Sorry this review is so late. I meant to finish it last week but while I was typing it up at a local laundromat an 8ft tall black guy asked for a few quarters so he could dry his clothes. I thought everything was going to be okay until he noticed I had a t-shirt on that read “I was trapped in a Vietnamese tiger cage with John McCain for 10 years and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”. He proceeded to punch me in the back of the head and drive his knee into my liver before pinning me to the ground and carving a backwards 'B' into my right ass cheek with an Xacto knife. He then told me, “You better Barack the muthafuckin' vote now, Wonder Bread!”, to which I replied that I was already voting for Obama and the shirt was just a joke. Seeing the error of his ways, the gentleman then helped me to my feet, apologized for the consonant he had mutilated my gluteus with, returned my quarters to me and said he'd see me at the voting booth in November... or else he'd be back to hack the lyrics to “Super Freak” into as much of my pigment deficient epidermis as it took.

I swear every word of that statement to be true and I'll be filing a police report on the incident as soon as I figure out just what the fuck it is I'm watching right now.

Shatter Dead wasn't so much recommended to me as it was brought to my attention. While the woman who told me about it was describing it to me, I made special note of one particular comment: the female lead gets fucked with a gun. Hmmmm. I have a friend who once did a pinup spread for a punk-porn nudie cuties site where she diddled her twiddle with a firearm that would've given Dirty Harry a cure for E.D., but I'd never actually seen a woman insert a piece into her piece. Being the perverse seeker of human curiosities it says I am on my business cards, Shatter Dead shot up the ranks on my “Find Excuses To Watch These Movies” list. Sure enough, when in need of a movie made in 1994, it finally gets its time to shine... or in this case, shart.

When your movie opens with two lesbians getting a little bump & grind (the real kind of lesbians, not Hollywood porno lesbians) and the girl with the rubber phallus grows angel wings in mid-pseudo-coitus, you know you're in for something special... the kind of special things that a healthy diet of bran will bring you on a regular basis. 17 months following this wanna-be art house doggy style moment (that, SPOILER ALERT, has absolutely no impact on the rest of the movie), the world has turned into George Romero's dreams for his never-to-be made Twilight of the Dead as the living dead inhabit the world, but are reduced to little more than homeless inconveniences to the remaining humans. These ghouls aren't looking for a spot in the skin and brains buffet line, but there is talk of starting a labor union... of the dead! Adding “of the dead!” to anything makes it exponentially more interesting. Anyway, case in point of the detante with the non-dead: a young woman named Susan walks through a crappy little small town in New York state as the resurrected and mutilated populace sit in doorways, shamble around aimlessly, or just hassle her for some spare change because they're “too damn ugly to go back home”. Despite this apparent semi-civility though, not all of the maggot farms are nice people (some even siphon your gas!), so survivors like Sue still carry around a healthy supply of southern comfort. Not the consumable kind though, I mean the kind of southern comfort that has a trigger and can fire off five or six-hundred rounds per minute. Perfect for re-deading any undead that get out of line. Besides, as zombies they're no longer legally eligible for basic human liberties and thus shooting them isn't a crime! Besides, they're all supposedly immortal, so no matter where you shoot 'em or how many times, it's not like you're actually killing them.

When her wheels run outta fuel on a lonely stretch of rural pavement, Suzy's accosted by a gang of ghouls who just happen to be hanging out in the roadside shrubbery of that exact spot. The posse of puss bags are lead by a seemingly still human preacher character who claims the used Plymouth for his “people” in the name of Jeebus (look it up)... then immediately drives off with it once he's re-fueled it. Having no interest in cracking open the girl's skull and feasting on gray meat (the happy medium between light and dark meat) for dinner, the dead just let her go and she starts the long walk back to civilization... at least until she can carjack a ride from a dead guy with a license. Guy must've died right before the zombie plague thing hit too, cuz he doesn't have a lick of makeup or fake blood on him anywhere.

