Danny and Michael Phillippou's “Talk to Me” made a splash two years ago, becoming the latest horror hit pushed out by indie distributor A24. Whether the film proves to be fondly remembered as a classic or become especially influential, only time will tell. However, it did prove that filmmakers who get famous on Youtube first were capable of making movies that were both box office successes and critically acclaimed. When the Phillippou's follow-up, “Bring Her Back,” came into theaters this past summer, it led to some brief debate about whether kids who get famous for making short-form content for websites can truly be called “filmmakers.” This struck me as an extremely silly bit of gatekeeping. These two are clearly operating on a level far above the Logan Pauls and Shane Dawsons of the world. With their second feature, the Phillippou brothers have removed any doubt about them clearly having talent. The film doubled down on the grimness and doom-laden ambiance of their debut, showing that this duo are clearly determined to bring their own perspective to the genre.
After their father collapses dead in the shower, teenager Andy and his partially blind half-sister Piper are put into the foster system. Andy hopes to become Piper's legal caretaker once he's old enough but his history of violence makes the social worker reluctant to approve of such a plan. Instead, both of them go to live with Laura, a former councilor whose also blind daughter recently died. Laura also lives with a strange, mute young boy she calls Oliver, whose eccentric behavior increasingly unsettles Andy. While Laura heaps praise on Piper, she seems to repeatedly push Andy's button and try to goad him into an emotional reaction. The reason for this is stranger than anyone can anticipate: Laura is enacting a bizarre occult ritual, to transfer the soul of her deceased daughter into Piper's body, using the demonically possessed Oliver as a conduit. Andy stands in the way of that plan, necessitating his removal by any means necessary.
Laura is played by Sally Hawkins, the great character actress who often projects a maternal warmth in films like "Happy-Go-Lucky" and "Paddington." When she enters "Bring Her Back," she strikes a similarly eccentric but lovable persona... At first. There are signs that something isn't right, in oddities like a rug being taped down or a door always locked. The hints that Laura is not as trustworthy as she seems pile up quickly, a rude comment, a willingness to drink around the kids too much. A sickening act of sabotage is when it becomes clear that we are dealing with a monster here. Hawkins is terrifying in the way she swings between an acceptable outward persona and her sickening actions. She pushes Andy's faces towards his father's corpse at the funeral, something the boy is obviously horrified by. She tells lies, throwing out piercing insults that almost could be mistaken for innocent asides, and goads the boy towards lashing out at her. Her abuse grows more severe throughout, a constant seasick tension floating throughout as the viewer is made privy to the actions that no one will believe Andy is living through. Other adults are always going to trust adults more than the kids they victimize.
You can argue about the merits of making a horror movie, a fantastical narrative involving demons and witchcraft that is designed primarily to give teenagers nightmares, about a very distressing real world topic of child abuse. I'm not sure "Bring Her Back" quite overcomes the uneasiness in this divide. A handful of times, moments out of a more traditional monster movie – a single line of dialogue that is too movie-y sounding to me, a fight scene, blurry video recordings of arcane rituals – emerge and make this tension more evident. However, "Bring Her Back" does accomplish a dread laden ambiance throughout, creating a perpetually rainy and dour atmosphere. As in "Talk to Me," the Philippous show a skill for putting especially cringe-inducing violence on-screen. A moment involving a knife, a desperate chewing on a wooden table, and a thread of flesh being slowly dragged from an arm all made me groan. "Bring Her Back" features plenty of grinding sound effects and grotesque make-up work, designed to gross you out. When paired with such a grim story and a constantly downbeat tone, the result is a motion picture determined to ruin any good mood you might be having.
I will always associate Bob Clark with the wave of Canadian exploitation films that started to filter into American cinemas in the seventies and eighties. Clark, however, was not a native of the Great White North. He, in fact, got his start in the Mediocre Sunny South, otherwise known as Florida. Yes, the director of "Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2" is one of us. While working in his college's theater group, he was approached by a local producer to direct an exploitation movie. That turned out to be the truly unfortunate sounding “She-Man.” The situation was so unpleasant for Clark that he decided to learn how to actually make movies before directing his second feature. A few years went by and Clark re-emerged with “Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things.” Shot for 50,000 dollars, with a cast and crew mostly made up of Clark's friends, the extremely lo-fi and off-beat horror/comedy would win a small cult following in time... Though a movie this unpolished and inconsistent being an improvement over Clark's debut should really give you an idea of how dire “She-Man” must be. But I'm getting ahead of myself. What is “Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things” about?
