Highly Overrated But Still Good

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

A gaggle of young actors, and their asinine, irredeemably annoying leader, Alan (Alan Ormsby), arrive on a remote island graveyard in order to perform an arcane ritual. After much mumbo jumbo, a blasphemous good time is had by all. But, wait! Something has gone... all too right. Something has caused the subterranean residents to stir. Tonight, the living had better watch out. CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS is a surprisingly effective low-budget horror movie, w/ a beautiful, slow-building atmosphere of dread and doom. In spite of some overt cheeeze, there are some genuine chills to be had here. Ormsby's William-T.-Shatner-on-speed performance is at once jaw-dropping and totally infuriating! His presence also makes the whole story work. Without his arrogant idiocy, the sting of what unfolds would be nowhere near as potent! Annnnd, the finale is... to die for! CSPWDT stands as a unique entry in the realm of living dead cinema...

A group of unpleasant young people, having (eventually) carried out a mock Satanic ritual, are discomfited when the dead come back to life and start killing them.I am sometimes bemused at the reactions I see towards certain movies at the IMDb, and this is one such film. We are all entitled to our own opinions, and none is any more or less valid than another. Even so, I do wonder whether some of the effusive praise for this film is coming from blind and deaf people. It is slow, the script is lame, the makeup is awful, the acting is shockingly bad, and the film looks even cheaper than it actually is. Which is clearly cheap. It isn't even good at being the type of film it purports to be: it aims to be a low-budget horror comedy, and succeeds only in being low-budget.Definitely one to avoid.

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.

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!