Shocker

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Shocker is a 1989 slasher film directed by Wes Craven and starring Peter Berg and Mitch Pileggi. College football star Johnathon Parker (played by Peter Berg) begins having dreams that psychically link him to serial killer Horace Pinker (played by Mitch Pileggi). Parker catches him and helps send him to the chair after Pinker kills Parker's girlfriend Allison (played by Camille Cooper). Pinker is killed via the electric chair, but he has made a deal with the devil that allows his spirit to live on through electricity and possess people so that he can exact bloody revenge. For those who might not know, Wes Craven is one of my personal favorite filmmakers. I have loved horror from a very young age. Scream is the movie that started it all. This movie came out five years after A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the hope was to create a new franchise. Camille Cooper as Allison struggles with her lines. She looks pretty, but she doesn't offer a ton of range. Mitch Pileggi as Pinker is probably the best part of the movie. The man  is just hamming his performance up, and clearly having a ton of fun. Some of the kills are hard to follow. There's one guy that Pinker possesses. They say later in the movie that he was found dead without a mark on him. Does that mean everybody he possesses dies after he leaves their bodies? Did this guy die because he was already injured in an explosion? They say the reason Johnathon has a psychic link to Pinker is because he is Pinker's biological son. At least, I think that's the reasoning. More than that, why can his dead girlfriend talk to him as a ghost?  A lot of critics said this movie was too derivative of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I understand the criticism, but I don't know if I fully agree with it. It would be one thing if Pinker did attack people in their dreams, and them they tried passing it off as an original story, but he possesses people instead. I also do have to admit that I like Peter Berg and Michael Murphy as Parker's foster father. There is a little bit of heart to these two. Does Shocker work as whole? No, it really doesn't. Some of the kills don't work as well as they should. There isn't a whole lot of acting that works. There are lot of things in the plot that aren't explained well or at all. I really only would recommend this movie to hardcore slasher and Wes Craven fans. If you're like me, you may or may not like it. But, you'll probably find something in it to gravitate towards.

5 / 10