Review: Shocker

Peter Berg stars as a supposed star quarterback who is so clumsy and unfocused he runs right into the goalpost and knocks his damn self unconscious. He sure must’ve gotten loopy, because once revived, he finds himself having violent visions of a serial killer. And those visions prove to be not just horrible dreams/nightmares, but visions of brutal events yet to happen. The killer is one Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi- where are you?), and eventually he is nabbed and sent to ‘ol sparky. However, not before Pinker murders Berg’s foster family, save him and one other. Unfortunately, all the electricity seems to do is give him a new way to do his deeds and taunt Berg while he’s at it. Yep, he lives through electricity and can jump into people’s bodies, compelling them to commit his grisly murders (What if there’s a city-wide blackout, though? A question that sadly never comes up in the film). Pinker wants revenge on Berg for sending him to the chair. Michael Murphy plays John Saxon…er, I mean Berg’s policeman foster father, Cami Cooper is Berg’s girlfriend, Ted Raimi plays an assistant football coach (!), and Dr. Timothy Leary…is here too. Don’t even get me started on that.

 

I don’t know whether he was instructed to by the studio or willingly did it, but writer-director Wes Craven (“A Nightmare on Elm Street”, “The Hills Have Eyes”) gives us a wannabe-“Elm Street” with this lame, incredibly lazy and ineffectual horror pic from 1989. Craven didn’t seem to like what others had done with the “Elm Street” sequels, and yet his own film here is worse than almost all of those sequels (It’d be pretty hard to make a film worse than “A Nightmare on Elm St. 2: Freddy’s Revenge”). If it weren’t for the generally OK performances, this would be bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, and since Craven both wrote and directed it, the film’s failure rests pretty much entirely on him, at the end of the day, even if he was asked by producers to make a Freddy-like imitation.

 

We start off in the worst way imaginable with a really bad and seriously lame title song by a band supposedly called The Dudes of Wrath. It’s an appallingly poseur name, and the song is sung by not only KISS front-man Paul Stanley (not at his best), but also Desmond Child, a noted songwriter-musician-singer. His songwriting credits are actually quite prolific: Most of Bon Jovi’s biggest 80s hits, several Aerosmith hits (including ‘Dude (Looks Like a Lady)’, one of their best-known), and perhaps most importantly of all, Ricky Martin’s ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’, which is so metal, right? The title song here was co-written by a guy called (I shit you not) Guy Mann-Dude. Yep, that’s not compensating for anything is it? He even had a metal band with that name and plays the guitar. Wow.  The soundtrack also includes Megadeth’s excellent cover of ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’, but the rest is pretty rank. Why am I focussing on the soundtrack so much early on? Because the film is pretty uninteresting, to be honest.

 

Horace Pinker is second only to Jacob Goodnight from the “See No Evil” films in the lame horror villain name stakes, and is clearly just Freddy Krueger before being burnt (or electrocuted as happens here). Add to that Peter Berg standing in for Heather Langenkamp and Michael Murphy for John Saxon, and you can see just how obviously a rip-off this is. This time the kid dreams about other people being murdered, but that and the gender switch are the only variations here.

 

What the film has going for it are pretty good performances by Berg (albeit he’s initially too comically clumsy) and Murphy, and a sense of genuine sadness and shock at people being murdered, that seems absent from most films of this sort. I appreciated that difference, but the rest is completely useless and third-rate. There’s a potentially interesting back-story/connection between Berg’s character and Pinker, but either Craven or the studio weren’t interested in that, and it just sorta hangs there not fully dealt with. Why bother with that, when the kiddies just want another Freddy Krueger, right? The body swap angle is also appallingly handled, it seems to come out of nowhere. Sure, we get one line mentioning Pinker’s fondness for voodoo, but that’s it for explanation (nothing in Pileggi’s performance makes the idea plausible and organic to the character anyway), and it seems like a rip-off of another horror film, the previous year’s excellent “Child’s Play”. It’s like Craven was just throwing out ideas and hoping some of them would land. Future “X-Files” co-star Mitch Pileggi is OK as the wild-eyed psycho Pinker. He’s over-the-top, which is fine, it’s just that the role hasn’t much depth or originality to it to stand out. But acting isn’t the film’s problem, creative bankruptcy and corporate greed are. Meanwhile, the visual FX here don’t help poor Pileggi one bit. They are appallingly cut-rate even for 1989. The absolute nadir of the film is when Berg’s comfy chair becomes inhabited by the spirit of Pinker and even magically grows a set of eyes! That shit wouldn’t even pass in an “Elm St.” sequel. No, not even the 3D one. No, Mr. Craven. Just…no.

 

Everyone regards Craven as a master of horror, and although he has made good films (“A Nightmare on Elm St.”, “The Hills Have Eyes”, “Scream”, the underrated “Deadly Friend”), people seem to forget that he also started with the abysmal “Last House on the Left”, and has given us stinkers like “The Hills Have Eyes Part II”, “People Under the Stairs”, “Cursed”, “Scream 4”, and this dud. He ain’t perfect, and he ain’t a master of anything. No, this just won’t do. It’s not scary, it’s not funny, it’s not clever, and it certainly isn’t original. But the title is apt, I’ll give it that.

 

Rating: D+