Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things

I’m not sure why I watch bad movies and then write reviews complaining about how bad they were. Its not as if I dont know theyre going be bad lets face it, when watching a movie with a title such as Children Shouldnt Play With Dead Things, its tough to claim innocence. If nothing else, I hope you appreciate what I go through to being you these reviews.

Children Shouldnt Play With Dead Things tells the story of theater director Alan and a group of his friends/co-preformers. Alans a weird but very charismatic guy. Somehow, hes convinced five or six of his fellow performers to join him on a boat ride to a creepy island, where he plans on rehearsing his latest play. After playing a few practical jokes on his friends, they begin to revolt and thats when Alan raises the stakes. In what can only be described as abnormal behavior, Alan does two things; one, be begins breaking ground over graves and sprinkling dry blood into them as part of his play rehearsal, and two, he digs up a corpse named Orville and takes him back to the cabin so that he may join the groups party. In fact, Alan enjoys his new rotten friend so much that he drapes Orville in a brides veil and marries him, an idea that is wrong on about fourteen different levels.

As you can probably guess, Alans satanic ritual isnt as harmless as it originally seemed. Before long, the cemetery comes to life with animated corpses crawling out of their graves, headed toward the cabin in search of brains (although, one has to wonder just how many brains a guy who is partying with a cadaver dressed in a tuxedo and a brides veil actually has). The remainder of the film quickly turns into a cheap Night of the Living Dead clone; Alan and his friends must secure the house to keep the zombies from coming in, and then figure out a way out (before everyones brains are eaten).

With a budget of (I’m estimating) six dollars, Childen Shouldnt Play With Dead Things manages to do a few things right. The zombies dont look too bad and the shooting locations fit well with the stories plot. Other than that, theres not much else to praise here. The camera work is laughable; several shots are out of focus, some scenes are so dark that you can’t make out what’s going on or who’s on screen, and the print itself has strange light flares appearing from time to time. The music and soundtrack are filled with abrasive, rejected Star Trek sound effects. Worst of all is the acting, which is so horrible that I quickly found myself rooting for the zombies, vowing to personally finish of any survivors myself.

Suspension of belief when watching horror films is one thing, but a complete suspension of believability, common sense and out-and-out logic is something else entirely. Children Shouldnt Play With Dead Things is bad horror at its finest. If you’re looking for awful, you’ve found it.

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