Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

Bob Clark was one of the first directors to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by George Romero, who not only fundamentally transformed the canon of pop-culture zombie mythology, but mainly used the walking dead as a catalyst for social criticism. Clark focused primarily on the latter aspect, so rather than horror, he presents a biting satire in which the zombies appear at the end as a form of divine, or rather infernal intervention. Unfortunately, the rest of the film conversely focuses on a heavily thesis-based and stiff depiction of the dynamics within a group of hippie bon vivants. As such, Clark and Alan Ormsby’s screenplay presents a caustic picture of the hippie community in the era of its decline, revealing that the internal workings of that group are subject to the same social pressures and power struggles as in mainstream society. Besides naïve and crazy people, the group is also composed of cynics, materialists and manipulators, with a charismatic leader standing at the centre of everything, though he gradually proves to be not only a manipulator and egocentric, but mainly his own construct, desperately trying to build a cult of his own personality and whose flowery speech conceals his calculating nature and systematic efforts to hide his own insignificance and pitifulness. Unfortunately, everything said in the film is delivered in an extremely stiff manner. Perhaps thanks to that, on the other hand, the excellent staging and dramatic elements shine through even more, particularly the final sequence, during which even the corpses themselves seem to marvel at the central character’s spinelessness. (01/05/2014)

The audience should not expect too much of this zombie flick. Bob Clark was one of the first followers of George A Romero and his Night of the Living Dead, together with the screenwriter Alan Ormsby (who directed a decent horror movie called Deranged) and who also plays the lead here. This duo present a fairly unique horror comedy about a bunch of theater actors who are trying to earn some kind of a weird bravery badge on a deserted island. Under the leadership of the maniacal master manipulator Alan (Ormsby) the “kids” go overboard playing with “dead things” and end up waking up the dead from the nearby cemetery. Do not expect any zombies rampaging all the way through, the walking dead only appear in the last third of the movie, which is something that will turn off a big part of the audience for sure. Clark did take his time before the plot developed and allowed him to reveal what the seething audience was waiting for. However, I did enjoy even the first and less entertaining half of the movie with its intense atmosphere and what came after was good. (16/03/2019)