d. Bob Clark, 1972
Bob
Clark directed
a number of films that would fit perfectly here, not least the disturbing and
hallucinatory Death Dream, and one of the best ever Sherlock
Holmes films, Murder By Decree. At the end of the
decade, he blotted his copybook by kick-starting the teen sex comedy genre with
the execrable Porky’s but, hey, nobody is perfect, least of all
you.
Children
Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things was Clark’s full directorial
debut (he only co-directed She-Man: A Study of Fixation) and has a more than a whiff of a student production about it: it’s talky, quirky and democratic - everybody gets a
monologue or a bit of business. Appropriately, his cast were drawn from his
college friends, and the characters they play share their own real first names.
They all give good performances with one exception, but as the actress
in question was married to the director at the time he probably didn’t feel
comfortable to ask her to stop rolling her eyes.
The Children of the title are actually a troupe of hippy-ish actors, all aged somewhere between 18 and 35. They are led by Alan, an awful little popinjay of a man-child who, by virtue of paying their wages, belittles and humiliates his colleagues at every turn, presumably to make himself feel better about his own unlovely inconsequence. Alan adores the sound of his own voice, and uses litanies of big words as alliteratively as he can. He also likes a joke, as long as it’s at someone else’s expense: the worse his victims feel, the louder and longer he laughs. His latest put on is for the group to travel to an old cemetery on a small island with a Grimoire full of incantations that he claims will reanimate the dead. In pursuit of this, they lightheartedly desecrate graves, rob corpses and wage warfare with each other through passive aggressive wisecracks.
Given their youth and groovy wardrobe, it’s all a bit like a bitterly amusing episode of Scooby Doo guest starring The Manson Family, something that I really do wish existed. When the dark spell unexpectedly works, however, and long dead mouldering corpses start to punch their way out of the dirt (hungry, of course, for fresh human flesh) it leads to a chaotic, bloody, atmospheric finale that sucks all of the comedy out of this comedy horror and leaves us with a sense of dread, especially when we see the shambling, insatiable corpses happily hopping onto the troupe’s boat and setting off for the mainland...
The Children of the title are actually a troupe of hippy-ish actors, all aged somewhere between 18 and 35. They are led by Alan, an awful little popinjay of a man-child who, by virtue of paying their wages, belittles and humiliates his colleagues at every turn, presumably to make himself feel better about his own unlovely inconsequence. Alan adores the sound of his own voice, and uses litanies of big words as alliteratively as he can. He also likes a joke, as long as it’s at someone else’s expense: the worse his victims feel, the louder and longer he laughs. His latest put on is for the group to travel to an old cemetery on a small island with a Grimoire full of incantations that he claims will reanimate the dead. In pursuit of this, they lightheartedly desecrate graves, rob corpses and wage warfare with each other through passive aggressive wisecracks.
Given their youth and groovy wardrobe, it’s all a bit like a bitterly amusing episode of Scooby Doo guest starring The Manson Family, something that I really do wish existed. When the dark spell unexpectedly works, however, and long dead mouldering corpses start to punch their way out of the dirt (hungry, of course, for fresh human flesh) it leads to a chaotic, bloody, atmospheric finale that sucks all of the comedy out of this comedy horror and leaves us with a sense of dread, especially when we see the shambling, insatiable corpses happily hopping onto the troupe’s boat and setting off for the mainland...
The moral of the story: never, ever join an acting group.
Just time to mention my favourite part of the film, its score. Played by Carl Zittrer on, I'm assuming, a car sized synthesiser, the music comes in big, fat slabs of atonal electronic noise, sounding at even its most melodic like someone hitting the keys of an organ with a mallet. It makes no attempt to do anything other than just creep us out and, as such, is excellent.
Just time to mention my favourite part of the film, its score. Played by Carl Zittrer on, I'm assuming, a car sized synthesiser, the music comes in big, fat slabs of atonal electronic noise, sounding at even its most melodic like someone hitting the keys of an organ with a mallet. It makes no attempt to do anything other than just creep us out and, as such, is excellent.
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