Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (Bob Clark, 1972)

Director/producer/screenwriter Bob Clark has one of the strangest Hollywood filmographies. Between his John Carradine-starring short film adaptation of the fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes in 1966 and his death in 2007 in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, Clark's career took many unusual turns. It's hard to believe the same guy made grindhouse movie She-Man: A Story of Fixation (plot description from imdb.com: "A soldier is forced to take estrogen and wear lingerie when he's blackmailed by a violent transvestite"), Deathdream and Black Christmas (two of the best horror movies of the 1970s), Mafia movie Breaking Point, Sherlock Holmes meets Jack the Ripper thriller Murder by Decree, sentimental Jack Lemmon drama Tribute, teen sex comedies Porky's and Porky's II: The Next Day, holiday classic A Christmas Story (the same year as Porky's II!!!), Rhinestone (with Dolly Parton and Sylvester Stallone), Turk 182, From the Hip (with Judd Nelson at the peak of his Brat Pack fame as a bad-boy lawyer), Loose Cannons (a Dan Aykroyd/Gene Hackman buddy cop movie), a slew of TV movies and mid-budget dramas and romances in the '90s (including a reunion with A Christmas Story writer Jean Shepherd for It Runs in the Family), and, um, bottom-drawer children's movies Baby Geniuses, Maniac Magee, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, and his final completed film Karate Dog. He had just started working on Blonde and Blonder (what if Dumb and Dumber but ladies?), starring Pamela Anderson and Denise Richards, when he was killed, so co-screenwriter Dean Hamilton stepped in as director.

It's hard to find a through-line in Clark's career, and a lot of his final years in the business were clearly director-for-hire jobs, but there's a wistfully nostalgic, Norman Rockwell-meets-Saturday Evening Post, sepia-toned visual quality to most of his films from the early '70s into the late '80s, when his movie and TV work take on a more generic look. It connects movies as disparate as Deathdream, Porky's, and A Christmas Story.

Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things is a much rougher piece of work (though I'm sure far superior to Karate Dog). You can tell that Clark and his cast and crew are still learning how to make movies (Clark is even credited here under his full first name Benjamin rather than his nickname Bob), and there's plenty of low-budget clumsiness and inconsistency, which is also part of the charm, but there are lots of moments where idea, execution, and effect come together to deliver something exciting. Dead Things is pretty minor compared to Clark's other two horror movies, and the comic-relief scenes with two gay characters in full OTT stereotype mode have aged horribly, but you can see the roots of Clark's better films here.

Maybe the least Miami-looking film ever shot in Miami, Dead Things takes place on an island near the city, where pompous, tyrannical theater director/owner Alan (Alan Ormsby, doing triple duty as the film's co-writer and makeup effects guy -- he's gone on to a long and successful screenwriting career) has forced his troupe of actors to join him on the island's cemetery to invoke Satan and attempt to raise the dead. He's also set up a prank by having the two stereotypical gay characters go to the island ahead of time, tie up the caretaker, dig up a grave, remove the body, and hide in the casket for a zombie-makeup-assisted jump scare. Alan is a raging jerk with a serious ego problem and numerous affectations, but his theater provides steady employment and his productions get good reviews, so the actors grudgingly put up with his whims and commands. Or maybe they're just hypnotized by his crazy '70s pants.

After the prank and a serious but seemingly unsuccessful attempt to raise the dead, Alan directs his troupe members to move the dug-up body into the caretaker's house for more theatrical corpse-desecrating shenanigans. He keeps pushing and pushing until his actors finally reach their breaking point and stage a mutiny. Unfortunately for all of them, the earlier invocation worked and the island is soon crawling with zombies. Will they make it back to Miami, or has the zombie party only just begun?

The film's makeup effects are inconsistent, with the caretaker a young actor in middle-aged makeup that led my wife to describe him as looking like part of a community theater production, but most of the zombies look pretty great, and the film's concluding moment is worth a lot of the silliness preceding it.