For reasons that are never made entirely clear, a theater director named Alan sails his troupe of actors and technicians out to an obscure island near Miami. The island's main feature is an old cemetery reserved for lunatics and murderers. Once there, Alan plays cruel pranks on his actors – including the witchy Anya – by having friends of his jump out of graves. He's brought along a witch's grimoire and decides to perform a ritual from its pages. This involves digging up the rotten body of a man named Orville. Alan drags Orville into the old house they find and continues to use his corpse as a prop, including in a bizarre mock marriage. As the night stretches on, it becomes apparent that the seemingly unsuccessful ritual actually worked as intended. The dead begin to rise and hunger for the flesh of the living. The actors wall themselves up in the home and do what they can to survive the night.
A cursory look at the cast list of "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" will reveal that most of the actors are playing characters who share their names. Alan Ormsby – future writer and co-director of "Deranged" and "Popcorn" – plays Alan. His then-wife, Anya Ormsby, plays Anya and so on. That this movie about a college theater group doing spooky shit on an island was made by a college theater group doing spooky shit in Florida suggests a certain meta element. It also suggests people just kind of fucking around and making shit up as they go along. Which is what "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" is truly indicative of. The plot is loose, best described as "some people go here and do some stuff" for an hour before the zombies appear. The dialogue strikes me as mostly improvised. A sequence where a frightened stage hand references that he pissed his pants over and over again definitely strikes me as the kind of thing that sounds hilarious to you and your pals when you're simply riffing and maybe smoked a joint or two. The same is true of two other members of the trope being flamboyant homosexuals who spend the whole film dressed as Draculas. Or when Anya starts putting on a Yiddish grandmother accent in the middle of a Satanic chant. It all feels very in-joke-y and on-the-fly, done more to amuse the people making it than for the audience's benefit.
Like most in-jokes deeply ingrained within an established group of (probably stoned) friends, the experience is largely tedious to outsiders. The acting in "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" is stilted, to say the least. That awkward quality is tied to the characters largely being extremely annoying. I'd call most of the people in the film "one-note" but the majority are more accurately described as "no-note." They stand around and make shrill voices, so interchangeable that their names are completely impossible to remember. Except for Alan, who is both the film's main character and its villain. Alan definitely has a note and it is "huge asshole." Ormsby says all his dialogue in a tone that is somehow simultaneously obnoxious, condescending, and monotone. Alan does nothing but belittle everyone around him, barking orders at them and insulting everyone. That he seems to think an act of simulated necrophilia – dragging Orville's corpse into the house, pretending to marry him, and then sleeping with the dead body – is the funniest gag in the world speaks to how sociopathic this guy is. One suspects the character was likely based on some real directors Ormsby and Clarke met in the theater. That doesn't make the character, who dominates most of the film, any easier to be around.
That same element is what makes "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" interesting though. Alan is the first person to attempt the witchcraft ceremony designed to raise the dead. He sucks at it. (He also mispronounces "Grimoire," which would be a telling trait if it was done intentionally but I'm not convinced it was.) Afterwords, Anya jumps in the grave and does a far better rendition, which succeeds later on. The whole time, Alan stands there and glares at her, absolutely incensed that a woman is showing him up. If there's any deeper point to "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things," it's that, the exhumed corpse of male entitlement. One of the first lines of dialogue in the film, referenced throughout, is Alan mocking a female cast member for being a spiritual – but not literal, she clarifies – virgin, a rare example of someone getting called a nerd and slut-shamed at the same time. Alan's facetious wedding and (hopefully) mock deflowering of Orville feels like some weird attempt to re-establish masculine virility. It all comes to a head in the final minutes when Alan pushes a woman into a horde of zombies to further his own escape, before Orville – the Hitchcockian bomb under the table throughout the whole movie – finally activates. "Dudes suck" is an evergreen observation to make. It's not enough to make "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" a less irritating overall experience but it does imply some deeper intentionality behind the film.
