Wes Craven's "Shocker"

Oops, I mean


There's a new feature on The Onion's A.V. Club called, "I Watched This on Purpose," where reviewers essentially dig up not-new crappy movies that no one would really watch except on accident, or on cable during a bout of insomnia or else just to be masochistic. I had never seen Shocker before, but I knew it was crappy, yet I recorded it and watched it (six months later) anyway. In other words, I watched this on purpose.

What I didn't know, is that the movie actually starts off pretty decent. An unknown serial killer is breaking into houses and murdering entire families. A young college football star suffers a concussion and has a vision of his mother and siblings being murdered - a bit schlocky, but it works. Of course, it turns out his vision was real and he's the only one who can identify the serial killer. Lucky for him, his dad is a police detective, he wins him over, they eventually catch the bad guy, bad guy goes to the electric chair - hooray, movie over!!!

Oh wait, we're not even halfway through it.

So the premise of the movie is actually that the serial killer is into black magic and electricity, because he's a TV repair man and he uses a soldering iron. So he combines his two interests to come back from the dead as a disembodied spirit who can possess people and manifest himself through electricity.

At first it appears the serial killer (named fucking Horace Pinker of all things) can possess people simply by touching them. That's a pretty powerful ability right there - in fact they made an entire movie off that premise alone, 1998's Fallen starring Denzel Washington; which, while not a great movie, was way better than Shocker. But as the movie goes on, they keep adding to Pinker's repertoire. First he goes from only being able possess people via touch to being able to travel via electrical lines, then he is able to manifest himself physically by absorbing enough electricity, then he's able to transmit himself via television broadcast, then he's able to possess electrical devices... It all ends with a shit-tastic climatic battle wherein the college football hero guy, who might really be Pinker's biological son or some shit, and Pinker battling each other inside a TV across different television shows. First it's a World War 2 documentary, then it's I Love Lucy and it goes on and on until they start showing up in live broadcasts, and they're physically there at the live broadcast, but they're really still in the TV... blergh!

I love horror and I like a fair amount of sci-fi, so I'm not one of those, "that could never happen!" douchebags, but a work needs to at least adhere to its own internal logic - which Shocker does not. It's the equivalent of two kids playing on a playground going, "I shoot fireballs!," "I'm immune to fireballs and I shoot lightening back at you!" "Oh yeah, well I'm immune to lightning!"

After it's revealed that Pinker is pretty much godlike via electricity, including broadcast signals and everything, the hero wins the day by fucking him up with a... VCR remote control? Ooooookay. So he hits the pause button, and the bad guy just pauses. That's a bit of a stretch, I don't see what VCR pause has to do with electricity necessarily but I've gone with you up until this point, Wes, so I might has well wait and see what happens... wait, what? And now, using the fast forward and rewind buttons the hero is... making the bad guy hit himself with things and slam his head against the wall repeatedly? But that doesn't even make any sense, not even based on the fake pseudo-rules that you really didn't even set up all that well...

It's kind of like Wes Craven needed a climax for the movie, so instead of thinking up anything good, he just kind of jacked off all over the script and then filmed it. It makes no sense, it's way too overblown, it looks like crap and it's just stupid. It sucks, because the beginning part, where Horace is just a killer with knife, would've actually made a good slasher movie. But once it goes from "Slasher" to "Shocker," it just becomes more and more crappy, until it ends choking in a pool of its own shit.

Oh, and apparently they're remaking it.