Shocker (1989)
What's It About?
After being sentenced to death by electric chair, a serial killer comes back from the dead to get revenge on the teenager who turned him in.
Is It Any Good?
With the death of Wes Craven in 2015, horror fans took a long hard look back at his filmography and found new favorites, a bunch of clunker TV movies, and one horrifying pornographic film. One definite uptick in appreciation on this revisit was for Craven's weirdo period between A Nightmare on Elm Street and New Nightmare. I personally hadn't seen any of these movies aside from the wonderfully weird The People Under the Stairs but Shocker seemed to be a clear favorite among my peers.
I kind of get the appeal of Shocker, it's got the same wide-eyed pop art quality about it that The People Under the Stairs does. It's unabashedly mean-spirited and violent and the movie makes you think you've figured it out only to go in a completely new direction. Mitch Pileggi's Horace Pinker is certainly a reason to watch the movie. If I were to describe Pinker's personality, I'd say that he's Freddy Krueger's Id. If Wes Craven was trying to get lightning to strike twice like it did with the creation of Freddy then he clearly failed but I don't think he had any such ambitions. Pinker would be shitty for a franchise and while I've certainly questioned Wes Craven's judgement in the past, I'm willing to be this was a one-and-done for him.
Unfortunately, while Shocker has no shortage of chutzpah it lacks nearly everywhere else. There's not a whole lot of explanation about Pinker's weird satanic electricity religion or how it brings him back from the dead. It's certainly a detail that sounds cool but plays confusing and should have been left on the cutting room floor. None of the characters other than Pinker are terribly captivating and the movie doesn't really do much that's interesting with Pinker's body-swapping powers. The last third of the movie, which consists of nearly an hour, is plodding and it just descends into hokum whilst trying to raise the emotional stakes. If this character was meant to be the new Freddy Krueger then they flipped ahead to the Freddy's Dead quality of storytelling and tone right out the gate.
Shocker is bloody, funny, and audacious but just like Horace Pinker himself once you get past all the blood, unnecessary swearing, and goofy one-liners there's just not really anything there anymore. Shocker may be the most over-rated under-rated movie in the Wes Craven canon.
Watch, Toss, or Buy?
There's fun to be had here but the movie is a tonal fiasco and it overstays its welcome by about 40 minutes. Watch it if you want but you wouldn't be missing much if you gave it a pass.