Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on May 3, 2002, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Full disclosure: I am a close personal friend of Shatter Dead director Scooter McCrae, but on the other hand, I became pals with him after being impressed with this quasi-existentialist zombie movie, McCrae’s first feature. Long before The Blair Witch Project was a twinkle in its creators’ eyes, McCrae proved that homegrown shot-on-video horror need not be mired in amateurish imitation or cheap sensationalism, and set a standard for DIY genre fare that too few have matched since.
Even keeping in mind the advances in videography since its production, Shatter Dead looks quite good in the fullscreen transfer on TK’s DVD, which is sharp, with appropriately muted but very accurate colors and only occasional grain. The movie itself is only the tip of this disc’s iceberg, however, as it has been stuffed—one might even say overstuffed—with extra features. (None of them, though, are as excessive as the long, long animated menu introductions, for which the Skip button will come in handy.) There’s a tour of the “Shatter Dead house” (actually McCrae’s apartment) with a special nude appearance by lead actress Stark Raven, and a regional cable interview with McCrae by a host who references “FANGORA” magazine and discusses the director’s work with the straight-faced demeanor of someone unaware—or not wanting to mention—that it involves a woman being graphically pleasured with a pistol.
Those for whom the nudity is a key attraction will enjoy a half-hour outtakes section, which contains enough scenes shot in the shower to be responsible for New York’s current drought, as well as behind-the-scenes stunts and FX clips. The disc’s most significant supplements, however, are a trio of audio commentaries. McCrae suggests on one that the best way to appreciate the talks is to skip among them, and it’s hard not to agree when listening to the one he shares with his cast. The performers (most of whom took pseudonyms on the movie but often address each other here by their real names) are a spirited bunch, but it’s clear those aren’t the only spirits at work here, and the result winds up shambolic, with only the occasional revealing story—not to mention that most of it is about a minute out of sync with the feature.
The timing is also off, by only about five seconds, on the commentary McCrae shares with his cinematographer Matthew Howe. The latter, who has shot numerous indie features since this one, takes a sardonically critical point of view of the movie, noting, “My work is much better than this”; though he and McCrae point out that they were the entire crew for much of the shoot, this talk is more anecdotal than technical. Its best moments are both, as when we learn that, rather than figure out how to hide the clamp lights in the interior scenes, the duo simply decided to make them part of the production design.
The best of the commentaries, paradoxically, is the one McCrae does alone—and very well-prepared, even having the script in front of him for reference. (Said screenplay was only 42 pages long, and thus about half the “length” of the movie.) The director covers the origins of the project and its “God Hates You” tagline and everything in between, exploring Shatter Dead (“a pornographic Wizard of Oz”) both in the context of the zombie genre and as a religious allegory. He also defends the movie’s straightforward, “TV movie-style” videography—to him, the Dogma doctrine is another kind of pornography—reveals the plot of a Shatter Dead 2 that “will never be made” and shares fun location stories, most amusingly an incident in which a passing driver was frightened by his “undead” cast. Along the way he describes an unfilmed dream sequence and reads a long, unused scene involving his Preacher Man character—the taped version of which is the only conceivable extra missing from this jam-packed disc.
