Day 3: Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things

   

There it is! The moral of the story is right there in the title. Seriously, they shouldn’t! Corpses can be full germs and bacteria that could make children sick. Or they might even come back to life and feast on their flesh. At least, that’s what happens in this 70’s take on Romero style zombie mayhem.

    This film follows a troupe of actors as they travel to a secluded island for a night of pranks and fun. They’re led by their extremely dickish, over the top, possibly necrophiliac director Alan. Alan has a whole night planned out of grave robbing, pranks, satanic rituals, and I guess just hanging out with corpses. After hours of playing around with a dead body Alan and his crew have dug up, the rest of the islands dead begin to rise and seek out the actors to feast on their flesh.

    It’s not until very late into the film that we get into any sort of actual zombie carnage. So for the first hour or so, it’s carried by extremely campy dialogue by the actors. They actually do a pretty good job at capturing the obnoxious and pretentious nature of amateur actors I’ve known over the years. A lot of their humor is eye roll levels of corny which is pretty accurate to some of the nerdier members of my high school drama club. Just because it’s accurate doesn’t make it any less cringe inducing though.

    The stand out is unsurprisingly, Alan. Ormsby totally game it up as the completely unlikable director. You gotta respect the lengths this guy is willing to go to be a complete and utter piece of shit. I don’t think he displays a single redeemable quality in the whole film. Well, aside from his awesome purple robe and badass striped hip huggers. We’re talking about a guy who thinks digging up corpses and hanging out with them is fun. It’s kind of weird that his friends even remotely play along. He even locks himself away with the corpse and lays with it in bed. Yeah, it’s kind of insinuated that he has desires of necrophilia. If he wanted to bang a corpse though, why’d he bring all  of his actors? Was he expecting an orgy?

     So after about an hour of really bad jokes and some good old fashioned corpse partying finally the zombies rise from the grave. The make up effects are actually really impressive. I was pleasantly surprised by just how good some of these zombies looked. The death scenes are grisly but don't really have much gore. This is probably due to the fact that this film has a PG rating! A zombie movie rated PG? Yeah. I guess their is an uncut version now available on DVD worthy of an R rating. But when this was originally released it was PG. I honestly would've assumed an R rating just from watching it.

    So where does CSPWDT stand on the zombie film scale? Despite its very obvious influence, Night Of The Living Dead this is not. But you could sure as hell do a lot worse in the way of 70's zombie films. This is a fun zombie movie that is probably best played with a group of friends. Director Bob Clark would go on to make the infamous proto slasher Black Christmas before moving on to much better known films Porkys and A Christmas Story. Wow.

Body Count:10