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.