Shocker sees horror director Wes Craven attempting (but failing) to replicate the success he enjoyed with A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984), bringing to the screen another supernatural psycho in the form of serial killer Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi), who uses black magic to free his spirit as he is being zapped in the electric chair. Transferring from body to body, Pinker is able to continue his grisly murder spree, AND have a little fun with Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg), the high school football star who was instrumental in Pinker's arrest.
Craven not only rips off his own ideas, using dreams as a major plot device, but also mimics the horrible tongue-in-cheek style of the later Elm Street movies, his killer a wisecracking figure unable to be destroyed by normal means. The result is a real stinker of a movie, boasting a lousy central performance from Berg (whose whiny nasal delivery is unbearable), lots of dreadful visual effects, and a plot that makes very little sense, all capped off with a sequence that is easily one of the worst things Craven has ever committed to film (and that's saying something): a battle that takes place inside a television set, with Pinker and Jonathan travelling through several TV shows, the plucky high-schooler eventually using the TV remote to control his enemy. I'm not entirely sure what Craven was aiming for, but the result is embarrassing in the extreme—even worse than BB the robot in Deadly Friend.
N.B. I just remembered the moment where Pinker disguises himself as a massage chair, which is as bad as, if not worse than, the TV channel hopping scene.
Craven not only rips off his own ideas, using dreams as a major plot device, but also mimics the horrible tongue-in-cheek style of the later Elm Street movies, his killer a wisecracking figure unable to be destroyed by normal means. The result is a real stinker of a movie, boasting a lousy central performance from Berg (whose whiny nasal delivery is unbearable), lots of dreadful visual effects, and a plot that makes very little sense, all capped off with a sequence that is easily one of the worst things Craven has ever committed to film (and that's saying something): a battle that takes place inside a television set, with Pinker and Jonathan travelling through several TV shows, the plucky high-schooler eventually using the TV remote to control his enemy. I'm not entirely sure what Craven was aiming for, but the result is embarrassing in the extreme—even worse than BB the robot in Deadly Friend.
N.B. I just remembered the moment where Pinker disguises himself as a massage chair, which is as bad as, if not worse than, the TV channel hopping scene.