The late, great and much-missed Wes Craven was a pretty prolific filmmaker. As well as giving us A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, to name two of the big ones, we also directed or otherwise lent his name to a lot of other films that have been overlooked somewhat or fallen into obscurity a little bit today. One of these films was his film Shocker, which I'm not ashamed to admit is another one of my guilty pleasure films.
Horace Pinker is a TV repairman and serial killer specialising in family annihilations. When he decided to prey on the family of the detective hunting him, however, the family's eldest foster child, Jonathan, has a psychic dream of the murders which allows him to lead the police to Pinker and eventually capture him - although not before Pinker manages to kill Jonathan's girlfriend as well. After a remarkably speedy trial Pinker is sentenced to death, but just before he goes to the chair he manages to summon Satan via a TV and a black magic ritual and gains the power to live on via electricity, allowing him to jump into people's bodies and continue his murderous rampages. Jonathan, along with his girlfriend's ghost and the rest of his college football team, must find a way to take Pinker down and off the air permanently.
Now as I've said, I like this film - it's wonderfully indulgent B-movie horror cheese. But I can also appreciate why others may not share this view. The biggest problem with Shocker is its pacing - Act Two goes on way too long, leaving Act Three, where everything goes more than a little crazy, rather too short for my liking. After all, if you're going to have a gimmick where your film's protagonist and antagonist jump into a television and have a knock-down fight between numerous TV channels, you should probably give it more than 10-15 minutes. The recurring deus ex machina of Jonathan's dead girlfriend and her magic necklace also felt rather hokey to me, especially her ghostly white-light powers keeping Pinker at bay at one point, only to never be used again.
But the film's got a lot of good stuff too, most notably the various people Pinker possesses as he goes through the film. The change in his victims' demeanours, along with the fact that they all exhibit the same dragging limp that Pinker suffers from, ends us giving us a scene where Jonathan is chased by a six-year-old girl with a limp who's swearing and spitting like a sailor, and that alone is worth the price of the film. The film also handles its effects well - yes it's 1989 so the CGI is especially dodgy to our eyes now, but somehow it also fits with the film's theme - Pinker should look strange when he's in the "real" world, made up of pixels and static, and the superimposing works well as well, as when that happens Pinker and Jonathan are supposed to look like they don't belong there. Also, Mitch Pileggi is superb as the psychotic Horace Pinker, as well as apparently proving to be ageless (further proof can be seen in that trailer for the new X-Files, where most of the cast has grown older while Pileggi has just grown a beard).
Interestingly, Shocker also takes some cues from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, particularly the first one and Freddy's Revenge. There's Jonathan's psychic dreams of Pinker and later on his use of dreaming to recover the magical plot McGuffin for one, as well as the idea of an undead serial killer crossing between the "real" world and a fantasy one (the TV world) to continue his killings. Its similarities to Freddy's Revenge are more interesting - Shocker is one of the few slasher/horror films to have a Final Boy instead of a Final Girl, and Jonathan reminds me an awful lot of Jesse from that movie - his girlfriend is there more for moral/spiritual support than anything (mainly on account of being dead but near the beginning she says that they haven't even slept together) and Jonathan goes to his best male friend and his college football team for help far more than he does anyone else. There's even an implication that one of Pinker's victims died because he liked Jonathan "a little too much". Hello homoerotic subtext...
In the end, Shocker is far from being one of the worst film's with Wes Craven's name on it (remember Dracula 2000?). It's clearly mean to be a pitch black comedy as well as a B-movie horror, and at those tasks it succeeds admirably.
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