My first impression of the movie was that I wished that the cinematographer would have taken the lens cap off the camera, then I wished he'd put it back on.

The teaser at the start, instead of giving me a jolt, made me laugh when I saw the chintzy makeup on the Ghoul. Later we discover that it's all a gag, to scare Alan, a theater director's cast members, coerced into coming to an island so that he can direct a goofy Satanic ritual.

The collection of characters:

Alan, wearing an outfit that would get him beaten to death in most biker bars, is the prototypical bully boss. He speaks with such forced diction that he sounds like an English professor on acid, and his incessant sardonic laughter makes me wish he'll die first, but no such luck. The others include Val, the snarky, cynical older woman, Anya, the ditzy wanna-be mystic, Winns and Terry, the young lovers, and Jeff, the chubby comic relief character. These comprise the The action follows what Joe Bob Briggs calls "your basic 'Spam in a cabin' plot." A group of friends isolated on an island (coincidentally within view of the lights of Miami) use a grimoire (which Alan mispronounces grim-or-ee) to raise a corpse from the dead. the ritual seems to fail, but we all know what's coming.

I've often wondered why grimoires are always portrayed in the same way. These books are priceless, revered, preserved over centuries. Why do they always look as if they were run over by a lawnmower?

The results are predictable. The fools open a can of evil and don't have the proverbial bigger can to contain it. It's a classic cautionary tale, whose title succinctly states the theme. CSPWDT The ending, as the zombies look across the bay to the lights of Miami, suggests they will use Alan's boat to sail across these waters and continue their mayhem.

Acting: half the cast overacts terribly, balancing the other half who seem to be playing themselves to the point it looks like a reality TV show instead of a horror movie.

The dialog is peppered with an endless flow of bad jokes, puns, and insults as if the film were an episode of Whose Line is it Anyway. my favorite line: Decomposition does strange things [clip]

The majority of character names are identical with each actor's first name: Alan Ormsby plays Alan. Anya Ormsby plays Anya. Valerie Mamches plays Val. Jeff Gillen plays Jeff. Paul Cronin plays – you get the idea. Probably to help them keep track of which lines in the script are theirs.

The budget for CSPWDT was reportedly $70,000. How it was spent is a mystery. I've concluded that the lighting is dim in most scenes to keep the electric bill low and so that we don't get too good a gander at the interior sets, which look to have cost around eight dollars to prepare and costumes that have that wonderful off the rack at Goodwill look to them.

The most money seems to have gone for the Zombie makeup, which is the best part of the movie. No two alike.

The movie provides a sort of Zombies' Greatest Hits, a historical compilation of zombies ranging from the pasty-faced Oliver, a dead ringer for the sinister organist in Carnival of Souls through the cinematic ages to anticipating the gooey delights of Lucio Fulci films.

They emerge from their graves in the standard horror film trope of heaving sod, arms and torsos thrusting through the turf that we've all seen before. Once, maybe twice a film is acceptable. I stopped counting at six.

The largely uncredited horde swarms the house in a climax reminiscent of the original Night of the Living Dead, the humans nailing boards over doorways (in this case with a convenient box of nails and a hammer that just happened to be lying around the abandoned house). The zombie attack is worth sitting through the rest of the movie, unless of course you have Tivo and can skip the preliminaries.

The IMDB database tags CSPWDT as comedy first and horror second. Children Shouldn't play with Dead Things is fun to watch if you don't take it too seriously. If you do, it comes across like a bad junior high film project. Instead, watch it as it was may have been intended, a movie that lampoons the horror film genre, and succeeds in spite of itself.