenes that are cut on the original DVD are in pretty good shape and one scene from this edition looks like it was taken from that source as the blacks go back to the gray they were prior. So there's no excuse why they couldn't replace the rest of the missing scenes from the older print as well.

Unfortunately, VCI has no plans to fix this error so this is the disc we'll have to make due with for another 10 years if they decide to do a 45th anniversary edition or maybe we'll get lucky and they'll do a 40th anniversary edition uncut. We'll see but at this point, nothing's being said or done about this and I don't think anything will for a while.

So overall presentation is great but having the film cut really brings this one down for me.

I first saw this movie on a late night horror show called "Chiller Theater" when I was about 12 or so back in 82 or 83. I remembered clearly the one zombie with the sport-coat and tie and imposssibly big mustache climbing out of the grave, which gave me chills then..and still does. Heck, I didn't remember this being a dark comedy back then, but it sure is.
You can look at this movie in two different ways: one being it is a cheesey, low-budget, poorly done film. Or 2: A bunch of college kids, seriously inspired by George Romero, who took a shoe-string budget and a lot of imagination and delivered a truly bizarre horror classic.
Sure, the dialog is pathetic and the Ormsby is very annoying in the lead role..but that's how he's supposed to come off. It's a 70's film and nothing more or nothing less. It's fun to watch and , at times, scary along the way.
The transfer of the film to dvd is just plain lousy. I doubt if any big companies like Universal, Fox, or even Anchor Bay would buy this and digitally remaster it but, let's hope they do.
This little gem of a movie is a classic and should get the respect it deserves. The sound on the film is ok at best. The video is horrendous: lots of drop-outs, many artifacts, and it looks like they got the worst possible film stock to transfer from.
So, if you are a hard-core zombie fan..this one should not be missed. If you are in the market for an all-out scream fest, you won't find it here. This is the perfect Late, Late, Late Show movie. I give it an all out A.

CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS is the heart warming story of a troupe of quasi-professional actors and their megalomanical director/producer Alan (Alan Ormsby) who decide it would be a nifty idea to go to a deserted island, perform a satanic ritual and raise the dead to serve Alan's every need. And why not? Its 1972. Having reached this conclusion Alan chooses an island that meets certain specific requirements and has the proper ambiance, to wit it has an old cemetery where the dead were not necessarily the nicest folk, and a deserted house where an unspeakable crime had been committed. As their boat pulls up to the little dock, our story begins.( oh, in real life the island is Key Biscayne, just down the road a piece from Tricky Dick Nixon's house.)

Our chosen island is a creepy little place, made all the creepier by Uncle Alan who proceeds curdle his "friends"/employees blood with graphic stories of the evils perpetrated by the dead buried in the ground around them, while they engage in the task of digging up a corpse of proper vintage for the evening's main event.

Come midnight, however, Alan's ritual seems to be a dud and Orville (the recently exhumed corpse) just sits there like, well, like so much dead meat, as do all the other bodies in the cemetery. Incensed, Alan calls a curse down on Satan, which draws nothing but ridicule from his troupe and a classic case of one-upmanship from Valerie (Valerie Mamches).

Humiliated and enraged, Alan orders them to drag Orville (Seth Sklarey) back to their camp at the spooky deserted caretaker's house where he proceeds to to demean, degrade, humiliate,and otherwise abuse both the living and the dead--while outside we see that the dead have decided to rise after all. Whether this is a result of Alan's ritual or a response to the curse called down on Satan is academic --the dead are rising. They are hungry. And ham is on the menu.

From here on we are in classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD mode, board up the doors and windows and consult the handy dandy grimoire that Alan brought along to use in his original ritual. But oh no! To return all the zombies to their graves, they have to return Orville to his grave and they could never make it through all those slavering flesh eaters! What to do?

Well, I'm not going to tell you. I haven't told you everything up til now either. What fun is review that makes you feel as if you've seen the movie? And this is one you should see for yourself if you dare call yourself a fan of the genre.

Written and directed by Benjamin Clark (later to gain fame as Bob Clark with PORKY's BLACK CHRISTMAS and A CHRISTMAS STORY), CHILDREN is nicely written and rings true to anyone who has had to spend time with "actors" who are at this rung on the talent ladder) .Uncle Alan and his little troupe are constantly "on", always performing, always trying to come up with a funnier line than the last guy. Life for them is a constant audition. Its hippie theater with delusions of the avant garde, improv by the uninspired.

There is some genuinely bad acting going on here and the finger is usually pointed at Alan Ormsby. I don't have a problem with him. I think he does what he has to do to get his charater across. For me its his real life Anya Ormsby who deserves the most criticism. Although her character of the fragile, spaced out, cleverly named Anya is all too familiar to those of us who inhabited that era---she just goes waaay too far. One character says "one day she's just going to float away", not likely, Anya has a jet pack.

