Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

In the early seventies, before Craven, Carpenter, Hooper and Romero had produced anything like a body of work in the genre, Alan Ormsby and Bob Clark were the most prolific and consistent names working in American horror. It's true to say that CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS, their first feature, owes a lot to Romero's ground breaking NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. But it was to set the standard of twisted storytelling and jet black humour for the likes of DEAD OF NIGHT, DERANGED and BLACK CHRISTMAS. Alan (Ormsby) is an obnoxious theater director who brings his acting troupe to a remote island to indulge in some black magic tomfoolery. The mouthy crew have mixed feelings about Alan's plans to raise the dead, but he keeps threatening them with unemployment so they play along. The initial voodoo ritual turns out to be a prank, Alan having organised for another actor to leap out of the grave on cue. But the demented director is eager for more fun and proceeds to dig up a real corpse, demand that the assembled call him “Orville”, then gets hitched with the stiff in a bizarre wedding ceremony. But mocking the forces of evil doesn't pay off in the end as the rotting dead start to emerge from their graves, hungry for human flesh.