Shattered Lives

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.

Unfortunately, I can not recommend this film. If there were more money invested into the technical and casting aspects of the movie, I have a feeling it would have been a great movie. However, an awful mess of poor acting, miserable (emphasis on the miserable) audio mixing, and poor direction earn this film a 1. The storyline is quite predictable, however you can't help but feel sorry for Rachel. Yes, the "dolls" are creepy, however the negative aspects described above greatly outweigh any potential there could have been with them (especially the trite robot voices). The only reason I watched past the 15 minute mark was out of sheer morbid curiosity.

Actually though, I really hate bashing films like Shattered Lives.

The amount of effort, money, time, coordination, and heart that it takes to make a film --- and Carl Lindburgh did virtually everything here --- attests to the fact that he took this effort seriously. It's got to mean something to him....why does it mean so little to us?

Many reasons, actually. Shattered Lives is a good example of a neat "idea" that should never have found its way into a script-writing program. It opens with a (by now) standard montage of a psycho killer in a gas mask hacking up a room full of half-drunk, stoned kids. This might mean something if there was ever any real exposition between the killer (whose identity is obvious from reading any brief summary of the film, unfortunately) and the victims. There are a few, very quick exchanges between the kids and the killer about midway through the movie, but they don't add any kind of clear picture about possible motivations. I understand you don't need any motivation to kill someone if you're a psycho, but there's no suspense or scares to fill that gap. It's like LIndburgh made this movie to say "See, isn't it neat I can make a movie. I can turn the camera on and point it!"

This brings us to the heart of the movie, and the relationship between a little girl named Rachel and her two toy clowns who come to life whenever she's alone with them. The clowns are a problem. They are neither creepy or coherent and their behavior seems to deliberately ape the behavior of many of the ancillary characters in "Twin Peaks," especially the film "Fire Walk with Me." But whereas Lynch's inventions are very multi-dimensional and cryptic --- they're INTERESTING --- these clowns are a drag. They make insipid pantomimes, talk in ridiculous rhyming stanzas, and worse yet, their dialog is slowed down and distorted to the point that it is hard if not impossible to decipher.

In addition, there are some jaw-droppingly bad technical gaffes, the worst of which is a scene where....I kid you not....the aspect ratio changes 2 or 3 times for absolutely NO REASON. It's in a simple dialogue scene. Did someone's license to Windows DVD Maker expire?

It's a real mess, all in all. It starts from a place that you're sure you've figured out, goes on to a LONG sequence that is obvious where it's headed, then leaves you at some place you don't want to be.

Lindburgh needs to take a break from watching movies and dig up an original idea, following that with a screen writing class. Shattered Lives has nothing to offer and is a joke even by the standards of Student Film.

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.

The Worst Movie ever. Don't waste your money. It's not even worth renting. I regret it. The cover looks like an eye catcher but once you see the previews that this DVD shows you should realize how bad the movie will be. Let's just say it was turned off in the first 20 minutes of how bad the movie really is. I should have read the review here first to not waste my money. I've even called blockbuster asking for a credit and that they should definitely remove it from their shelves. Don't get me wrong, I love all types of movies but this does not qualify as such. I hope they didn't spend to much money making it. The person who wrote it, directed it, produced it, starred in it, etc. should have spent the money and time elsewhere.