Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)

A group of young actors and their dictatorial director journey to an island cemetery to dabble in a little black magic, dig up corpses, and display some really bad 70’s fashions. For some reason they think that raising the dead buried on the island is a great idea, and the successfully do so by a satanic ceremony they perform. Of course as we all know, the living dead are never of the highly sociable variety and they proceed to do what they do best…chow down on people who are dumb enough to raise them in the first place.

While this one is not really a standout film by any means, it does contain some fairly creepy atmosphere. The island cemetery is awash in swirls and swirls of fog, and the scenes of the cemetery with the dead on the rise are actually pretty spooky. The zombie makeup is amateurish but effective, particularly that of the first zombie to attack. That one really scared the shit out of me when I was little. I also enjoyed the film’s score; full of weird sounds that you would find on one of those old “sounds of Halloween” cassettes we had when we were kids. The gore is very minimal, but some of the red stuff does get splashed around here and there, just don’t expect anything that you would see in a Fulci flick and you’ll be fine. The downsides are of course the lame acting, I’m not sure if anyone in this film went on to really do anything except for Allan Ormsby who played the obnoxious director. The characters in the film are all pretty likeable except for that older Indian chick and of course Alan, the obnoxious director of the group. I’m not sure about you, but I’m willing to bet that psychic chick who can “sense” the group’s oncoming doom is one kinky girl in the sack. What a weird gal! Another slight downside is that it did seem to take a little long for the undead to start doing their thing, but I think that actually was beneficial to the movie as it allowed some time to set things up. The sooner the zombie is not always better my friends. This flick will always have a sentimental value to me as it aired fairly frequently on my local “Thriller Double Feature”, but that’s not the main reason I enjoyed this. Terrific atmosphere, creepy music, zombies, and the like all done very well on the cheap is why this film deserves a look.