Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things: Directed by Bob Clark. With Alan Ormsby, Valerie Mamches, Jeff Gillen, Anya Ormsby. Six friends in a theatrical troupe dig up a corpse on an abandoned island to use in a mock Satanic rite. It backfires with deadly consequences.

“u0026quot;I havenu0026#39;t laughed this hard since granny got caught in the wringer,u0026quot; says one of the potheads in this hilarious quasi-spoof of all those Val Lewton and George A. Romero walking-dead movies we have come to love (or loath, depending on your personal taste) through the years. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIn this story, a young actor pair play a ghoulish prank on the rest of their troupe after, one spooky night, they visit a cemetery island. Their artistic director, Alan, pretends to bring the dead back to life by conducting a highly stylized ritual.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eWay too much screen time is misspent; the amateur dialog includes lame witticisms, melodrama and other kinds of unnecessary filler commentaries (And canu0026#39;t Alan stop that irritating laughter… way too much!). Once the action kicks in (which comes close to the end of this film), itu0026#39;s worth the wait. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eI saw this one on a late-night, local station television program that ran films very much like this one… only this one scared me at the age of 13… but then again, you might laugh your way through it, until the bitter end… …which is probably the reason, nowadays, why very few people still wear striped hip-huggers.”