That's probably why this amateurish seeming, puff of pot smoke has garnered a small cult following over the years. Beneath the bad acting; dark to the point of indecipherable at times photography (even on the restored Blu-Ray); and relative non-narrative; the movie does have its merits. Ormsby is also credited with the make-up and he's much better at making zombies than acting. The faces caked with soot, sunken eyes, raggedy fangs, and chewed-up flesh all represent some genuinely impressive no-budget creature effects. I'd argue Orville's design, blank and non-threatening until it suddenly turns sinister in the final frame, is damn near iconic. "Deathdream" and "Black Christmas" proved Bob Clark had the horror chops. That is evident at times too. The sequence of the undead pulling themselves from their graves, shambling through the fog and eerily backlit, proves this probably could have been a good zombie movie if it hadn't waited until the last fifteen minutes to become one.
That Bob Clark would go on to direct an influential horror classic, at least one Oscar-nominated drama, extremely popular comedies, and some of the most miscalculated motion pictures ever made is evidence that he had a genuinely weird sensibility. Which means some of "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things'" irritating qualities had to be intentional. A lot of it definitely was a lack of money and rough-hewed talent though. Before his untimely death, Clark was planning a remake of the film. This probably would've been a good idea... Except he was well into the "Karate Dog" era of his career by that point. I recall one interview where he mentioned rapping zombies? Yeah, maybe best that didn't get made after all. "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" is mostly not worth your time but I can't entirely dismiss it either. [6/10]
For reasons that are never made entirely clear, a theater director named Alan sails his troupe of actors and technicians out to an obscure island near Miami. The island's main feature is an old cemetery reserved for lunatics and murderers. Once there, Alan plays cruel pranks on his actors – including the witchy Anya – by having friends of his jump out of graves. He's brought along a witch's grimoire and decides to perform a ritual from its pages. This involves digging up the rotten body of a man named Orville. Alan drags Orville into the old house they find and continues to use his corpse as a prop, including in a bizarre mock marriage. As the night stretches on, it becomes apparent that the seemingly unsuccessful ritual actually worked as intended. The dead begin to rise and hunger for the flesh of the living. The actors wall themselves up in the home and do what they can to survive the night.
Like most in-jokes deeply ingrained within an established group of (probably stoned) friends, the experience is largely tedious to outsiders. The acting in "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" is stilted, to say the least. That awkward quality is tied to the characters largely being extremely annoying. I'd call most of the people in the film "one-note" but the majority are more accurately described as "no-note." They stand around and make shrill voices, so interchangeable that their names are completely impossible to remember. Except for Alan, who is both the film's main character and its villain. Alan definitely has a note and it is "huge asshole." Ormsby says all his dialogue in a tone that is somehow simultaneously obnoxious, condescending, and monotone. Alan does nothing but belittle everyone around him, barking orders at them and insulting everyone. That he seems to think an act of simulated necrophilia – dragging Orville's corpse into the house, pretending to marry him, and then sleeping with the dead body – is the funniest gag in the world speaks to how sociopathic this guy is. One suspects the character was likely based on some real directors Ormsby and Clarke met in the theater. That doesn't make the character, who dominates most of the film, any easier to be around.
That's probably why this amateurish seeming, puff of pot smoke has garnered a small cult following over the years. Beneath the bad acting; dark to the point of indecipherable at times photography (even on the restored Blu-Ray); and relative non-narrative; the movie does have its merits. Ormsby is also credited with the make-up and he's much better at making zombies than acting. The faces caked with soot, sunken eyes, raggedy fangs, and chewed-up flesh all represent some genuinely impressive no-budget creature effects. I'd argue Orville's design, blank and non-threatening until it suddenly turns sinister in the final frame, is damn near iconic. "Deathdream" and "Black Christmas" proved Bob Clark had the horror chops. That is evident at times too. The sequence of the undead pulling themselves from their graves, shambling through the fog and eerily backlit, proves this probably could have been a good zombie movie if it hadn't waited until the last fifteen minutes to become one.
