Shattered Lives

How this was released beyond a school film department I have no idea, but it has some of the worst acting, sound mixing, music, and editing I've seen in years, and this from someone who loves low-budget schlock as much as art film. Stuck it out to the bitter end: Poignant scenes came off as trite and repetitive, the robo-drawl clowns were far more irritating than creepy, and the delivery was often given with all the passion of a middle school play. Technically and artistically, the film is a complete bomb. With any luck, this is Lindbergh's last film.

I even ended up putting my grocery list together during the incredibly long fake emo scenes toward the end. It sounded like a LiveJournal read aloud, there was just nothing of substance to grip on to.

The height of tackiness is when the director shills his own movies in the reviews! A Carl L. was the only 5-star on Blockbuster, and a lucas_smidth whose only other high rating was for another Carl Lindbergh film just happened to be the highest rater here.

This was the most terrible movie I have EVER seen. Im serious. The acting was terrible. The plot was bad. Scenes went on for nothing. Oh and the sound was pathetic. it would go loud and then low constantly and I don't just mean in loud scenes, just bad audio period. The beginning of the movie is pretty much the end. Then it cuts to the story of a little girl and her so called reasons for why she is messed up. Once you realize what's going on it is quite easy to figure out the story. The mom is pathetic and I think that is the only thing that gave this movie any value, the fact that the mom is so terrible that you have no sympathy for her at all. I won't go into detail as it would spoil the movie, however it doesn't matter because it's not even worth watching. Save yourselves, don't bother with this movie it's SO bad.

If I met this director i'd tell him to quit film making and find a new career!!

Following the death of her grandparents, a woman's quest for revenge on the guilty party assumes a similar role that she undertook as a youngster when demonic clowns appeared to her in order to kill and has it continue on her new role.

This was an utterly dreadful and completely worthless effort. About the only thing that needs to be watched is the opening massacre of the college students which contains some rather nice stalking, a few decent kills and a burst of energy that's completely missing from the rest of the film. That it has the nerve to replay this exact sequence at the end says it all about the quality of the rest of the movie for it couldn't be bothered to try anything else. The flaws here are numerous in both quantity and execution, the most egregious of all is the fact that the demonic clowns at the heart of the story are so completely uninteresting and non-threatening that they're a joke to be considered creepy, given lame design work that's completely cliché alongside computerized speaking voices that are obviously distorted human voices instead of truly demonic-sounding beings that really ruins their overall effectiveness with all the time we have to spend on these weak supposed-villains. On top of that, they're thrust into such a completely uninteresting story that even if they had been creepy it would've been hard to take the rest of the film seriously as this plays off more like a fifth-rate Lifetime channel affair concerning an adulterous mother and her clueless husband who are thrust into exaggeratedly overlong scenes that go on forever to clue us into her mental disorder that ends up beating us so over-the-top with that message it loses the impact and just becomes tedious to sit through. Lastly, the whole movie is rendered near unwatchable by the low-budget on display which causes the audio numerous problems of dropping in-and-out of the scene, never giving this anything to do so it just feels boring and is loaded with so many camera tricks and angles that try to convince us something's happening but ultimately highlights the futility of what's going on. Overall there's so little to offer here it's not worthwhile.

Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, Brief Nudity and a sex scene.

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.

This is a very good low budget horror film. the mood is unsettling, kinda like a David lynch film. The clowns are creepy and effective. There is more going on this film, then just your generic b-movie horror film of teenagers being killed off one by one. I was highly entertained. I looked up the budget on this film, it was something like 70,000 ! and they shot on 35mm. films looks great visually, not sure to credit the director or DP on that one? someone needs to give these filmmakers a real budget, and see what they can come up with.... perhaps a Shattered Lives 2 is on the horizon? I loved the clown characters, and feel there is much more story behind them, where they come from? what motivates them. etc.