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Released by: VCI Entertainment
Released on: September 11, 2012.
Director: Bob Clark/Roger Evans
Cast: Alan Ormsby, Valerie Mamches, Jeff Gillen, Anya Ormsby, Paul Cronin, Jane Daly /Red Mitchell, Tracey Huffman, Charles Trotter
Year: 1972/1987
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The Movies:
Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things:
Alan Ormsby (who also wrote and starred in Bob Clarke's Deathdream) plays Alan, a stage director who is obsessed with the occult. He brings a few select members of his company to a remote island where the long forgotten corpses of whoever used to live there lay buried beneath the ground.
His intent is to hold a black mass or sorts which he hopes will raise the dead and somehow give him further closeness with his dark lord and master and after playing a prank on his band of actors and actresses, he does just that but not before he digs up a corpse and uses it in his arcane rite. When he doesn't get the results he'd hoped for he brings the corpse back with him to the remote cabin where he and his cohorts are holing themselves up for the night, but what he doesn't realize is that his ceremony was more successful than he first thought and that soon enough the group are going to find themselves surrounded by hordes of the living dead…
Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, aside from having the distinction of owning one of the coolest titles of all time, works primarily not on the strength of its story or its performers but on the merits of a few completely twisted set pieces. Much of the dialogue feels completely contrived and is poorly delivered with a lot of the humor, presumeably intentional, falling very flat. The actors, none of whom are children and some of whom look to be in their late thirties, are at times awkward and out of place and you can guess the ending about ten minutes in. Clarke, however, succeeds in creating a really strange atmosphere throughout the movie and he and Ormsby wisely allow things to get really dark in tone towards the end of the movie which makes the predictable ending a lot more interesting than it would have been otherwise.
The inferred necrophelia that occurs when Alan brings his corpse friend into bed with him is a completely wrong moment that is oh so right in the context of the movie. In fact, almost all of the interaction with that corpse is wrong, but again, it helps create mood and it shows us that Alan is more than just a poser occultist on an ego trip, he really might have something wrong upstairs after all.
Clarke would go on to make better films like Black Christmas and Deathdream, and he'd go on to make some truly horrible films as well but Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, currently slated for a remake under Clarke's watchful eye, remains a unqiue part of his filmography and an interesting chapter in the early part of his career.
Forever Evil:
You've got to love the homemade horror movie boom of the eighties and all the lunacy that came with it during those golden years. As VCRs became common place and video stores needed materials as quickly as they could get it and often times the movie didn't have to be good - it just had to have a cool cover. Case in point? Forever Evil, made in 1987 by director Roger Evans and written by Freeman Williams.
When the film begins a woman pays a visit to a spiritualist named Ben Magnus (writer Williams) who reads the Tarot for her and soon learns that she is to be paid a visit by… DEATH! The only problem is, he got it all wrong - the cards were talking to him, something he learns when a giant Jawa with glowing red eyes shows up… shortly after some sort of unseen force zooms towards the woman and whisks her off, Evil Dead style.
From here the movie shifts gears and introduces us to a man named Marc (Red Mitchell) and Holly (Diane Johnson). Marc likes blue and yellow stripes and scarves and Holly (Diane Johnson) is pregnant but isn't showing. They're about to sell the old family cabin that sits on some choice lakefront property in Texas to a real estate agent but want to have one last shindig before getting rid of the place. They invite two other couples to join them, and one of the ladies professes that the only reason she stays with her boyfriend is because of the oral sex. They head inside, play poker, make strange noises and awkward glances for a while and then Marc notices that Holly is missing. They search the home and find her naked and dead in the shower, her stomach cut open and the baby that didn't ever appear to be in her stomach completely missing. From there, something evil kills everybody except Marc, who puzzlingly escapes from the chaos only to stand in the middle of the road where he's promptly run over by somebody that we never see again.
