Ooh, boy. The best thing about Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things is definitely the name. The second best part is Alan Ormsby’s facial hair and the whole cast’s clothes — as ridiculous as today’s hipsters look, they have nothing on the hippies of the early ’70s. This movie spent almost an hour futzing around before finally delivering zombies, and the zombies were pretty sorry when they finally arrived. I did learn a few things: zombies are smarter than hippies; at least some zombies can sail a boat; jobs in the theater were really hard to come by in 1972 (Ormsby gets the others to go along with his grave-robbing/dead-raising shenanigans by threatening to fire them from his theater troupe). I actually think this could be remade into a decent movie, but Hollywood would rather remake movies that were decent the first time around into shit than remake something shitty into something decent. What’s up with that?
Tomorrow night, the William Castle/Marcel Marceau zombie/mime movie Shanks. And no, I am so not even kidding.
Good to know my memory of this movie is still accurate from when I saw it some twenty years ago… I remember thinking ‘there ARE dead things in this movie, right?’ Not Bob Clark’s best work.