Can't Sleep, Clowns Will Tell Me to Kill My Mother, Can't Sleep, Clowns Will--

According to IMDB, Shattered Lives earns all of 3.2 stars out of 10. I suppose that means I’m supposed to hate it. Perhaps the fact that it involves a stormtrooper-like killer, a clown little person that speaks like Marlena Evans when she possessed by Satan on Days of Our Lives, and the most monotone child actress since Birdemic solidifies this assumption.

You know what they say about assuming. It simply doesn’t work when Emily gets to watch a movie involving little clown people and killer kids.

Quick Plot: We open on a drunken teen party being crashed by aforementioned stormtrooper wielding an axe. Flash back a few years to young Rachel, as blond as The Bad Seed and as sour as a Lemon Luden’s Cough Drop. Rachel is the only child of a miserably married couple who constantly discuss the fact that they are sad.

Sad, for Mom, apparently justifies having an affair smack in front of your child and calling her a little bitch when the kid has the nerve to tell your nice guy husband that, you know, there was a naked man in the shower. What would possess a daddy’s girl to spill the beans? Why, her clown dolls coming to life of course!

Letting your child play with a pair of harlequins just seems like irresponsible parenting, but considering mom’s methods include dragging her daughter to the park to “go play on the swings or something” while she makes out with her lover, it’s not surprising. As Rachel gets more and more stressed about her parents’ unhappiness, dolls Leelo and Melo (I think?) evolve into ghostly apparitions that show up to dance, stare, and threaten the poor little girl with mouth removals.

It’s incredibly creepy. Or really funny. Or very silly. Or maybe terrifying. 

I kind of have no idea.

It’s a bizarre description of a key ingredient in the film, and I realize that. When the figures first appear, they’re eerie. Then they open their mouths and sound, plain and simple, rather stupid. But they keep talking, having a lighthearted ‘we’re your TOYS’ conversation that, mid-sentence, turns into a threat to remove Rachel’s mouth from her fudging face. I will understand if anybody that has seen this film found these villains hilarious. I will also defend their rights to be scary.

As you might guess, encouraging a tattle is just the warmup for Rachel’s playthings. Their real game involves the biggest knife that Rachel isn’t allowed to play with, lodged, naturally, inside Mom’s cheating chest. 

This part of Rachel’s childhood makes up the first hour of the 90 minute Shattered Lives, and while it shows its amateur-ity and low budget, it’s also fairly unique and even, at least to me, unsettling. An odd choice is made in moving the action forward 10 years or so, skirting over what happened after Dad came home to find his daughter stained in her mother’s blood. Nah, why explore the resolution of that plot when we could just give Rachel a new tragedy to deal with for her post-high school life?

Shattered Lives is a strange film, which actually works well towards its benefit. There are plenty of straight-to-DVD horror movies about pretty urbanites hunted by hillbillies or zombies feasting on frat boys. With Shattered Lives, we never really know what’s going on, even though we know (based on the introduction) where it will eventually end. It’s incredibly flawed in its storytelling, but the movie has more ambition than is required and makes some fairly interesting and possibly, scary choices.

High Points

There’s some genuinely strong attempts to get inside the marriage of Rachel’s parents, leading to a surprisingly believable moment where her mother acknowledges that she’s just not living the life she thought she wanted

Low Points

...but then again, it’s hard to even care when said character has done just about everything but beat her daughter with wire hangers and slap her in the face with a handful of Comet

Lessons Learned

You should always do at least one fun thing a day. This is some ace life advice from Rachel’s dad, who also theorizes that married people fight all the time because that’s what marriage is

Despite the visual limitations of a gas mask, wearing one offers few drawbacks when committing multiple homicide

When your clown dolls tell you to stop asking questions, stop...asking...questions

Rent/Bury/Buy

I rather liked Shattered Lives, even though the sane film fan inside me knows it’s not necessarily very good. Even so, I admired the weirdness of it all. Writer/director Carl Lindbergh definitely needs some more practice behind the camera, but he clearly has some interesting ideas and isn’t afraid to throw some wackiness our way. I’m genuinely curious to see where he goes from here. The film is streaming on Netflix (which is, quite frankly, as much effort as you should put into acquiring it) so give it a try if you want something different and don’t mind a lot of rough edges. 

Also, it’s a must for fans of clown dancing. Just sayin’