With that out of the way, Marc makes it out of the hospital and then somehow joins up with a woman named Reggie (Tracey Huffman) and the cop investigating the murder, Leo (Charles Trotter), who describes the crime scene as being nasty enough to make Manson puke and who has the uncanny ability to recognize war veterans on sight. Thankfully, before the night of horrors that took his wife, Marc had successfully finished his invention, the Emergency Grappling System. He demonstrates this device, which wraps around your wrist and fires a spike on a cable, to Reggie by spearing and reeling in a log. At some point, this may or may not come in handy. Eventually our three heroes start investigating things and wind up at the house where the Tarot card reader from the opening scene lived. Here they find evidence of some cult member types trying to bring their dark god, Yog Kothag, back from the part of space he was banished to once upon a time. Somehow this ties in to the murders and our intrepid if unlikely trio soon find they are dealing with an otherworldly evil far more powerful than they could ever imagine…
Recommended to fans of micro-budget oddities like The Basement, Sledgehammer and Things, this movie is way too long and horribly paced to be of interest to the mainstream. With that said, it has an almost hypnotic quality to it that makes it completely watchable should you find yourself in the right frame of mind. Despite the fact that it's almost two hours long in its director's cut (and only eight minutes shorter in the 'home video premier' version also included with this release), the film frequently loses focus and spends plenty of time on aspects of the script that go absolutely nowhere. It's trance inducing in that strange bottom of the barrel sort of way and as it throws logic out the window (Really? Marc isn't the least bit upset that wife and unborn child are slaughtered… he can instead fall for Reggie a day or two later?), we have no choice but to invest the time and energy to stick with it. You know where the picture is going early on as the unusually long and horribly rendered computer generated credits lull us into a comatose state, and from there it somehow gets better and worse at the same time. Where are the cultists that everyone is talking about? Why do they want to bring Yog Kothag back from space? How did he get stuck in space in the first place? How the Hell did Marc just rip that axe off the wall so easily? How many times are they going to recycle that same bit of music that keeps playing over and over again, and why is it seemingly devoid of any actual rhythm? Why does that black dog keep appearing and why is everyone so afraid of him when he's obviously not out to bite anyone but just wants a Milkbone or something?
The old school special effects, random zombie, even more random zombie baby and dopey gore scenes make this one more fun than it has any right to be. Oh, it's slow. Slower than any movie like this should ever be but it has enough moments of inspired lunacy that a very specific segment of horror fans will appreciate.
Video/Audio/Extras:
VCI presents Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things in an anamorphic 1.85.1 widescreen transfer that looks pretty rough. There's heavy grain throughout and the dark scenes are too dark and some of the fine detail does get buried. Color reproduction is okay but a little on the flat side. Some mild mpeg compression artifacts pop up, but the elements used for this disc obviously weren't in the best of shape and it shows.
Forever Evil is presented in 1.33.1 fullframe and that appears to be its original aspect ratio. The IMDB says this guy was shot on 16mm but it looks to have been transferred to tape for editing purposes. Regardless, the quality here is okay considering the obscurity of the movie and the source materials that were probably available. Don't expect mind meltingly awesome detail, you won't get it and the picture is frequently soft but it's all plenty watchable and for the most part reasonably clean and colorful.
Children gets a no frills Dolby Digital Mono soundtrack in its original English language. Expect some hiss and some odd fluctuations in the levels from time to time but otherwise this track is alright considering how the movie has sounded in the past. You can hear everyone well enough without having to strain yourself. No alternate language options or subtitles are provided.
As far as the audio options go for Forever Evil, you get a Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track. The sound quality here is okay and but the levels are slightly high when it comes to the sound of crickets. Go figure. The repetitive and wonderfully clunky synth-heavy score sounds good and if there isn't a ton of bass response or rear channel action here, for what it is the audio sounds fine. Again, no alternate language options or subtitles.
There are no extras at all on this disc, just a simple static menu.
The Final Word:
No reason to bother with this disc if you have the single disc releases (which actually offer up some extras and in the case of Forever Evil, a director's cut of the movie) but if you don't, the price is right and if the presentation is rough around the edges, the movies are both a lot of fun.
