Director/Screenplay – Scooter McCrae, Photography – Matthew M. Howe, Music – Scooter McCrae, Geek Messiah & Stephen Rajkumar, Special Effects Supervisor – Pericles Lewnes, Makeup Effects – Arthur M. Jolly & Lee Malecki. Production Company – Seeing Eye Dog Productions.
Cast
Stark Raven (Susan), Flaura Fauna (Mary), Robert Wells (The Preacher Man), Daniel “smalls” Johnson (Dan), Marina Del Rey (Grandma), John Weiner (Jack), Jeffrey Kushner (The Patrolman), Dale Customer (The Lord of the New Order), Robert Ferapples [Scooter McCrae] (Corpse in Car), Barbara “Candy” Coster & Kamal DuPree (Angels of Death)
Plot
Everywhere the dead have returned to life where they resemble the living in most respects. Society is in chaos. Susan travels through small town New York State. She is surrounded by a group of the dead led by a preacher who take her car and supplies. She takes another car at gunpoint. In one neighbourhood, she finds there is a curfew and is not permitted to sleep in the car. She is granted a room at a boarding house where she meets the dead girl Mary and forms an attraction to Jack.
Shatter Dead was the directorial debut of Scooter McCrae and gained him a small cult reputation at the time. Subsequently, McCrae has directed only two other films with Sixteen Tongues (1999) and Betamax (2015), both in the horror genre. Certainly, he has worked in just about every capacity behind the camera and has made acting appearances in a number of other films.
It would be easy to look at a synopsis of Shatter Dead and dismiss it as being just another low-budget Zombie Film. It was made in the interregnum between the second wave of zombie films that began with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the major revival the genre underwent in the mid-2000s. On the other hand, Shatter Dead is a unique and entirely original work about the resurrected dead that is not at all a regular zombie film. The nearest comparison might be a more horror-minded version of the French They Came Back (2004).
Shatter Dead signals its uniqueness from the opening scene where we have two women, one of whom appears nude and to be humping the other from behind, during which the camera looks up at the woman on top backlit by light and we see her incongruously sprout a pair of angel wings. Next, as we follow Stark Raven as she wanders through the small town streets, you are left wondering what world it is that we have stumbled into. She is surrounded by the dead – we see them as beggars, including one who holds up a sign saying he has sold his arm for medical experiments and another saying he has been left disfigured after taking a job as a crash test dummy. The dead even try to steal gasoline from her car, while there is even talk about unionisation of the dead at one point. It is a vision of the dead that is about as far away from George Romero as it is possible to get – not to mention is refreshing to watch after wading through the deluge of near-identical zombie films that hit us a decade later.
In later scenes, Stark Raven has her car jacked by the dead. She tries hitchhiking on and comes across another driver (played by Scooter McCrae himself) who offers her a ride before she becomes suspicious, pulls a gun on him and holds a pocket mirror under his nose to determine that he is in fact dead, whereupon she throws him out and takes the car.
Stark Raven as Susan
The film has the occasional hallmarks of amateurism. Both the principal actresses, Stark Raven and Flaura Fauna, have a certain flatness when it comes to dialogue inflection that betrays a non-professionalism. Some of the gore scenes look unconvincing. The script is more of a series of scenes that happen rather than anything with a particular structure. However, the originality and ingenuity of the ideas at play make Shatter Dead a standout film.
There is also the remarkable scene at the refuge where Stark Raven takes a shower and is joined by Flaura Fauna, who begs to use her soap, not having had any for weeks. This starts out seeming like it is someone’s fantasy – or the basis of a porn film set-up – before being upended in remarkable ways. Not to mention the unusualness of Stark who has the habit of showering completely nude while also wearing her gun in its holster. Once Flaura Fauna joins her in the shower, Raven makes the discovery that Flaura is one of the dead. This segues into some remarkable pieces of writing where Flaura casually talks about needing to move around lest all the blood in her body pool, or of how being dead is actually the gift of being able to be young forever without fears of aging, while being a benefit to the planet in terms of consuming zero resources.
Scooter McCrae seeks to push the material right to the envelope. There’s a scene where the pregnant Marina Del Ray takes a shotgun blast to the stomach and then crawls into the shower and places the baby that she pulls out to her breast. In another scene, we have Stark Raven fellating a gun barrel in a graveyard. Although the scene that caused some censorship upset was the one where Stark Raven hooks up with Daniel “smalls” Johnson, before finding he is dead and cannot get it up to have sex, whereupon she contrives an arrangement where she straps her gun to his waist and has sex with him using the gun as a surrogate penis – a scene where Stark Raven actually allowed herself to be entered with a real gun. (Although most of this seems to have been cut – Shatter Dead is listed as having a runtime of 1:24 minutes where what we get is a mere 1:14, meaning that a good ten minutes of material has been cut from the film).
