- (Also known as Wes Craven’s Shocker)
- Written and Directed by Wes Craven
- October 27, 1989
After being sent to the electric chair, a serial killer comes back from the dead to get revenge on the athlete that turned him in to the police.
Shocker is yet another imaginative film from the creative mind of Wes Craven. This is one of those things I hadn’t seen in many years and though I really enjoyed it when it first came out, I was a little nervous about viewing it again after so many years. There have been a handful of movies I’ve outgrown for whatever reason. They impressed me when I was younger but watching them with a few more years under my belt they don’t quite do it for me anymore. I was worried this one might be one of those.
With much relief I can say I still enjoyed it. It’s not a perfect film but it’s just as off-the-wall and weird as I remember. As a movie it is much stranger in presentation than it is frightening. It is not even bad scary in that 80s sorta way. Just the idea is so bonkers and what they put forward is so dumb but in a good way that you enjoy yourself from start to finish.
Our film villain of Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi) is a serial killer who uses some dark magic skills to survive the electric chair and continue his reign of terror as a being of electricity. I do not recall even the token flashback explanation you would normally get in these things. Child’s Play at least gave us that. In this it just kinda is a thing.
The hero of Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg) is a 25-year-old (the actor’s age at the time of release) high school football player that’s a bit aimless. During the story he is aided by his dead girlfriend Alison (Camille Cooper) that gives him a magic necklace that can exercise Horace when he takes over somebody’s body. She communicates with her 18-year-old (not really) beau via dreams and they feel like classic Elm Street sequences.
Berg for his part is pretty much your standard high schooler in popular culture-at least for the time. He has a general attitude but is deep down a good kid. All he was missing was an exclamation of “Gee whiz!” To Craven and Berg’s credit they gave us somebody likeable rather than irritating. The real issue is the occasional crow’s feet you see courtesy of better technology.
I really feel Craven could have made him a college student and lost nothing in the story but rather gained a greater level of believability. I know it was and still is common for high schoolers in entertainment to clearly be too old to be there but c’mon! Is it too much to ask for somebody that looks age appropriate?
The twist in this story (if you can’t figure out by the first bit of strangeness that happens) is that Jonathan is Horace’s son. There is a psychic bond between the two with poorly defined rules. How exactly they have this bond that predates his dad’s execution is not really explained but they’re related so you don’t need much of an explanation anyway.
Horace’s m.o. is that of a TV repair man who favors killing families in the goriest and messiest way possible but still manages to elude capture by the cops. If you have never met a TV repairman you are way younger than me. He kills these families at night and I really doubt late night rounds were a common thing when the industry existed. All things considered Horace should have been easy to catch.
Anyway, after surviving the electric chair Horace begins his killing spree again and Jonathan catches the blame as a copycat killer for…reasons. I just can’t find a good way that he would get believed to be a copycat killer. They just make a quantum leap of logic based on absolutely nothing. The rest of the story is about the two fighting so Johnny boy can clear his name.
But Shocker is entertaining. It takes a silly idea and runs with it. It pushes the concept as far as the imagination and the budget will allow and that’s really what you should do with something like this. That extends to the ending where our two main characters are involved in a cross-network battle fighting in the background of various shows with color commentary by Mr. ET himself John Tesh playing a local news anchor.
The effects that accomplish that are rather good. They look serious but get across the silly of what is going on. There are fake shows along with our characters mixed in with WWII stock footage. They really wanted to drive home this was war.
This movie is more a horror comedy than anything. It’s silly and strange and stupid and over the top. Maybe you can even call it a bit campy. It feels like it’s almost trying to mock entertainment of the time to one extent or another. Our almost addiction to superficial entertainment and worshiping of television. Our villain not only repairs TVs but uses it as a way to move around.
I have no idea how Johnathan figured out Horace was body hopping. Was it the psychic connection? Was it evidence he understood that others did not? What? Not that it matters or this leap in logic is noticeable while viewing. It may only occur to you after watching. And what rules governed the possession. That seemed inconsistent to me. Supposedly there was editing to get this to an R and it could be that stuff was lost with those edits.
This is just pure bonkers entertainment. It is dumb and fun and does not pretend to be anything else. For every Scream or Elm Street, Craven gave us stuff like Deadly Blessing or this. A little silly or goofy but a good time.
All this makes Shocker a bit of niche entertainment. I think if you are a lover of more trashy movies (like me) you will certainly embrace this but your general moviegoer will not enjoy this so proceed with caution. But proceed nonetheless. It is so much fun!