Most of the cast were friends of Clark's, with Ormsby and the late Jeff Gillen becoming frequent collaborators. (Gillen plays the department store Santa Claus in A Christmas Story and wrote and directed Deranged with Ormsby.) Ormsby's then-wife Anya Liffey has a substantial part as a hippy-dippy proto-New Age flake who goes off the deep end. She was especially great in Clark and Ormsby's next film Deathdream. She mostly stopped acting after her divorce from Ormsby other than an occasional appearance on a TV episode or short film, but she has also worked as a dancer and releases CDs of her music. Valerie Mamches plays the character of Val, an actress who sees through Alan from the jump and has withering contempt for him. Her only other film role was in Barbara Loden's Wanda, but she had an extensive theatrical career and taught acting in Seattle for many years until her death in 2015. Jane Daly as Terry, the newest actress in the troupe, and Bruce Solomon, as Winns (one of the gay stereotypes), made their film debuts in this movie. They both went on to long acting careers in movies, TV, and theater, though Solomon appears to have retired in the 2000s. The rest of the non-zombie cast only ever appeared in this movie or a few other Clark and/or Ormsby projects.

If you're going to watch a Bob Clark '70s horror movie, Deathdream and Black Christmas are far superior choices, but Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things is an entertaining bit of ultra-low budget indie horror filmmaking with moments of inspiration and a nice glimpse of a filmmaker finding himself through trial and error.

  

The House of Mystery (William Nigh, 1934)

The House of Mystery is another one of those creaky old-dark-house large-primate-running-amok ensemble cast horror-comedies that were everywhere in the early decades of film, and by the mid-1930s, with so many horror masterpieces from the last two decades showing the way forward, it looks pretty corny and old-hat. However, the movie is mildly entertaining and only 62 minutes long, so I'm giving it a small recommendation.

The film begins with a title card reading "Asia, 1913," which gave me unpleasant forebodings of racist content. I love '30s movies so much, but a lot of them have some truly awful racist scenes that mar some otherwise pretty good films. Fortunately, this scene isn't too bad, other than using "Asia" when the film specifically means India and having a few white characters play Indian people. The overall message, however, is surprisingly anti-colonialist, critiquing American and British raiding of other countries' treasures.

John Prendergast (Clay Clement) is an American archaeologist financed by a few wealthy British guys and several fellow Americans. He's looking for valuable loot in India and not being too respectable about it, even though he's also carrying on a relationship with a local woman, Chanda (Joyzelle Joyner aka Laya Joy). He gets drunk every night at a bar for American and British ex-pats until they kick him out, and he has no ethical problem stealing sacred local treasure. He's finally caught in the act, and a temple priest puts a curse on him, but he and Chanda escape with the stolen riches.

An aside: Why are so many characters in early 20th century film named Prendergast or Pendergast? I'm not complaining, but there are roughly 6,500 Prendergasts and Pendergasts in movies made between 1910 and 1960. This thought will be expanded in my upcoming book The Prendergast Effect.

Prendergast's two British backers are murdered in London, and though people suspect he's hiding out back home in the States, no one really knows where he is. Twenty years later, a domineering busybody and her absent-minded professor husband, Hyacinth Potter (Mary Foy) and Prof. Horatio Potter (Harry C. Bradley), discover a wheelchair-bound man named John Pren and his Hindu companion Chanda living in their neighborhood. Hyacinth believes Pren and Chanda are Prendergast and Chanda (shocking, right?), so she gets her hands on a copy of Prendergast's old contract, and the Potters' lawyer contacts the surviving American financiers.

Long story slightly less long, Pren admits to being Prendergast, says he shortened his name to try to get away from the curse, says he's in a wheelchair because of the curse, says he sent money to societies that preserve animals sacred to Hindus because of the curse (to no avail), says he raised a gorilla and had him stuffed and mounted in his library after the gorilla died because of the curse, and says he'll pay the financiers, the Potters, and the lawyer a share of the profits as long as they agree to live in his house for a week to see what they're getting into, curse-wise.

You can guess what happens next. The financiers are a hodgepodge of '20s and '30s comedy stereotypes, and they get picked off one-by-one, possibly by a gorilla. The police are called in and do a terrible job, becoming part of the action. (Another thing I enjoyed about The House of Mystery is its depiction of the police as incompetent authoritarian buffoons.) Much predictable but enjoyable hullabaloo ensues.

That's pretty much it. The House of Mystery is neither incompetently nor memorably shot, delivers what it promises, and gets the heck out of Dodge before overstaying its welcome. If you're ticking off every old-dark-house and/or primate movie in film history, it's a must-see, but otherwise, eh, it's not that bad. Until next time, have a mildly entertaining week.