Every episode I've watched so far has been good but NBC audiences in 1972 did not flock to the William Castle/Richard Matheson produced anthology “Ghost Story.” After thirteen episodes, the framing device with Sebastian Cabot as Winston Essex at the haunted Mansfield House was cut and the series was re-titled to “Circle of Fear.” The quality of the scripts remained consistent, as in “Doorway of Death.” A single father with three kids – teenage Peggy and the younger Billy and Robert – move into a new apartment. Dad is often away at work, leaving Peggy in charge of her younger siblings. The first day the kids are there, they notice a strange man from the apartment upstairs beckoning to them. The children enter the empty room and open a door, revealing a snowy field, a cabin in the woods, and the same man chopping wood... Often with a dead woman by his side. The seemingly homicidal spectre, unseen by adults, continues to lure the kids back to the doorway upstairs. Before long, he's trying to convince the kids to bring their teenage sister along too.
I have no idea how much “stranger danger” was on parents' minds circa 1973. From what my parents tell me, children were allowed to wander around as they please back then. However, the implications in “Doorway to Death” seems blatant to me. The strange, nonspeaking man smiles at the kids and waves playfully. This is despite his obvious threatening qualities, like his bloody boots or the axe in his hand. He's always friendly to the children, without approaching the adults until he's earned the kids crush. The climax involves the spectral man attempting to place the teenage Peggy in the same role as the dead woman he's dismembered. Which plays a lot like a metaphorical sexual assault. Perhaps we are more aware of these things now and it was all unintentional. From modern eyes, this reads a lot like innocent, naive kids are being groomed by a ghost into doing something unwholesome.
The Addams family's extended branches continue to grow. This episode introduces Abigail Adams, a cousin of Gomez by marriage with only one D. Gomez and Morticia dislike her, feeling like she's constantly after the family fortune. Despite that, Abigail is a high society member and that interests the bickering Courtney couple. This works out because little Wednesday has, recently, developed a crush on their youngest son, Robespierre. The Courtneys accept a tea date with the Addams, arriving under the mistaken belief that they are direct relatives of the affluent Abigail Adams. As you'd expect, the straight-laced Courtneys bristle against Gomez and the gang immediately.
Here is another episode that feels like two separate ideas that got awkwardly fused together. On one half, you have some up-tight prim and proper types forcing themselves to interact with the Addams, because they mistakenly believe it'll win them some social points. This is another chance for the show to display one of the whole marks of its premise: That so-called “normal” families are a lot more dysfunctional than the outwardly macabre Addams. The Courtneys constantly argue, the husband threatening to divorce the wife any time they have a disagreement. Naturally, they are horrified by Cousin Itt dropping out of the chimney or Uncle Fester dropping in with a vice on his head. Mildly amusing stuff but nothing we haven't seen before from this program. Certainly not as adorable as the scene of Gomez and Lurch building a little house – adding a tiny King Kong to the roof – before smashing it with a miniature wrecking ball.
Much more charming is the B-plot, of Wednesday having her first crush. I don't know if a whole episode could have been supported by this premise. However, it does allow the entire family to play a role. Each member of the Addams give the household's youngest daughter advice on how to impress a boy. This amounts to a series of utterly adorable scenes of Lisa Loring, dressed in Morticia's trademark outfit, interacting with the rest of the cast. Her dragging around Fester's blunderbuss or giving Lurch a great big hug is utterly precious. Considering the series too often sidelines the kids, I like to see them given a proper role in the story and interacting with the rest of the family more. The way it all wraps up, very quickly before the end, also made me chuckle. Jeez, the appeal of sitcoms really is simply being able to spend time with characters you like, isn't it? [7/10]
Here is another episode that feels like two separate ideas that got awkwardly fused together. On one half, you have some up-tight prim and proper types forcing themselves to interact with the Addams, because they mistakenly believe it'll win them some social points. This is another chance for the show to display one of the whole marks of its premise: That so-called “normal” families are a lot more dysfunctional than the outwardly macabre Addams. The Courtneys constantly argue, the husband threatening to divorce the wife any time they have a disagreement. Naturally, they are horrified by Cousin Itt dropping out of the chimney or Uncle Fester dropping in with a vice on his head. Mildly amusing stuff but nothing we haven't seen before from this program. Certainly not as adorable as the scene of Gomez and Lurch building a little house – adding a tiny King Kong to the roof – before smashing it with a miniature wrecking ball.
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