Revenge of the Revenant Review 21: The one where the zombies try to unionize

 

Title: Shatter Dead

What Year?: 1994

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity/ Unnatural Experiment

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

As I write this, the review count for this feature is finally over 20, which is pretty close to what I planned on from the start. This has been a further reminder that I had one review undone that I had planned on from the beginning, still literally in a pile of movies I had backlogged or never put back. I knew it was time to get this one out of the way, but I also knew I was in for a rough ride, which is really why I had put it off so long. What we have here is a movie as amateurishly cheap as Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, as willfully provocative as Cemetery Man or Dead Alive, and as awkwardly off-kilter as anything short of The Video Dead. Here is Shatter Dead, the true tail end of the “vintage” zombie movie wave, and the end of my rope.

Our story begins with a shot of an angel having relations with a mortal woman, an image that will be repeated without further explanation. We then get a dramatically intoned skip to 17 months later, where we find our heroine Susan, making her way through a city where the weirdos and panhandlers are now the undead. We quickly learn that the dead have been coming back to life, and nobody seems to have found a way to redeanimate them. But rather than attacking the living, they have simply become the new underclass of society, scraping along on panhandling, petty theft and in one gruesome case as a crash test dummy. Meanwhile, Susan herself plows through the landscape with an arsenal of weapons and a vicious contempt for the undead. Her prejudices are challenged when she is confined with Mary, a cheerful revenant who has willingly joined the undead. Things go downhill when a group of the zombie radicals massacre the refugees, once again leaving Susan to make her way home. But what will she do when her boyfriend turns out to be among the undead?

Shatter Dead was a direct-to-video film written and directed by actor and cinematographer Scooter McCrae. The role of Susan was given to an actress identified as Stark Raven, whose only other known film credit was in McCrae’s later film Sixteen Tongues. Other cast included the equally obscure Flora Fauna as Mary and the late and reasonably accomplished Robert Wells as a zombified preacher. The movie received some favorable notice from contemporary reviewers and later commentators. Dendle’s Zombie Movie Encyclopedia compared it favorably to other independent and direct-to-video zombie movies of the late 1980s and 1990s, while criticizing it for weak acting, limited production values and “direct(ing) too much energy away from its fascinating conceptual possibilities in favor of trite exploitation concerns”. The movie was at one point available for streaming from Netflix, but disappeared by around 2010. It also appears to be “out of print” on disc, though copies remain available in the $10-25 range.

As with many if not most of these entries, my personal history with this movie starts with finding out about it from Dendle’s reference work. I looked it up within a few years, with surprising ease for a film as far under the radar as this one clearly was. On initial viewing, it was interesting but not that impressive, with the strongest memory being its absolutely horrific ending. Jump forward once again to a few years back, and I thought of this one not long after I looked up or bought up a few other movies I eventually reviewed for this feature. I soon figured out there was no longer a good way to obtain the movie without buying it, so I ordered it for a fairly low price. I then watched the disc I had obtained exactly once before shelving it. I took it down again for the stack I assembled when I started this feature in October 2020, and there it stayed right up to when I viewed it for this review. As it turned out, all the reasons I had procrastinated were no better or worse than I could have recounted from seeing it in the 2000s.

What truly stands out about this movie is that it actually feels a lot less strange on viewing than it does recounted in cold blood, a pattern that already cropped up with Life After Beth and Dead Heat. Part of this is undoubtedly how good the dialogue, character development and world-building are, making a bizarre premise seem mundane in the best surrealist tradition just by showing it through the eyes of the people who have to live through it. Wells’ entertaining and genuinely funny performance gets special mention here, especially where he recounts the trials of the undead. But another major factor is a counterintuitive lack of energy, especially for a film as far off the charts as this one is for graphic content. The movie has the violence and gore of an exploitation movie plus as much skin as an arthouse flick, yet the prevailing atmosphere is existential depression. With the dead unable to leave the world of the living, the remaining humans have slipped into a kind of indifference, broken only by Susan’s hatred of the zombies. It is by all means an approach that “works”, but stretched out over even the modest 80-some running time, it quickly becomes as bleak and demoralizing for the viewer as for the characters.

The core weaknesses of the film, however, emerge from uneven development of its premise. Its attempts at a theological rationale through recurring images of the very carnal (and female!) angel simply never pan out. I must further stress that there is absolutely no explanation given in the film itself. More immediate problems arise at the edges of its premise. Just for example, Susan’s guns are so useless that she might as well leave them behind, though the movie certainly doesn’t downplay the irrationality of her behavior. The undead have their own illogic, particularly the repeated and laughable assertion that they will be eternally young. In fact, while they don’t show much visible rot, they are stipulated to be incapable of healing wounds or broken bones, an issue which would surely add up even without the living trying to re-kill them. Then there’s moments that just don’t feel developed, like a character who mentions a phone call from his dead and cremated mother and an undead fetus that is simply too poorly done to work.

That leaves me with the “one scene”, and it is with more than a little reluctance that I choose an actual shower scene. It starts with Mary approaching Susan and asking to share her new bar of soap. They proceed to the shower, and what’s noteworthy for me is that the camera actually follows their natural movements, exactly the kind of detail where sequences like this usually just annoy me. In one of a modest number of effective surreal touches, Susan keeps her gun with her, incidentally is terrible for a firearm. Susan sees a large blemish on Mary’s leg from pooled blood, which she immediately recognizes as a sign she is undead (a detail first featured in Sole Survivor). She starts, but Mary manages to (literally) disarm her, remarking, “You have the gun… and the soap.” We then get an intriguing monologue about her life (???) as a zombie among the living. She mentions stealth tactics like standing on her head to put color in her face, as well as the above-mentioned conceit that she has escaped old age. It’s almost innocuous when she comments that she has no scars from her demise. It’s easily one of the most thoughtful bits of world-building in the history of the genre. For an already thoughtful movie, it’s far from an isolated moment, yet it still sets a high mark that the movie as a whole can’t quite reach.

In conclusion, this one is the most conflicted I’ve been about any movie I’ve reviewed outside of Zardoz. There’s enough good and bad here for both a higher or lower rating, and enough content issues to fall well within “unrated” territory. What balances things out is the thought clearly but into developing the premise. It doesn’t quite rise above its limitations the way movies like The Video Dead or Chopper Chicks In Zombietown do, but still finishes well above the bottom. As for whether I would recommend it, I must say it’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s one more movie that no survey of the genre will be complete without.