Information/Write-up
Prior to Bob Clark’s success as the director of A Christmas Story and Porky’s, he spent some time as a low budget filmmaker, producing one of the greatest horror films ever made, Black Christmas. Even before that, he was a fledgling filmmaker working with his partner Alan Orsmby. The two collaborated on several projects, the most well-known of which is 1972’s Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, a zombie horror comedy that has reluctantly garnered a cult following thanks to home video.
Alan (Alan Orsmby), a pretentious and playful, yet serious-minded theatre director, brings a small cast of actors and crew with him to a remote island off the coast of Florida. There they find an abandoned and rundown shack, as well as a nearby graveyard, containing the corpses of murderous criminals. Alan, always keen to provoke his underlings, decides to perform a ritual in order to raise the dead, but when nothing comes of it, he decides to make up for it by bringing one of the corpses back to the shack and having some fun with it. Unfortunately for him and his troupe, the ritual did indeed work and the dead eventually rise to attack and kill them all.
Shot on location in Coconut Grove, Florida for around $50,000, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things is comprised of college student acting talent, and it shows. The film has an unfortunate case of dialogue, much of it flowery, but it’s also part of its charm. It’s a group of young, know-nothing filmmakers getting together and putting on a show. There’s definitely talent involved, both in front of and behind the camera, even if the material is basically a take-off (admittedly so) of Night of the Living Dead. But because it takes place entirely at night with crickets always chirping in the background, it has a surprisingly creepy feel to it. The idea of a group of twentysomethings playing around with corpses that finally rise up and have their way with them works well enough because of its attention to atmosphere.
Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things was shot by director of photography Jack McGowan on 35 mm film using Arriflex 35 IIC cameras and spherical lenses, finished photochemically, and presented in the aspect ratio of 1.85:1. VCI Entertainment brings the film to Ultra HD for the first time from a 4K scan of the original camera negative, graded for Standard Dynamic Range only. Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things has always been a rough presentation to begin with, and no amount of pixels is going to fix that completely, but this Ultra HD offers mediocre results. Uneven levels of grain with erratic bitrates litter this presentation, with certain passages looking more even and natural than others. There’s also obvious black crush, some of it built in, and some not so much. Still, saturation is very nice on costumes and backgrounds, both bursting with swatches of orange, green, purple, and red. The lack of High Dynamic Range is definitely felt in these areas, particularly during the interior scenes where shadow detail suffers. Everything is stable and mostly clean aside from a few lines and minor speckling, but this film deserves a better presentation than this. It’s watchable, but it’s not up to the standards set by other companies producing UHD discs of similar low budget horror films.
Audio is included in English 2.0 mono LPCM with optional subtitles in English SDH. The volume is a bit low, requiring a minor adjustment, but dialogue is clear enough while score and sound effects have decent support, especially in the last half hour of the film. The main star are the crickets, which tend to permeate the background. It’s a clean track without any sibilance or distortion issues, faring much better than its video counterpart.
Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things on 4K Ultra HD sits in a black amaray case alongside a Blu-ray of the film in 1080p (featuring the same restoration) and an additional Blu-ray of extras. Also included is an 8-page insert booklet featuring various stills and the essay Bob Clark’s Dead Things: Low-Budget Horror in the Sunshine State by film historian and home video columnist Patrick McCabe. The insert is double-sided, featuring new artwork by Simon Pritchard, and everything is housed in a limited slipcover featuring artwork from one of the film’s theatrical posters.
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