Driblets of blood fell from my hand, a reminder of the sorry state of Waldo, my red and white striped compatriot in the fight against the Goose Lord and his gang, who was bleeding out from a bullet wound to the gut. I scrambled looking for gauze, but all I saw were rows of candy colored fentanyl pills. I saw a door that was ajar leading to a back room where I used to store my collection of Beanie Babies, no doubt now being sold on the black market by the delinquents who had taken over my museum.

— To be continued. 

Hey, kids. It’s October and time for your Curator of Schlock to become the Curator of Shock! And I have some ghoulish tales for you this week starting with the 1972 zombie classic Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things from director Bob Clark. He’s the guy that directed the two Christmas classics: A Christmas Story and Black Christmas. Let’s see if he handles horror as well as the holidays.

The movie begins with a cemetery caretaker being overtaken by a couple of ghouls. How would you like to have that job? Keeping an eye on a cemetery on a deserted island in the middle of the night only to be accosted by a ghoul in a top hat. It doesn’t help that this cemetery is filled with people that couldn’t get buried in a regular cemetery, the mass murderers and psychopaths are who’s buried here. And those too poor to be buried in a proper cemetery. I learned that they just fill a hole with bodies, cover it with dirt, and proceed to fill up another hole. Isn’t that what happened to Mozart at the end of Amadeus?

We in the audience learn all of this from Alan (Alan Ormsby), owner of a well-respected theatre company in the big city. He’s forced his theatre company to sail over to this nearby island for dead criminals. What for you may ask? Hey, how about digging up a dead body? And if you don’t want to, you’re fired. You’ll never work as an actor in this town again! So his actors start digging and find a desiccated corpse in a top hat.

An actor named Jeffrey (Jeff Gilan) tries to lift the corpse up only to scream as the corpse attacks him. Alan laughs as the whole thing turns out to be a prank. The living dead man is just another actor from the company wearing some fancy prosthetics. Jeffrey complains that he peed his pants and the other actors want out, but Alan still has a few tricks up his sleeves. 

Donning a blue wizard’s robes and reading from a book of spells, he explores Satan to raise the dead. He even has a corpse he named Orville  handy to see if the spell worked, but no dice. Orville doesn’t come back to life and Alan looks like a fool. Still, there’s fun to be had ridiculing a corpse. Alan even has Jeffrey preside over a fake marriage ceremony between him and Orville. The acting group has had it and decides to leave the island with or without Alan, even if it costs them their jobs. There’s just one problem. The dead have indeed come back to life. Fancy that. Until next time, avoid reading from ancient grimoires and playing around with dead things. 

 Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.