Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

U.S.A. / 1972 Directed by "Benjamin" (Bob) Clark Starring Alan Ormsby Jane Daly Seth Sklarey Color / 87 Minutes / PG Format: DVD (R0 - NTSC) VCI Home Video

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4     4   10 = Highest Rating

With his shameless, low budget rip-off of Night Of The Living Dead, director "Benjamin Clark" (alias Bob Clark, helmer of Porky's and A Christmas Story) nevertheless generates a few goosebumps despite a highly derivative story and generally poor acting from the no-name cast. Chances are most American monster fans who grew up watching TV in the 1970s and early '80s will have vivid recollections of seeing the film on late night Creature Feature broadcasts. And probably even being scared by it.     Co-screenwriter and makeup designer Alan Ormsby stars as Alan, the owner/director of an avant garde theater company. He's an insufferable, obnoxious dickhead, delighting in threatening his actors with unemployment unless they constantly kiss his ass. He's also a rather macabre fellow, fascinated with and dabbling in the occult. One night he drags his actors out to a secluded island off the Florida coast. For fun he plans to hold a satanic ceremony in an isolated, run-down graveyard located there. An elaborate practical joke has been set up in advance involving "zombies" — really two other actors sent out to the island ahead of time — coming alive and "attacking" the party. Alan's dark, twisted sense of humor leaves something to be desired. To set up the joke a real corpse was dug up and disinterred from its grave; the island's only inhabitant, the caretaker, has been gagged and tied up to a tree. (Nobody seems much bothered by this last bit, though.) In turn creeped out and infuriated by Alan's ghoulish behavior, the members of the theater troupe swallow their protests when threatened with being fired. "You are the serfs," Alan reminds them.     After getting his jollies at the expense of the frightened actors, Alan attempts a bit of serious sorcery. Reading from a grimoire of demonic lore, he casts a spell over the corpses in the graveyard in an attempt to raise the dead. The black candles and drawn pentagram don't help — nothing happens. The others are incredulous that Alan seems to believe in this mumbo jumbo. One of the troupe, the stonger-willed Val (Valerie Mamches), makes fun of his occult pretentions. In a game of one-upmanship Alan takes things even farther. Delighting in his blasphemous mocking of the dead, he orders the dug-up corpse brought to the island's only cottage. While the actors who were in on the practical joke — two gay characters, both stereotyped swishing 'nellies' — stay behind to fill in the grave (why?), the tall, gaunt corpse of Orville Durwood (Seth Sklarey) is carried to the cottage for what Alan calls his "coming out party."     The spell, of course, has actually worked... only the effect isn't immediate. While Alan is holding a mock marriage ceremony between he and Orville (!) at the cottage, the dead begin to claw their way from the moldy earth. The gay actors are attacked by the flesh-hungry zombies; so is the poor caretaker, who, tied as he is to a tree, cannot escape. (This scene scared the crap out of me as a 10 year old kid.) Very quickly Alan and the others find themselves trapped within the cottage. Beseiged by a horde of the living dead, there's seemingly no hope of escape.     Rip-off though they are, the zombie attack scenes actually work. (Clark makes excellent use of slo-mo a number of times, most tellingly in the climax.) In fact, the "dead rising" graveyard sequence — a motif not cribbed from Night Of The Living Dead — has been aped a number of times since. (Return Of The Living Dead comes to mind, and there's a direct homage in The Dead Hate The Living!.) Too bad one has to sit through an hour of snotty, obnoxious Alan and his whining sycophants to get to them. Ormsby's actually decent in the part, as the viewer really gets to loathing this perverted twerp.* (There's an allusion to necrophilia thrown in for good measure — yuck!) Mamches, as Val, and Jeff Gillen, as the fat guy comic relief character ("I peed my pants!"), appear to have had some acting experience but the rest of the cast is downright inept or just plain annoying. (The latter case best represented by Ormsby's sister Anya, who plays a wide-eyed space cadet certain to get on your nerves.)     Your patience may be severely tested before the monster action finally kicks in during the final half hour. Fortunately that monster action is actually pretty good, all things considered. This movie genuinely frightened me as a child and I gotta give it some props for that.

* Watch for the moment near the very end when Alan purposefully sacrifices one of the characters to the zombies in order to (temporarily) save his own skin. Even the zombies look disgusted!

A bargain basement cheapie from VCI, the disc was originally released in '99. Picture quality is uneven — it's very dark at times — with the occasional blemish and rather omnipresent grain. Sound quality varies; now and then a line of dialog is too muffled to hear clearly. In any event the movie looks and sounds a wee bit better than any TV broadcast or VHS incarnation of it I've previously seen, though not by much. (I'm talking UHF and basic cable broadcasts at least 20 years ago.) At least it's presented in letterbox format.     This is basically a bare-bones disc, featuring only the trailer (in surprisingly good shape), a short slideshow gallery of lobby cards, and very brief text biographies of director Clark and star/writer Ormsby as extras. For under $10, though, I suppose VCI's DVD will just have to do for now. 1/27/02

UPDATE In late 2007 VCI is releasing a new edition mastered from the best available materials. In addition to improved A/V quality the disc will contain bonus material (featurettes, commentary) made with the participation of Bob Clark just prior to his death.

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