Finding her way to a residential area, Sue's put up in a flophouse with a bunch of other vagrants as part of the neighborhood curfew program. One of the few guys there hits on her, all of the women look at her like dogs eying a bag of Alpo, and what she doesn't notice is that her new preacher buddy is in the living room watching autopsy videos. That reminds me, I gotta go buy groceries after this... While at the flop, Susan's introduced to Mary, who actually killed herself so she would stay young and attractive forever. But no one else there is supposed to know her circulatory system doesn't work anymore, so don't tell anybody. Though wary of Mary, the living dead girl convinces Sue that she's not a bad person just because she doesn't eat, sleep, or breathe now. It would be easier to catch some 'z's though if she wouldn't stay up playing her damn harpsichord all night...

While Sue is dreaming about topless she-male angels and giving a blowjob to a revolver, the house goes batshit nuts-o when a group of oddly garbed gents led by Howard Stern's evil twin in a gay superhero costume break into the place, shoot everybody, and declare there ownership of everything as members of the last remaining humans on Earth! The noise startles Susan from her sleep and she puts a few slugs into Mary's coconut in the excitement. Because the zombie virus doesn't reside in the brain but in the “soul”, Mary isn't dead... or not again at least... as such, she and Sue get into a fight (yeah, getting shot in the face tends to piss people off) and our heroine tries to bash her skull in, only to find it pointless beyond fucking up all chances of Mary trying to pass for human anymore. Sue ties her new ex-bff up and manages an escape. Not so lucky is the owner of the house, who gets her belly blown open and thus gives premature birth to her baby, suckling the hellspawn at her teat in the shower in what I'm sure is a statement about how the government is filled with secret Nazis and spiritual terrorists. Damn it I hate art films. Almost as much as I hate movies where the protagonists are all pre-pubescent children spewing bad puns and fart jokes that even a 1st grader would call hackneyed... if they knew what “hackneyed” meant.

The next day our girl catches up to the preacher and chases him through the neighborhood in an effort to get back her car. Instead of just painting the pavement red and gray, she listens to him babble on like any other dick about how he's the savior and God has chosen him to lead the remnants of mankind into the new world. Finally she just dusts him (only after he tells her he's beginning to like her... and licks her) and takes back her ride, heading to her original destination: her boyfriend Dan's apartment... where Dan has gone all crazy and emo in her absence and slit his wrists, becoming a zombie too. Which I don't understand, because though suicide used to be painless (and bring on many changes... *rimshot*) now it's just pointless. Instead of ending his family issues and incessant ringing phone, now it'll just go on forever... or at least until he realizes that rupturing his ear drums will fix all of this. Though we haven't really been told what affect things like decapitation or cremation would do to these particular undeadees.

Taking her loved one's turning with all the emotion of a pile of ground beef, Sue's suggestion to get around his now permanent case of limp dick (no blood, no erection) is to tie her gun around his waist using the belt of his bathrobe and use it as a strap-on... instead of just getting an actual strap-on. That's right kiddies, it's time for the whole reason I rented this stinker in the first place: gun sex! It's pretty graphic to watch (and very, uhm, “soggy”), but in some weird effort to try and make it less pornographic, the hardcore stuff is overlayed with softcore stuff. So, even if Smith & Wesson tag-teaming a girl is your idea of erotic object insertion fun, this is more like another trippy attempt at no budget imitation art than it is dolphin floggin' exploitation material. I can't imagine putting something metal with that many hard edges into such a tender orifice can feel too good either...

The thing that really bugs me about the zombies here is their inclination to embrace their so-called immortality as soon as humanly possible without waiting to see if there's any kind of cure for this condition. Mary and Dan both lament about not wanting to grow old and be feeble and pathetic when they do become the walking dead, but they're not even willing to give it another year or two first! Shit, if I had the choice I know I'd wait till my dick at least gave out on me before I even considered “crossing over”! Further more, Dan is such a hopeless romantic that he poisons Susan's milk because he wants her to be young and beautiful (well, at least the first one) alongside of him until the end of time. Does he consider that maybe he's not going to want to be with her in another 20 years, let alone another 20 days?! That's a big commitment to consider before you start grinding lethal amounts of sleeping pills into the glass of moo juice you're giving to the one you say you love! Besides, once she's turned, what's to guarantee she's going to want to stay with you after you've killed her anyway?! Way to go Bud Casanova, if we didn't know you were a queef before, you've just relinquished all doubt we might've had left.

