Revenge of the Revenant Review 5: The one where the zombies kill the screenwriter

 

Title: Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things

What Year?: 1972

Classification: Prototype/ Unnatural Experiment

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!!

 

In the last installment of this feature, I freely mused on what it would take for a movie to get the lowest rating. This time, I’m back with an answer. I’m also taking the step of introducing a category not originally used for Space 1979. Previously, I have used the designation Irreproducible Oddity for the less classifiable films I have covered. What it has meant to me is that the films in question usually at least fit somewhere within a time and setting. City of the Walking Dead was an Italian zombie movie, Krull was a 1980s fantasy movie, Phase IV was a 1970s ecological parable, etc. An Unnatural Experiment is a movie that goes to another level, whether higher or lower. These are the films nobody else asked for, nobody else was trying to make and nobody else ever tried to replicate. That is as good an introduction as any to Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things.

Our story begins with a disturbance in a cemetery that appears to end with the ambush of the caretaker at the hands of a revenant entity. We then skip to the arrival of a filmmaker named Alan with his cast and crew (though we don’t see any cameras) on an island used as a cemetery. The auteur alternates between bizarre monologues about death, fate and cosmic terror and down-to-Earth berating of his subordinates, who openly insult and mock him in turn. He seems to single out a lady named Anya, who becomes especially vocal. Unknown to the others, a few of his underlings are already on the island play-acting as the undead, who appear to have tied up the caretaker, though there are plenty of other incidents that aren’t so easily accounted for. Alan’s grand finale is to dig up one very real corpse and read a demonic spell from a grimoire advertised to raise the dead, finally driving Anya hysterical. While he and most of the crew retire to the caretaker’s cabin, the spell proves to be very real. The dead begin to rise, quickly taking out the few who have lingered outside and besieging the cabin. After several attempts at escape end disastrously, Alan and Anya face a final onslaught alone, without any doubt as to the outcome. In the final scene, the undead board the crew’s boat and sail for a brightly lit city on the mainland.

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things was directed by Bob Clark, the future director of Porky’s and A Christmas Story. The script was cowritten by Clark and Alan Ormsby, who also starred as Alan. The film was reportedly made for $50,000 dollars with many of their friends and family in the cast, including Ormsby’s (then) spouse Anya Ormsby, also as the character of the same name. Limited information exists about the film’s contemporary distribution, though it is apparent that it reached “cult” status at an early date. Clark and Ormsby collaborated again for the (far superior) zombie-themed 1974 film Dead of Night, which also featured Anya Ormsby.

For my own experiences, I’m sure I first saw this movie sometime before 2010, and may have seen it a few more times before I bought a digital copy a few years back. I actually only thought of it consciously for this feature when I was working out an “unrated” category, at which point this one came almost immediately to mind. I was genuinely prepared to give it that rating, until I gave it another go. With the experience fresh in mind, I can say without hesitation or qualm, this one is just plain bad, in a very extreme and inexplicable way.

If I’m going to get much further talking about this movie, I have to get one more thing out of the way: This is one of those movies that literally feels like being on a bad acid trip, or in my frame of reference being off my meds for about three days. I have commented previously in my Space 1979 reviews (see esp The Day TimeEnded) that not many people really appreciate what this really means. To truly capture being in a hallucinatory/ dissociative state isn’t a matter of psychedelic colors, freaky effects and/ or weird concepts, though any and all of those things can certainly help. What seals the deal is a narrative so disjointed and fragmentary, by accident or design, that it defies the very concept of linear time and causation. The counterintuitive part is that a movie can to all of these things and still be outrageously, incomprehensibly and inexplicably boring. That is what this movie is like.

Of course, we still haven’t really covered the movie’s portrayal of the undead. A major reason is that even that is often inseparable from Alan’s incessant monologues. To be sure, he is comparatively coherent and intermittently amusing when he gets in the presence of the dead, particularly the dug-up corpse he calls “Orville”. However, he gets all the more insufferable, and his more risqué comments get positively cringey. When the dead rise up, there is a strong sense that they have simply been driven to indignation by his antics, a reading reinforced by Anya’s rage. From there, the movie is effective but largely predictable. There are some good atmospheric shots, notably an eerie view of the gathering horde from the upper floor of the cabin, and a few ironic twists, such as the comeuppance of an underlying who tries to take a ring from one of the dead. But the one vivid and innovative moment is the finale, as Alan holds Anya squarely between himself and the undead, who seem perplexed enough to pause before the foregone conclusion unfolds.

For the “one scene”, however, the standout is the reading of the grimoire. As Alan recites the incantation, the camera (which is not at any point tied to the “point of view” of any character) takes in the island’s jungle-like landscape and several of the dead. A genuine sense of Gothic horror builds up, ant for a brief moment, the crew fall silent; Anya in particular stares ahead intently. Then others declare the summoning a failure, and the spell is broken. Then Alan goes off on the most surreal and genuinely entertaining of his monologue, directing his usual insults and abuse against Satan Himself. In a highlight, he protests pointedly, “I paid my money, I expect my merchandise!”

Out of all the films I have chosen or considered for this feature, this is the one I’m getting to early just to have it out of the way. Even with all I have written, I still acknowledge the film as worth watching. I will also freely admit, if you have seen it, there’s a very good chance it will linger in the mind long enough to be tempted to watch it again. It might be worth the trouble, or I wouldn’t be listing it here. Just don’t try too hard to find some deeper message or hidden genius, because it certainly isn’t here.