It's A Wonderful Death

According to the title of a once-infamous horror flick, children shouldn't play with dead things. Yet, delightfully, the nation's youth are currently being showered with morbid treats which positively revel in the lighter side of death, thanks to the miracle of modern 'kidult' cinema. With half-term upon us, and Halloween lurking round the corner, it seems that everyone's heading for the graveyard in search of flesh-ripping fun for all the family.

Top of the rotting pile is Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, a gorgeous underworld stop-motion epic which the director describes as "a sweet little love story... only with dead people." Burton's real-life partner Helena Bonham Carter voices the eponymous stiff, an alluring bag of bones whose rank and rotting body parts just keep falling off. When fate demands that Victor (Johnny Depp) take her hand in marriage, that's exactly what he gets. When the bride rolls her eyes at the groom, he has to keep rolling them back. Cute little maggots crawl in and out of corpulent ears, deceased dogs learn to play dead and fetch their own legs, and a decapitated head props up the bar while skeletons cut a rug in the nightclub from beyond the grave. I started smiling at the first strains of Danny Elfman's creepy score and then laughed and cried my way through the remaining 77 minutes, feeling for all the world like a six-year-old who just fell in love with Elsa Lanchester's Bride Of Frankenstein for the very first time.

Terrifically, this zombiefied entertainment carries a 'PG' rating, with the merest warning that the film contains some "mildly scary scenes" - although the biggest scares will surely be for the parents who believe (wrongly) that all kids' entertainment should be morally uplifting and sweet. Those of us who grew up on a diet of 'Famous Monsters' magazines and Hammer movie TV reruns will know, of course, that an interest in ghosts, ghouls and goblins is an entirely healthy obsession which should be nurtured and treasured for life. I can't wait to see Corpse Bride again, hopefully in a cinema packed with kids who will promptly go home and cannibalise their teddy bears and Barbie dolls, to the horror of their suburban mums and dads. Hooray!

Next page • "Chewing upon hunks of meat decorated with infant booties"