Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)
Six aspiring movie makers dig up a corpse named Orville then experiment with witchcraft and voodoo rituals in an attempt to bring him back to life... only to be surprised and shocked when they actually do awaken the rotting dead from their graves.
A very low budget film where the first hour is slow and it's also very talky and the aspiring movie makers seem to be led by Frankie Poulain from The Darkness. This first hour has a marvelously hedonistic feel to it, a vibe that still very much washes over from the previous decade and is helped by a constant stream of chatter that is both witty and audience friendly. The film is well cast and the script avoids many of the cliches that affect teen movies to this day, utilizing likable and (mainly) believable characters.Whilst this is always great the fact there isn't any zombie action until the final fifteen minutes means it can also become a test of patience.
On the plus side the beautifully disturbing avant-garde score is wonderful and really brings a macabre ambiance to the atmosphere that director Bob Clark oozes into proceedings
Clark doesn't really seem hampered by the low budget when it comes to the scares. The ghouls rising from their graves is superbly executed with a spooky atmosphere, well produced practical effects and clever photography.
The final half reels are grim in comparison to what's gone before. Characters sacrifice one another in a bid to escape the ghouls and all signs of friendliness quickly dissipate. In fact the scene as group leader Alan pushes a female friend down some steps into the zombie hordes in a bid to escape is as mean spirited as horror gets.
Although coming a full four years after Romero's groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead CSPWDT is the first movie to ride on it's coat tails. Having said that, this films final scene depicting the ghouls entering the city suggest that this, (together with the whole resurrecting the ghouls via voodoo idea which had been done before but not with flesh eating zombies) may have influenced Italian film makers - especially Lucio Fulci who basically steals this scene for his closing shot on Zombie Flesh Eaters- more so than the Romero classic.
I definitely need to research what the 101 Films Blu-ray is like because this dvd from Nucleus is wildly variable in it's image quality.
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