 Welcome to today's edition of frightfully forgotten horror movies, but to start things off. What are we drinking today? Uh, no name to it, but it's just a German half-wisen with heller-tow-blong cops. It's very nice. Easy drinking. Mm-hmm. Today, we're gonna be talking about 1972's children shouldn't play with dead things. And this was a movie that was recommended to us a long time ago by one of our very good friends Carl Woods. The movie was directed by Bob Clark. He's done two very notable horror movies. This one and Black Christmas. He did a Christmas story and Porkies. This movie was written by Alan Ormsby and the director Bob Clark. The movie starts off in this great kind of schlocky way with these kind of ghouls in the cemetery. They're gonna dig in this grave or something and approach this guy. His man in the woods. Again, it goes towards him and like, ah, and that's it. And then it takes us to the main cast of characters in this movie, which is like a theater troupe led by the character Alan, played by Alan Ormsby. They're on this boat on the way to an island. You don't really know why they're going there yet. We find out it's like a cemetery. They reached this kind of cottage. In the meantime, he's also being a complete prick to everyone else, threatening to fire them from his theater troupe. He pulls out this fucking trunk. Some tickle trunk like Mr. Dressup. He pulls out some mystical robe, and then he pulls out this like old book. He claims he wants to raise the dead by reading these funerary incantations and demon resurrection passages. Part of this is they need a corpse to finish this funerary incantation. So they head out to the cemetery to dig up a corpse. Bah, this guy pops out of the grave and scares the shit out of them. It's one of their theater buddies who has been planted there to play a prank on these guys. I peed my pants. Yeah, and he keeps saying it. I peed my pants. The coffin that had one of their bodies in it, they took the corpse out of that, kept that corpse to the side, and the corpse's name is Orville. Opens up the book, and he does his big chant. Kind of feels a little half-assed or, you know, and hokey. Yeah, so one of the girls in the group's like, step aside. I'll do this. I know how to do it. But nothing happens. And so, you know, kind of looking around and they end up just going back to the cottage and they take poor Orville, the corpse, with them. The two guys that pulled the prank, they leave them there in the cemetery to sort of bury the graves back up. They go to rebury this guy. See, he's got a nice flashy ring. And so one of the guys goes to grab the ring off and DING! All those weird sounds. All that shit worked. All that, you know, it really worked. This wasn't a joke. You start to see hands coming out of the ground, out of the ground, and it kind of cuts back to the cottage. Playing around with Orville, treating him like his own personal pet. And he's all laying with them and everything and talking to them. And so it's getting really strange. The one guy who managed to get away starts running towards the cottage. And so the dead are starting to rush this cottage, right? This cabin. And so they start boarding everything up. They're gonna go to the front of the cottage and distract all the zombies. One guy is gonna slip outside and take the boat and go to the city and get help for everybody. It sort of works. It works for about 10 seconds. The first part of the plan works. The guy leaves, but then after they go and shine a light on where he was supposed to have left. Yeah, he's being all eaten. They say to Alan, well, isn't there any passages in that book that can send these things back? And that's where we're gonna end it. If you want to see what happens with the troop, keep watching children shouldn't play with dead things. It's a super neat movie. The first thing that stuck out to me really was the sound design because there's no music. It's just sound effects. Weird synthesizer noises and bleeps and screams. Bombards your senses, right? Adds to the craziness of the movie when they're outside all the constant crickets. It helps to put you there and that they're isolated. There's no help from anybody from the outside world. Yeah, not at all. If there was more music to this movie, I think it would have distracted it would have taken away actually. Not every horror movie needs a theme song as long as what's there works. Yeah, exactly. Also what works in this movie and mostly what the movie's about is all the characters, especially Alan. It's just this fucking prick who you want to fucking... This tenchess asshole. The magnitude of your simplicity. I love how the character is written. He's written very well. He's written to be a pretentious prick who thinks he's good. But really he's just an idiot. Yeah, and he's a fucking coward too, basically. On top of it, yeah. All of the characters, they joke around so you get the sense that they're close, right? But they don't joke around so much that it gets ridiculous and that starts to take away from what they're supposed to be doing in the movie. Another thing that works with this movie is the campiness. Because the way it starts off with those ghouls and stuff, it's like, okay, you know, right off the bat, we're in for a bit of a camp fest. They use the low budge of the movie in their own favor. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Alan Ormsby himself did most of the makeup for it, right? And he just used like common household shit that was lying around like his mother's house. Fuck, that stuff looks great! It works. I love the zombie design in this. On record, I'll say the zombie design on this is better than Night of Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Yeah, because it's just people painted blue and Dawn of the Dead. Yeah, and this is years before Dawn of the Dead, right? Yeah. I love that zombie look, that falling apart zombie look. Yeah, and I like the, because you see a lot of them are wearing like suits and stuff, right? Yeah, because they're all buried in there. Yeah, and they're dirty and shit, right? And so you see a lot of the zombies from behind, too, right? And they're just kind of running towards like one of the guys and it's like, you don't need to see what they look like just to know that it's a zombie and they're dirty and everything. That's all you need. Yeah, for sure, yeah. Okay, this is 1972. Evil Dead came out in 1980, 81. The whole reading from the book in the cabin to raise the dead by accident, kind of thinking it's a prank, that is way before Evil Dead. And I think that Sam Raimi had to have been influenced by this movie a little bit. Yeah, I think so. These people, like in this movie, they're the cause of all this shit, right? In Night of Living Dead, you don't see what causes it, right? And so this is like, again, one of the, maybe one of the first movies where these people cause their own fate. Stumble upon it kind of like stupidly, right? Yeah, yeah, but they did it, you know? They're the ones who fucked up. And it's like, you can see that in even like Return of the Living Dead or something, right? Where, again, like they caused all this shit. And you can see a lot of how this movie has influenced other zombie slash dead coming from the grave. Dead, Razor from the grave. Tight movies, you know, in the future. We're not quite sure if it's like one of the first zombie movies that maybe showed actual zombies coming out of the ground. Out of the ground? The director actually wanted to remake it. But he what, he died in a car? Car accident, right? Before he was able to do it or get the project going. One of the reasons I really like this movie too is because it reminds me of something that we would do or that we have done. Kids, kids making a zombie movie for shits and giggles to have fun. In junior high, we've made zombie movies in the basement and like, I felt like I was watching something that I would make. You know, if we had the budget back then, we would have made that movie. Yeah. That's what I like about it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's kind of a close to the heart. Yeah, it is. Totally. Rapid. If you're in the mood for, man, any zombie movie, basically, check out Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. It's up there in one of the top influencing movies of the zombie slash horror genre. I think so, yeah. If you're a fan of Night Living Dead Zombie, even the old hammer plague of the zombies, it's kind of got that zombie look to them a little bit. Check it out. 1972's Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. And neither should you. But you should keep drinking.