Step into my office…
What a movie that truly reflects the time period it was made. What was most shocking about this flick was its run time.
News reports continue to stream in about a serial killer that is murdering entire families and leaving a hell of a lot of blood in his wake. Police can’t seem to catch him and Los Angeles is on edge trying to figure it all out. Johnathan is a college football player with a promising future. After a particularly hard hit one day in practice he and his girlfriend Allison are walking home. He sees his foster home and a strange van parked out front. Upon investigating the scene, Johnathan finds that his brother has been brutally murdered and his mother and little sister are next. The serial killer is after them. Johnathan attempts to intervene only to find that it was only a dream… a vision. However, when he wakes up, in his own home in his own bed, he receives a phone call saying that his foster family has been murdered in exactly the way he saw it play out.
Johnathan is convinced he is the only person now that can catch the killer. He talks to his foster father, Michael, the detective in charge of the investigation (conveniently), and attempts to help with the case. As more bodies stack up, they eventually are able to corner and capture the killer now revealed as Horace Pinker, a TV repairman. He is tried and convicted of all the murders and sentenced to death by the electric chair. The day of his execution however does not go as planned and they realize that Horace Pinker isn’t going away that easily.
Shocker starts off REALLY strong and fast. Within the first 10mins, the action goes from zero to sixty and I thought this movie was going to be full throttle the whole time. Sadly though, after the execution, it becomes a boring game of cat and mouse for far too long. The middle of the film up until about the last 10-15 minutes is a drag. Not even full of exposition but just a slow slog to get to the end. I kept looking at the time and thinking that nearly two hours for a horror movie was long, especially one from the late 80s.
As the movie wraps up in the climactic fight sequence it mostly redeems itself. There are a lot of dumb scenes that mostly add a comedic twist to what is for all intents and purposes a fight to the death. It’s not full of telegraphed jump scares, but it has enough cheese to make up for that. It also has one of the strangest scenes “explaining” how Shocker becomes who he is in the second half of the flick. I saw someone say that it was “sloppily organized and jarringly paced” and I think that describes it perfectly. It’s not a bad movie (it is a Wes Craven joint after all) but it just feels incredibly slow in spots making it all the more weird considering its blazingly fast start.
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