“Just another gathering of slasher cliches,” wrote The Washington Post about the 1989 movie defeated at the box office by the third-week run of a talking baby comedy. When the horror maestro sadly passed away in 2015, it was deemed less of a career footnote than failed Oscar bait Music of the Heart.
Shocker by name, shocker by nature was the general consensus when Wes Craven attempted to kickstart another franchise about a maniacal murderer who haunts his victim’s dreams. However, coinciding with its 35th anniversary, Shocker’s latest Blu-ray release suggests critics – perhaps still in thrall to a certain Mr. Krueger – were a little too keen to sharpen their claws. Although not in the same league as Nightmare on Elm Street, the movie’s go-for-broke mix of cat-and-mouse chase, meta-media commentary, and body-swap farce can still feel electrifying.
As its opening scene wastes little time in explaining, the film’s inescapable boogeyman is Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi), a limping TV repairman who, having butchered at least 30 people in cold blood, has become America’s Most Wanted. Hottest on his heels is Lt. Don Parker (Michael Murphy), a man who pays for his doggedness with the slaughtering of his wife and two kids. His surviving foster son Jonathan (Peter Berg), who may have family ties with the monster he helps to capture, suffers further unimaginable tragedy when girlfriend Alison (Camille Cooper) meets a similar grisly fate.
So far, so relatively conventional slasher, although there are hints of the super-psychic when Jonathan starts visualizing Pinker in increasingly horrific nightmares. In fact, it takes until the 40-minute mark – when its monster is finally apprehended and, in record time, sent to the electric chair – for Shocker’s outlandish unique twist to come into play.
Pinker doesn’t perish when his body is subjected to thousands of volts. Thanks to a deal he struck with the Devil just moments before his planned execution, the sadist is now able to take the form of pure electricity and subsequently possess any person he comes into physical contact with. It’s a truly bonkers premise, yet one Craven ultimately has a lot of fun with, turning innocent joggers, football coaches, and tractor-riding tweens into the height of malevolence. In the film’s funniest scene, Pinker even manages to inhabit a reclining chair.
Craven also finds the time to doff his hat to the master of suspense with an inspired Hitchcockian fight scene atop a satellite tower and lean further into the supernatural with regular ghostly reappearances from poor Alison, by far Pinker’s most bloodsoaked victim. (Craven reportedly had to tone down the gore 13 times to secure an R-rating.)
The unadulterated madness is compounded by future The X-Files regular Pileggi’s wonderfully over-the-top performance as a man with an unquenchable thirst for homicide. Pinker isn’t afforded much of a backstory, or much in the way of one-liners. (“Come on boy, let’s take a ride in my Volts-wagen" is one of his few zingers.) Nevertheless, as a lean, mean murder machine, he’s arguably one of horror’s purest.
Pinker’s relentless murdering spree culminates in the highly entertaining Looney Tunes-meets-Stay Tuned sequence in which he chases Jonathan via the medium of TV itself. The pair find themselves cameoing in everything from Leave It To Beaver to the 1931 version of Frankenstein to an Alice Cooper music video (the shock rocker also fronts the heavy metal supergroup Dudes of Wrath formed specially for the film’s opening theme) to footage of the Berlin riots and atomic bomb (with Pinker amusingly serving as the explosion). “I've heard of audience participation, but this is ridiculous,” quips a shell-shocked couch potato after the good-versus-evil battle hilariously spills over into her front room.
Admittedly, this set piece works better conceptually than visually, as does the rest of the film’s special effects, which even by 1989 standards look decidedly amateurish. Craven later acknowledged they weren’t up to scratch, blaming an overambitious VFX artist who suffered a nervous breakdown on realizing he’d bitten off more than he could chew. It’s little wonder he also expressed hopes for a more technologically-advanced redo.
You can also hear more of Craven’s musings about his most underappreciated horror on the audio commentary that accompanies its new 4K restoration alongside other previously released extras including chats with Pileggi and Cooper, numerous trailers and galleries, and a feature on the soundtrack which cleverly sticks two fingers up at the rise of Satanic panic.
However, it’s the never-before-seen (or never-before-heard) material that will pique fans' interest the most, namely interviews with composer William Goldstein, production designer Cynthia Charette, and leading man Berg whose pivot into directing makes him the prime candidate to replace Craven should it ever get the remake treatment.
With The People Under the Stairs and Swamp Thing both said to be joining The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and Freddy Krueger’s first outing on the list of Craven remakes, that might not be such a far-fetched idea. But packed with high-voltage thrills, the original should have been allowed to power at least one equally ridiculous sequel.