An awful lot is accomplished in this little movie with what can only be called a minuscule budget, I've heard it was $70,000. Alan Ormsby's make- up for instance is very effective, but why wouldn't it be...rumor has it he learned his craft working with Tom Savini, one of the greatest. And Carl Zittrer's musical score is extremely effective especially during the zombie resurrection scene, a scene always cited by fans as one of the scariest they've experienced. The electronic score combined with the shots of Ormsby's undead wriggling out of the earth like so many ghoulish seedlings seeking the sun in a perverted Disney nature film provides genuine chills and isn't easily forgotten. My daughter still gets freaked out by the music alone!

There's more, so much more. But go find out for yourself how much fun you could have back in the days before those awful homogenized computer generated monsters usurped the screen, and imagination went out the window.

Bob Clark's "CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS" is in my opinion a true zombie classic that doesn't get the respect it so very much deserves for being a blue-print to the genre. This is the most underrated zombie film of all time!

I saw this movie when I was just a child at best. I was not even into the double digit age range yet. I to this day will never forget the impact the movie had on me. I only had a black and white television I think that made things even more real. I remember it was on some horror show that would show movies etc. Ill never forget how real everything just seemed to me. That movie is one reason I would never ever even think of messing with the dead. The movie seems so real on so many levels, yet has such an odd feel to it. When you imagine if you were there on that desolate island. Doing and seeing the things that they ended up seeing. The characters are really ones that you just never forget. Perhaps that is why the movie has such a great feel to it. I have seen many horror movies, yet for some reason this one seems most realistic. I know its a shame that the picture or sound might not be the best. I hope one day they really clean this movie up and give it the package it deserves. I searched most my life just to find out the name of this movie. So to finally obtain a VHS version and now waiting for DVD as I write this. If your into real horror movies over the fluff they been putting out. This is one that you just can't pass up, give it a chance. Watch it in a dark room and prepare to not only laugh but know fear. Let yourself drift and be where they are and feel how it must be like. The VHS version I have has the original trailer on it as well. So that is always fun to watch for a laugh :)...

Remember... Children Shouldnt Play With Dead Things...

"Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" is a campy cult classic. It contains many, many flaws, but it seems to be this bad on purpose. Without a huge budget or an extensive track record, the makers of this cult classic dove right in and made a spectacularly bad, yet at the same time, really excellent movie. Though the story is a composite of successful films of this genre, the script is silly, the dialogue is atrocious, the acting is at times touch-and-go, and the film stock is of questionable quality. But these elements all come together into a viewing experience fans of cheap horror films should really love.

The story's rough outline: Ambitious film director Alan Ormsby (the characters have the same names as the actors portraying them) has plans for his small film troupe. He doesn't respect them, but they are obviously the only actors he has encountered who are willing to tolerate his pompousity and his nastiness. This guy is a real turd, by any definition. If you look in Vincent Bugliosi's book about the Manson case, "Helter Skelter," there are pictures of Manson during his beatnik stage (the part where he's called a "changeling") which look alarmingly like Ormsby in this film. Alan is insulting, cocky, arrogant, pretentious, belittling, and verbally abusive. You could say he's a psychological bully. He takes his actors to some small burial island to perform a mock Satanic ritual, possibly to test the loyalty of these people, to see just how far they will go when he tells them to do something he knows they won't like.

There is a lot of dissention, as they really think this is a bad idea. And they were right. Unintended consequences happen in films of all types; it's a staple of all films, no matter what kind you like. Here, the ritual backfires, and after a while, you have an island teeming with reanimated decomposing corpses. The story apes "Night Of The Living Dead" at this point, as they have locked themselves in an old house, trying to think of a way to escape.

The zombie invasion, though brief (the final twenty minutes of the film), is actually a remarkable piece of low-budget horror movie galore. The film stock, though cheap, is visually enhanced and the colors have a beautiful pastel tone to them, and the lighting, obviously portable spotlights, serve their purpose, as the zombies really stand out against the backdrops. The zombies themselves have been criticized by this film's haters, but they are actually very well done, each a macabre masterpiece on its own. This film's director also directed the second "Porky's" film, and there is a scene in that film involving one of the characters being made up to look like a zombie, and he looks just like one of the ghouls shown here.

The soundtrack is a constant barrage of wails, moans, squeaks, and electronic noise; distracting to some, but a perfect compliment for this particular film, and the part where the dead bodies rise from their shallow graves is a caccophany of over-the-top racket, borderline overbearing, but adding to the horror of what's happening. These hideously beautiful, grotesque cadavers are now the walking dead, and per Romero's take on it, they are in search of food, as the central part of the brain is often the last to be affected by decomposition. They are on the hunt, and no living person is safe.

Back to the "Alan" character: the viewer gets to see Alan's true character when the zombies come after him and sweet little Anya Ormsby. It's astonishing, and even the zombies are surprised at this.

This movie is a must-see for fans of cheap, cheesy, campy horror flicks; a technically terrible, but creatively brilliant film.

A classic schlock zombifest of the late 70's. Alan Ormsby's magnum opus "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" is a must have film for any respectable and established horror video library. The cinematography may be dated, but the acting is superb. Alan Ormsby's character is absolutely loathsome, which adds to the dark yet sublime plot of the film. The gore lovers may be slightly disappointed, but the risen dead pull off a macabre flesh feast wonderfully. This film is indeed a cult classic. True horror fans will know the familiar phrase..."Orville is my friend!"