Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things – Witchcraft Ritual Raises The Dead.

I must admit that when I first saw Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things over twenty years ago, I found it to be in very poor taste. The idea of exhuming a corpse for a silly witchcraft ceremony seemed appalling and repulsive to me. As the years have gone by, the film has grown on me. The sharp, digitally remastered print of the film on Amazon Prime makes it even more enjoyable to watch.

A group of young theater actors sail to a burial island for criminals and paupers near the coast of Florida. The group comes to dabble in witchcraft and to exhume the body of a corpse to use in a ritual ceremony. Alan (Alan Ormsby) is the director of the theater group and master of ceremonies. He brings to the burial island a warlock's chest of ritual items, such as a warlock's robe, a book of spells and an envelope of dried infant's blood. Many in the theater group are skeptical of being a part of Alan's ritual, but go along with it so that they do not lose their acting jobs.

As the group arrives on shore of the burial island, Alan insists on upholding a “primal juncture” rule in which he hopes to make out with a beautiful new theater group member named Terry (Jane Daly). Terry rejects Alan's rule by stating a girl scout joke. Terry is not the only actor in the group who rejects Alan's arrogant attitude, as we see throughout the entire film.

Alan takes the theater group on a tour of the island while speaking in a Bela Lugosi – Dracula accent. He informs the group that the caretaker's house has been abandoned for two years. The caretaker was placed in an insane asylum after murdering his wife and children. The group breaks into the house to stay the night. The kitchen of the house is infested with rats. Alan jokingly says they can feast on the rats if their food supply runs low. Valerie (Valerie Mamches) responds to Alan by saying - “In your case, that would be cannibalism.” Valerie appears to be Alan's biggest critic in the group, so there is an interesting tension between the two actors in many scenes.

The group leaves the house to find the grave of a man named Orville Dunworth. Jeff (Jeff Gillen) opens Dunworth's casket and is attacked by the corpse inside the grave. Alan begins to laugh hysterically. Inside the grave is actor Roy (Roy Engleman) pretending to be the corpse of Dunworth. Dunworth's corpse was removed earlier. Alan, Roy and Emmerson (Robert Phillip) set up the joke to scare the theater group. Jeff repeats over and over - “I peed my pants” after being frightened by Roy in the grave.

In a failed attempt by Alan to raise the dead at Dunworth's open grave, he then orders Paul (Paul Cronin) and Jeff to carry Dunworth's corpse “Roman style” back to the caretaker's house. Valerie tells Alan he should have “stuck to the clown act.” Despite Valerie's criticism, Alan stages a mock wedding ceremony in which he marries Dunworth's corpse. Although Alan displays a tone of arrogance throughout the film, he also seems to not take any of his rituals very seriously. The wedding ceremony is a complete joke to Alan. He mocks Dunworth's corpse by reciting jokes about the dead.

As Alan lies in bed with Dunworth's corpse (one of the more distasteful scenes in the film), the theater group tries to leave the island but are confronted by zombies who have risen from their graves. The group flees back to the caretaker's house in a scene that is reminiscent of George Romero's Night of The Living Dead (1968). Zombies pound on windows and doors as the group nails up boards on the inside of the house.

Director Bob Clark went on to direct a number of other great cult classics – such as Black Christmas (1974), A Christmas Story (1983) and Porky's (1981). Clark was planning on directing a remake of Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things before his death in 2007, but the remake never happened.

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things was also known as Revenge of The Living Dead, Things From The Dead and Zreaks. Although the film is often put in the category of “comedic horror,” there is very little humor in the film. The end sequence of zombies digging their way out of graves and roaming the cemetery is genuinely frightening and effective. Happy viewing.

--- Steve D. Stones