After seeing this film, and then immediately watching Michael Jackson's "Thriller" music video, it is plain to see that Landis lifted his entire graveyard scene, and most of his zombies directly from this movie. Children Shouldn't play With Dead things was the first film to feature a mass rising of the dead from a cemetery. If you watch both sequences side by side, without sound, you will know that the earlier one was STOLEN from the other.

I remember seeing CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS years and years ago, back when zombie films were few and far between (unlike today, where the opposite is true). It came across as an amateurish, oddball remake of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, done as a comedy horror with some very poor acting. So how would it hold up today?Well, the truth is that the film does hold some quirky charm, mainly due to the year it was made and the outrageous fashions on display. It's easy to forget that this was made by Bob Clark just prior to BLACK Christmas, so at least it set him up to make at one classic horror movie. The truth is that CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS is only semi-successful at best, as the entire first hour is pretty much a waste of time. It consists of various goofballs wandering around a cheap-looking cemetery, digging up a corpse and spouting some inane dialogue.Things do change for the admittedly scary climax, which is a brief re-run of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD as the reanimated dead gang up on a remote house to chow down on those within. It's fair to say that Alan Ormsby's unforgettable anti-hero is more of a villain than the undead themselves; what a guy, what a performance, it's not one you'll easily forget! If you can get past the poor make-up, Halloween costume-style look of the effects and the non-existent acting, you might just find a quirky little movie with some things to recommend it.

The cheap self-awareness of the script, direction and acting leaves the bombastic crassness as it is: rubbish, mindlessly goofy. Jeffrey Gillen does a less dis-likable role (than the other guys).For much of the movie, I hoped that at least one of the three actresses will undress; the sexiest of them, Jane Daly, is also the least good at acting. And none of the girls takes her clothes off.The score enhances the goofy eeriness enjoyed by some in the '70s. 'Children …' looks like a stage play, the youngsters act as if they are on stage, but there's an intrinsic goofiness; it's not that it feels stagy, but that the play is goofy. It ends with a ship of ghouls.

Originally reviewed rather poorly, and referred to for many decades as campy, cheesy, and low-budget schlock, the recent resurgence of the zombie genre has brought a new generation to Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, and a whole new appreciation. This film holds up. It more than holds up, it gets better with age. Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. 1973. Not only is this my favorite zombie movie, but it's my favorite movie of all time. For reasons that are as much emotional as intellectual. I first saw it on Elvira's Movie Macabre season 5 episode 17 when I was sixteen years old. The next morning I remember a cross country meet where I was running through the woods. Everyone on the bus had seen the movie the night before and what is forgotten in the descriptions of this movie as campy is that it's a scary movie. The scene where they look out into the night and the female zombie is eating Paul floored everyone. It was what everyone was talking about. Now it's more years since I saw CSPWDT for the first time than it was years since the movie was first made when I saw it that first time. Twice as many years, in fact, if any of that makes sense. http://www.thingsofthedead.blogspot.com/