Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)

I just saw this On Demand, yesterday. It was free, I hope, unless I screwed something up. Anyway, it's not bad!

It's the story of a group of people in their 20s who are working in a theatrical troupe. The troupe is run by one character, Alan, who is such a complete asshole right from the beginning that it actually makes the movie a little hard to stick with, at times. Seriously, I don't think he even takes five seconds off, from being a jerk to everyone. He reminds me of the character who keeps saying "Resplendent!" in the Witches of East Arlen episode of King of the Hill.

So, Alan is in charge of the troupe. Everyone else works for him, and he keeps them in line by threats of firing them. That's probably a quarter of the movie right there, people wanting to leave and Alan knowing that they are all too scared of losing their jobs, etc. They seemed a little TOO scared of losing their jobs, to me. Maybe I missed something that would have explained it.

Anyway, there is a really long, slow buildup, in which you grow to hate Alan more and more and more. He takes them all to a deserted island cemetery off the coast of Miami somewhere, (that happens right at the beginning, they arrive on the island on a boat in the first couple of minutes). On the island, Alan makes them take part in a mock ceremony to raise the dead, and get Satan involved.... it is a little unclear how much Alan thinks this to be a genuine ceremony. He seems to enjoy the theatricality of the ceremony, but he might think it is the real deal too. Hard to sort out. One thing that does seem clear is that he was interested in forming a gay necrophiliac relationship with the corpse they had dug up, sooooooooo that's fun. Seriously, you just hate that guy so much, watching the movie, that hatng him almost appears to be the entire point of the movie.


I'm talking about Alan too much. There are other characters, who are all given at least some amount of personality. There is one girl who I thought would probably be the final girl. I will simply say that there wasn't really much of a tradition of having a final girl in the early 70s, and just leave it at that.

After they do their little raising of the dead, calling out to Satan ceremony, nothing seems to be happening, so they all go to a little caretaker's cottage together. Alan starts to get comfortable with the corpse... don't worry, they don't go too far with that, but there is definitely disgustingness implied.

By now we are pretty far into the movie, and it has been a slow burn. You can imagine more or less what happens once they lock themselves in the cottage, surrounded by a fairly good sized cemetery. I will just say that the make up is really good, on the "characters" that we meet in the remaining few minutes of the film, and that there is a lot of tension and brutality.

If it just seems too much to sit still for the very sloooowww first three quarters of the movie, two choices you could have would be one, to try to get ot know the various characters, some of whom are actually kind of interesting, or two, just skip ahead to the carnage and mayhem toward the end.

This movie probably laid some of the groundwork for Zombi 2 (1979), by Lucio Fulci. So, you might want to see it for that reason. It is also interesting to see it as part of a continuum, lying chronologically partway between Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Equinox (1970) on one hand, and Zombi 2 (1979) and Evil Dead (1981) on the other.