A group of five young thespians, led by ruthless director Alan (script consultant, make-up artist and producer Alan Ormsby), travel to a remote island cemetery to attempt to raise the dead. After much bickering and stalling, the spell seems to work a little too well. Soon the dead rise to terrorize Alan and his theatrical companions.

For a film pegged as a "zombie" film (and thus lumped together with the films of Fulci and Romero), fans of undead carnage may be disappointed as for over an hour there is not one mortally challenged shambler to be seen. Instead, what CHILDREN offers is a genre curio, worthy of repeated viewings in order to fully appreciate its characteristic screwiness and surprising atmosphere.

No doubt providing the volume of the idiosyncratic atmosphere is Ormsby’s character, Alan. The future director of the following year’s DERANGED, Ormsby is a wonder to behold, relentlessly hamming it up for the camera. Speaking with a deliberately pretentious theater voice, he delivers some of the film’s most quotable dialogue (he proclaims that "the magnitude of your simplitude overwhelms me" when chewing out one of his cohorts). The rest of the small cast (mostly comprised of college friends and family members) chime in with witty, stinging dialogue as well, cloaked in an otherworldly, slushy yellow/green tint. But it is Ormsby, with his bushy brows darting about his face in tandem with his quips, that largely preserves the film’s loquacious, calculated humor.

Certainly, CHILDREN is one of the most surreal and downright bizarre zombie films. It is the jarring paradoxes in the film that grant the film its character. Ormsby and other cast members wear eyesore plaid indicative of the time period while traipsing through the gothic graveyard setting. The film’s setting is effectively unsettling, as pervasive fog and bad lighting seem to warp spatial relations (a testament to Jack McGowan’s photography), creating a strange scenery that appears to be neither a set nor a natural location. Bob Clarke’s (billed here as "Benjamin Clarke") makes the best use of the $70,000 budget and rushed schedule of 14 days, as he avoids excessive zooms, usually indicative of a rushed budget. His solemn direction, largely comprised of short and medium shots, gives an uneasy documentary feel to the production. It is at the locus of this authentic documentary feel and the overly prepared, stiffly delivered dialogue that allots the film a unique feeling of perversion and tension. Interestingly enough, the film's talented crew also included legendary low-budget cinema icon Ted V. Mikels (The Corpse Grinders), who served as the film's uncredited executive producer.

The traditional zombie shocks kick in only during the final twenty minutes, but the power of these scare sequences proves potent. In an obvious homage to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, Alan and crew board up a lonely house and seek refuge from the rotting army. Carl Zittrer’s score is tremendously effective here, a weird, unreal composition of dripping water, clanging pots and pans, and a sleazy synthesizer. It’s a score so bizarrely powerful that it almost single-handedly makes the otherwise pedestrian zombie attack something special. Thankfully, the film has many more delightful sequences prior to the climatic living vs. dead battle royale. Most of these scenes involve "Orville"; an unfortunate corpse dug up by Alan for graveyard fun. One priceless scene even involves Alan taking wedding vows with Orville! Orville proves to be more than just another sight gag, however as his presence typifies the "disrespect of the dead" motif in the film (indeed, children shouldn’t play with dead things). Almost as soon as Alan ridicules Orville, the dead rise from their graves for revenge, confirming this oddly effective message. There is also one scene including Alan’s fresh-from-sepulchre friend that could qualify as "art" by even the most pretentious standards: Orville’s crusted face is seen moving forward in extreme close-up. The audience, expecting a re-animated corpse, is taken by surprise as the frame zooms out and we see Orville’s inert body being carried by Alan and his crew. This is an example of one of the classier and imaginative "cheap scares" prevalent in such zombie pictures, as it effectively jolts while foreshadowing the inexorable walking dead mayhem.

But it is the film’s final sequence that gives it its spooky resonance. Overwhelmed by a horde of zombies, surviving members Alan and Anya (Anya Ormsby) both die terrible deaths. Alan throws Anya to the zombies, and Alan meets an ironic and well-overdue fate by the hands of his one-time playmate, Orville. And in an uncharacteristically downbeat conclusion, the film’s closing image of the film is of the zombies lurching onto the group’s boat, no doubt on their way to terrorize the city…

The haunting, downbeat ending, while uncharacteristic, actually enhances the film’s odd atmosphere. CHILDREN is indeed an odd film, as it is mostly a ninety minute joke with a zombie audience, but it remains, against all odds, a chillingly surreal midnight film.