The same Bob Clark that did Porky's did A Christmas Story and also made Black Christmas and Deathdream. He even produced the film Moonrunners, which inspired TV's The Dukes of Hazzard. He also made Turk 182! (if you had HBO back in the day, you saw it), Rhinestone and the Baby Geniuses series. Yep. Bob Clark pretty much did it all. And here's one more completely great thing he created.Alan (Alan Ormsby, who would go on to write Deathdream, Deranged, My Bodyguard and direct Popcorn) leads a group of actors who have all gone to an island together for a night of shenanigans. Sure, the island is a cemetery for criminals. And of course, he's going to do a seance to raise the dead. And while the whole thing is a joke, Alan is genuinely upset that the dead aren't walking the swamp.They do find a corpse - Orville - and Alan uses it to continually harass his actors. And the ritual really did work, as the dead begin killing everyone off one by one.The shift from comedy to drama to horror in this film is startling. The cast is amateur, but the terror feels real. The dread and doom at the end, as the zombies board a boat as the lights of Miami are in the background and atonal music plays are as perfect as film can be.Clark shot this movie at the same time as Deathdream, using some of the same cast. A surprising moment in the film is that while there are two gay men - and they stereotypically lisp - they play an integral role in the film. That's pretty woke for 1972.Stick with the slowness at the start of this film. It will pay off by the end. I give you my promise.

not all horror movies have to have a large scale budget and slick polish to be scary. not everything can be 'The Omen' or 'The Exorcist'. personally i think cheapie creepers like this one can be the scariest.this movie was a prelude to much of the horror genre. this pre-dated direct to home video videotaped horror, it features a book of the dead bound in human flesh, and it was well before zombie flicks were filmed in color. it also had a ending similar to Cronenberg's 'It Came From Within' which was a few years later. this film really was one of the first of it's kind.pretty much dime store production values to begin with, it still seems cheaply made but effective. it really is the ideas here that work the best. desecration of the dead, satanic verses, necromancy and necrophilia, all really obscene and profane subject matter. i've always felt it was the subject matter not the budget that make the film. and the subject matter here is very creepy.so much has been overplayed since this time that it's probably difficult for younger audiences to appreciate how effective this film once was and still is in my opinion.this truly is a evil and despicable little film, and it embodies the spirit of what horror movies are all about. they don't make 'em like this anymore which is probably a good thing because we'd all be scared to pieces. try watching this one alone in the dark.

A theater director takes his troupe of amateur actors to a small, isolated island that just happens to contain a graveyard; when they perform a "Satanic ritual" designed to raise the inhabitants of the cemetery, they are surprised to discover that it works, and they are besieged by the evil dead.Enjoyment of this movie seems to depend on your tolerance for the ridiculousness of the film's first half, in which the characters are continuously berated and humiliated by their fey ringmaster. There isn't much to it, but this movie is a textbook example of a drive-in/late nite TV flick. If you caught it in the 70s or early 80s, you will probably be more willing to accept its talky shortcomings. The makeup is cheap and effective; the zombies don't really look dead, but they're like haunted house employees who want to kill you for real.

Back in the old days, there was a place called a video store. This place held things called videotapes. One day, while hunting around for a good horror movie, my eyes fell upon a copy of CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS. And picking it up, I wondered to myself: Is this a zomedy (zombie comedy) like DEAD ALIVE? Is it filled with tons of living dead and gore? More than thoroughly intrigued, I rented it, got home and popped it into something called a VCR. Guess what? This movie qualifies as one of the worst zombie films ever made! And justifiably so, in my opinion. First off, none of the characters is vaguely likable. They spend more than an hour just talk, talk, talking until they're all blue in the face, pulling pranks on each other and repeating such memorable lines as "I peed my pants" a thousand times. Finally, when the undead do rise, thanks to these idiots using sorcery, they're all holed up in a house (hm, how original!) and are then killed one by one. Is it a bad sign that I cheered every time a character met his or her fate? That was the first and only time I will ever watch the movie. Still fifteen years on, I remember that experience like it was only yesterday. Shocking to think that Bob Clark, who made the wonderful Christmas classic "A Christmas Story" directed this crap! By the way, the zombie make-up is pretty bad, easily on-par with BURIAL GROUND and ZOMBI 4: AFTER DEATH. Even treating it as an unintentional zomedy might be testing the limits of your funny friends and humor. Just be happy they never made a sequel, I guess. As Ebert said "For every bad movie, there's a good movie counterpart." That movie would come seven years later when Lucio Fulci released ZOMBIE. Both cover zombies brought about by sorcery (or voodoo) but ZOMBIE is infinitely scarier!