Shatter Dead paints a picture of a world where the dead no longer die or even necessarily rot, they just don’t grow old or regenerate. These aren’t your shambling masses of flesh-hungry ghouls, they are competent, logical, emotional beings that just can’t die. Susan is just trying to get home to her boyfriend with the groceries, but her car runs out of gas and is stolen by a mob of the walking dead and a preacher that acts as their leader. She ends up staying in a house full of vagrants that gets attacked by undead zealots who wish to make everybody undead. Surviving the attack, she makes it home to her boyfriend *SPOILER ALERT* who has already killed himself. How will she cope with the fact that her boyfriend is undead, something she hates? Will she join him?

Shatter Dead has some great ideas and asks many important sociological and philosophical questions, but the acting is so terrible that it’s difficult to find if it gives any answers. The main character, Susan, portrayed by Stark Raven, has just two looks to convey every emotion and they both look the same – stone faced. The supporting cast is no better. The fact that the subject matter of the film is a rather emotional one – life and death - didn’t phase the casting director one bit. The movie does have some interesting point to it, but they are really hard to get through to because the acting is so horrible.

The special effects make-up of the zombies is the worst I’ve seen in a modern movie. Some of them just have gray make-up on their faces, some just have latex hanging off with a bunch of blood, some of them just don’t have anything. It’s sophomoric at best and is rather confusing since some of the story hinges on the strength of the make-up, of which it has none.

Shatter Dead is heavy on the nudity. The opening scene is of an apparent angel, portrayed by a woman with gigantic, pendulous breasts, copulating with a woman with a wrist brace. The chapter list describes it as “raped by an angel”. I think that every chapter has at least one nude scene culminating in a torrid love scene between Susan *SPOILER ALERT* and her undead boyfriend where they use her gun as a strap-on, given that he no longer has blood to fill out an erection. They even show the penetration.

All in all, Shatter Dead is a really terribly bad movie with a few interesting ideas that would have been even more interesting if it had a better cast with better direction. The gratuitous nudity is bad enough to at least be a hoot in any party situation, so beer and friends might make it easier to go down.  Someone might be able to make this story worth viewing someday with a better cast and crew, but I doubt anybody ever would. I can’t say check it out, but I wouldn’t say avoid at all costs.

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