Brattle Grindhouse: In Memory of Bob Clark

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things screens at 8:00 pm, and Satan's Cheerleaders screens at 10:00 pm on Thursday, May 17. We'll be spotlighting a few movies from the series, but you can see the full schedule here.

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things shot to the top of our Brattle Grindhouse wanna-see list because of the unforgettable title. The 1972 movie was also directed by the late Bob Clark, whose diverse body of work included A Christmas Story and Porky's.

In an interview with LA Weekly, Quentin Tarantino told Bob Clark at a directors' roundtable, "But hands down, on my own list of great zombie movies — or even the great shoestring classics of ’70s horror — Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things is right up there in the tip, tip top. The thing I loved about that movie so goddamned much is that the whole movie is humorous — it’s humorous from beginning to almost end."

The plot follows a pretentious theater director who takes actors to a remote island for a ritual that involves some shenanigans with a dead body named Orville. This business pisses off some corpses, and zombie hilarity ensues.

The second-best title of the festival, Satan's Cheerleaders, from 1978, shows right afterwards. The title pretty much sums it up - some Satanists in a town decide that some naughty cheerleaders would make perfect human sacrifices. John Carradine wanders into the movie as a bum. This one is total Mystery Science Theater material.