I purchased Shattered Lives because I am in the middle of doctoral research on evil children in film and had no other way of watching it to check out the narrative to determine its appropriateness. After collecting over 300 titles of varying standards, I'm now down to the bottom of the proverbial barrel with this hackneyed shot-on-video student film. There are some really dreadful evil child films out there, such as Robert Voskanian's 1977 Z-grader, The Child, but this film is way more tedious with its overlong scenes and crawling pace, sloppy editing, trite dialogue and uneven soundtrack. A few reviewers have highlighted the poor performances of the actors and most of them do indeed feel very staged and self-conscious, but I'm going to leave these poor souls alone considering the substandard material they had to work with, written by the wannabe director cum producer cum editor Carl Lindberg, who is yet to produce anything of any substance and seems obsessed with emulating Donnie Darko for some inexplicable reason. Finally, a very bloody and contrived multiple murder sequence that opens and closes the film is rendered uninteresting because of its outlandish scenario so that this too devolves into pure tedium. I'm usually quite patient and forgiving with films but I found myself sighing and fast forwarding through meaningless scenes that went for too long, such as an awkward dance performed by two dwarfs dressed as harlequin dolls, endlessly circling each other for about six minutes - sounds intriguing but it's not.
My advice? There are too many really solid shot-on-video horror films flooding the market these days to justify wasting your time fast forwarding through this lifeless morass.