Sue shoots Dan in the head for not asking her if he could poison her first, which sends him jackknifing out of a window, landing on the sidewalk and spitting up crushed yellow ice(?!). The preacher and some of his living dead followers appear and prop dead Danny up by tying broken piece of wood to his body to support his myriad of broken bones. He inches around like the Tin Man in need of his oil can, and the movie ends with Sue staring into her bathroom mirror, presumably dead as she runs water droplets from the faucet down her face to substitute the tears she probably can't cry anymore. Aw, boo-hoo. Cry me a river... or at least a glass of water to wash down my blood pressure meds.

Shatter Dead is yet another casualty in the ever growing series of “sounds like a cool idea on paper but shits all over your TV screen” movies I seem to be coming across lately. Though I don't understand the world it takes place in, I'm very interested in it. The electricity and water all run fine, but the humans live under curfew laws and there's no actual police, just vigilante types putting themselves in charge while random maniacs in bizarre costumes go on a killing spree? That stuff definitely needs to be cleared up. But the stuff about people dying and returning to live forever despite any amount of physical trauma committed on them? That provides interesting possibilities, some of which are actually touched on here like a zombie who sold one of his limbs for medical experimentation, mention of the possible zombie labor union, and a pregnant woman shot in the stomach who now has an incomplete zombie baby to take care of the rest of her unending life. Again, all cool on paper, but reduced to digital diarrhea when it comes to execution... which is what watching it feels like: a slow, drawn out, excruciating execution. Like slowly being electrocuted to death by hooking a car battery up to your nipples and taint.

Effects wise the gore is all about red syrup being thrown against walls or sprayed from bottles. The makeup stuff is the kinda shit you'd buy at a drug store the day before Halloween because you have absolutely no idea what to dress as and fall back on “zombie in torn shirt”. Nothing says “living dead” like ripped jeans and black circles under your eyes. At least that's what the Shattered Dead folks figured... The acting is bland and straight up BAD. “Stark Raven”'s run as Susan just hurts. She reminds me of a friend of mine who thought she could get into acting, the only difference being that my friend actually knew enough to give up immediately after she was rejected by the acting school she applied to. If she wasn't fucking the director at the time, I'd say the safe bet is that “Stark” got the job because she was willing to shower on camera and stick a prop gun into her slimy hair pie. Dan Johnson, the guy playing Dan (now THAT is creative writing!), is either a good actor or an actual pseudo-intellectual sack of douche. Either way he fits the character and is probably the only cast member who didn't make me cringe while reading off his lines. Not surprising that he's the only one of the group to have anything resembling an acting career following this, even if it was only random bit parts on the occasional TV show.

Writer/director Scooter McCrae should stick with the story ideas and let somebody else handle the camera. The production group is credited as “Seeing Eye Dog Productions”, which makes sense because the camera work is bad enough that you'd think McCrae was blind and needed a helper animal to do the shooting for him. The guy's only other creative credit is a flick called Sixteen Tongues that sounds like a cunnilingus orgy porno. Fittingly enough, from what I've read it's a very sexualized and, like SD, very idea heavy project that also fails to flesh out its potential and suffers under the thumb of a barely-there budget. Once again I'm interested enough to give it a whirl, but having lived through one McCrae original, my loins will be properly girded for the next (and likely last) one. I'm saying this because I feel bad enough that your name is “Scooter” and I think you need someone to give you some legit advice on improving your existence: focus on writing. Get your ideas on paper and learn to flesh them out into worthwhile ideas. Drop the retarded art school bullshit symbolism crap and worry about concepts, story and dialog. Once you've mastered that, then you can dick around with becoming a director again and sticking in scenes of lesbian angels having anal sex and eating Jell-O with a Native American shaman next to a bonfire in the remains of the Twin Towers.

One thing Shatter Dead does manage is living up to its title. Not in the “shattering your nerves” sense, but in the “past tense for the dropping of a deuce” term. You know, like “No thanks, I don't need to shit right now because I shat before I left the house”. Instead of "the wind beneath my wings", this movie is the wind beneath my ass. For now though I'll give McCrae's first effort a single star and just enough confidence that Sixteen Tongues will provide some kind of improvement. Don't let me down, cuz I've got a sawed-off double barrel that wants to do the back door version of what Stark did to that revolver on you if it isn't...