Theater troupe director Alan (Alan Ormsby) has a twisted and sick sense of humor. Together with his band of actors and actresses, he aims to conjure the dead in a night of terror and practical jokes on an island that once served as a graveyard for the criminally insane. Digging up a corpse for a magic ritual, Alan’s games divide the troupe but when the ritual actually raises the dead, this company of actors will have to fight together to survive.
Filmmakers gotta start somewhere before they hit it big and horror is usually an easy genre to make a mark. You don’t need a huge budget, you can shoot at night to hide your low-fi production values, and amateur actors are tolerated by the audience because usually, they end up dead in delightfully gory fashion. That’s pretty much the game plan for Bob Clark’s Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things - although none of the cast are children. Written and starring Alan Ormsby, the film keeps to simple basics of a gaggle of coeds trespassing into areas where they’re not wanted only here they manage to provoke the undead with a mystic encantation that raises them from their eternal slumber.
It’s a heck of a premise for a small horror feature shot for the slim sum of $50,000 on an island off the coast of Miami, Florida. While the production value is slight with obvious cheap sets and near-weightless styrofoam gravestones, Clark effectively uses his tools to steadily build suspense for the first two-thirds of the film leaving the last act to be a balls-to-the-wall zombie flick. You’re given enough time to love and hate various members of the cast and then enjoy their ultimate demise by a gang of the undead in pancake makeup.
At the center of the show is the delightfully hammy Alan Ormsby as the outright horrible theater company showman Alan. From the start, he’s a power-hungry jerk who treats everyone around him like dirt. Why exactly he’s so exalted by his band of players is a tidbit of a mystery, but their jobs and hopefully eventual fame hinges on tolerating his indulgences. When Alan recites an incantation from the book of the dead it’s a lark. When he digs up a dead body it’s horrifying and the group starts to show how far is too far - but by then it’s too late to stop the evil that has clawed its way out of the grave.
It’s been the better end of twenty years since I last truly sat down to watch this flick. I had a great teacher in school who frequently showed low-budget cult classics to prove the point that you don’t need a huge budget to make a good movie, you only need a half-way decent script, plenty of preparation, and a lot of creativity. Two years later Bob Clark would show what he could really do with horror with the terrifying holiday classic Black Christmas but all of his best aspects as an efficient storyteller is on display with Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. From the steady build of suspense right down to the timely scares, you can see Clark was ahead of the game for his third feature film.
I wouldn’t necessarily call this a truly great horror film, but it’s an effectively creepy one. I love the film’s dark sense of humor and I admire the gumption it took to stage a venture like this on such a slim budget crewed up by a gang of amateur filmmakers. At 87 minutes, I appreciate the film takes its time to get into the horror mischief so that when the creatures do pop out of their graves it’s shocking and scary right through to the final haunting images as the credits roll.
Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things celebrates 50 years of grave-defiling horror with a new three-disc 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray collection from VCI. The 4K version scores a BD-66 disc with a BD-50 reserved for the 1080p version and another BD-50 disc for bonus features. The discs are housed in a sturdy multi-disc case with alternate slipcover artwork and reversible insert art. The two Blu-ray discs were stacked with the 4k disc getting its own bay. Also included is a six-page booklet with an essay by Patrick McCabe detailing the film’s production and life on home video. The discs load to animated main menus with traditional navigation options.
To celebrate fifty years of Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, VCI delivers a new SDR 4K 2160p 1.85:1 transfer that is best described as probably as good as it's going to get. To be fair, this movie has never looked great on home video and while this is probably the best the film has looked on disc, it’s not exactly a stunning example. Part of what fights this release is the exceedingly simple no-frills production values. Shot cheap at night with an amateur crew, there are lighting issues, focus issues, and then there are simply scenes that are so damn dark it’s neigh impossible to see what’s going on. I’ve never seen a film print of this one so my reference points are the old DVD and briefly looking at the 2016 Blu-ray while clerking a video store in Chicago. Black crush is a problem, but then I’ve never known it not to be an issue. When things are in focus and well-lit, the film can actually look quite good with some bright healthy colors and sharp details in the makeup of the undead and the cast.
It’s just that those shots are intermittent with any number of issues including a noisy grain structure niggling in between. The 1080p Blu-ray version included in this set isn’t any better either. I’ll slightly tip the edge to the 4K disc because those really good shots do look better, but on the flipside when it doesn’t look great it’s easier to see the issues and faults smacking this title. As I’ve only ever seen this movie a handful of times, I’m not proficient in its history or handling over the years but given what I know about the production unless there’s a magically perfect print out there, this one just isn’t going to be a showstopper regardless of the format. Which then makes you ask “why do a 4K disc at all?” It’s alright, for this film it is what it is.
At least on the audio front Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things scores a lively and effective LPCM 2.0 track. Indicative of the low-fi shoot, the dialog can come and go as it sounds like every line was recorded on set without any over-dub to clean things up. Sometimes voices are right on the money, sometimes they’re hot, others they’re practically a whisper. This is especially the case when our gathering of theater folk is in the cemetery. Once things move into the old cabin it cleans up a bit since the location is much tighter. There are some simbalance issues here and there, but I’d wager that’s all part of the original recordings and can’t be fixed too much. All in all, it’s a solid track and that last act is pretty great horror creature feature stuff.
The big get for fans of this indy horror gem is the collection of bonus features. Between the three discs, you’ve got hours of interesting content ahead of you. I love it when low-budget movies like this one get a stacked slate of extras. It highlights how much heart and care went into the production to bring it home. The various personalities interviewed clearly had a lot of love for the show and gave it their all. It’s a nice selection of new and archival bonus features. The Alan Ormsby interview is well worth digging into but apparently, something got cocked up with the audio so there are subtitles to help you out.
4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc One
Blu-ray Disc Two
As Bob Clark’s third feature film, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things is a prime example of low-budget filmmaking gone right. Assembling an amateur cast and crew of college buddies, Clark managed to craft a solid and creepy horror flick that still holds up five decades later. Sure, it’s not the greatest film ever and Clark would go on to bigger and better projects, but this is a showcase of what a talented filmmaker can accomplish with very little. Now for the film’s Golden Anniversary, VCI delivers a new three-disc 4K set for fans to devour. The video transfer for either 4K or Blu-ray isn’t something to get too excited about. Given the production limitations, it was never a film that ever looked amazing on home video and this round stresses the need of a 4K disc at all with only a few subtle improvements over its 1080p counterpart. Audio is in relatively solid shape considering all things and the collection of bonus features is well worth digging into. It’s no Black Christmas or A Christmas Story but it’s kind of awesome to see the late great Bob Clark’s catalog get so much home video love this year. Ultimately this one is Worth A Look.
