| Demdike@Cult Labs | 13th April 2017 12:30 PM |
1 Attachment(s) Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)
6 aspiring movie makers dig up a corpse named Orville then experiment with witchcraft and voodoo rituals in an attempt to bring him back to life... only to be surprised and shocked when they actually do awaken the rotting dead from their graves.
Having only seen a poor quality copy of the film before i was perhaps unfairly critical. The first hour of the film is very talky and with a murky, faded picture quality became very quickly tiresome. However this beautiful restoration from Nucleus Films gives me a whole new perspective on the film.
As previously mentioned the first hour is slow and it's also very talky and that's to be expected from a film as low budget as this however what i was missing before was the suitably macabre ambiance of the atmosphere that director Bob Clark oozes into proceedings as well as a beautifully disturbing avant-garde electronica score. This first hour has a marvelously hedonistic feel to it, a vibe that still very much washes over from the previous decade and is helped by a constant stream of chatter that is both witty and audience friendly. The film is well cast and the script avoids many of the cliches that affect teen movies to this day utilizing likable and believable characters.
Clark doesn't really seem hampered by the low budget when it comes to the scares. The ghouls rising from their graves is superbly executed with a spooky atmosphere, well produced practical effects and clever photography.
The final half hour is grim, grim, grim! Characters sacrifice one another in a bid to escape the ghouls and all signs of friendliness quickly dissipate. In fact the scene as group leader Alan pushes a female friend down some steps into the zombie hordes in a bid to escape is as mean spirited as horror gets, and yes, i include torture porn in this statement, as all the characters are supposedly mates and colleagues.
Although coming a full four years after Romero's groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead CSPWDT is the first movie to ride on it's coat tails. Having said that, this films final scene depicting the ghouls entering the city suggest that this, (together with the whole resurrecting the ghouls via voodoo idea which had been done before but not with flesh eating zombies) may have influenced Italian film makers especially Lucio Fulci who borrows the scene for his closing shot on Zombie Flesh Eaters more so than the Romero classic.
Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, perhaps not, but big kids should definitely watch this! | 