Written and directed by Wes Craven, 1989's Shocker tells the story of Horace Pinker, a TV repairman with a taste for mass murder. He's got the small town he lives in held in a grip of fear and the cops are coming empty in their efforts to put a stop to the murders. This changes when Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg) has a dream in which he sees everyone in his foster family save for his dad, a cop named Don Parker (Michael Murphy), slaughtered by Pinker. The only clue in the dream as to his true identity is the TV repair truck outside the house… with Pinker's name on it. Oops.

At any rate, as it turns out this dream was a premonition of sorts and once Jonathan and Don find that, yes ,the family has been slaughtered Jonathan is able to convince his old man to bring a squad of cops to Pinker's base of operations. They do, and they find that not only is Pinker real, but he's capable of killing cops too. Soon enough, Pinker murders Jonathan's girlfriend, Alison (Cami Cooper) too. Eventually though, they bring him in and soon enough he's to be executed. When that switch is pulled and the electric chair fires up though… Pinker doesn't die. It looks like he dies, but he doesn't, instead he develops the ability to somehow use electricity to transfer from his body into that of a doctor and from there into various other characters. This allows him to keep up his killing spree and take out a few of his friends along the way. As the truth about Jonathan's connection to Pinker is revealed he winds up coming up with a plan to take the murderer out… but is it even possible to kill someone who can travel through electrical wires?

At one hundred and ten minutes in length, Shocker is a good half hour longer than it needed to be and for that reason, we run into some pacing problems and the movie turns out to be pretty slow because of it. Add to that the fact that Craven borrows a lot from A Nightmare On Elm Street and this one understandably failed to light the horror movie scene on fire when it debuted years back. Revisiting the movie, those flaws haven't faded and Shocker still has a few too many problems for it to ever really work, but there are moments here that save it from hitting the bottom of the barrel and aspects of the film that are, flawed or not, actually pretty fun.

Let's start with the cast. Peter Berg is fine here as our young hero. He's not super charismatic but he's likeable enough so that when he winds up doing things that don't quite make sense we don't mind so much. Cami Cooper's character is fairly silly as once she's murdered she basically plays the spirit of love that helps conquer all, but she's pretty and nice. Your mom would probably think it was cool if you went out with her. Michael Murphy is fine if unremarkable as the top cop in charge of bringing Pinker down, but it's Mitch Pileggi who makes this one moderately interesting. He's way over the top here and he's a blast to watch as he chews through the scenery. He makes wisecracks like Freddy Kruger does and it's hard not to draw comparisons between the two, it almost seems like Craven wants us to, but Pileggi is pretty friggin' awesome here. More than any other single element in this movie, he makes it watchable and when he's on screen, the movie is pretty fun and it has a good sense of humor behind it.

Although this was a low budget picture and some of the effects show their age, we get a few decent kills scenes here as well as a lot of optical effects that show off the different ‘electric things' that Pinker can do. Some of these work better than others but that's par for the course and even the hokier effects set pieces are at least entertaining. The visual highlight of the film happens towards the end, however. Without wanting to go too heavy into spoiler territory we wind up with the showdown between Pinker and Jonathan (you knew it had to happen) taking place across the airwaves giving Craven an opportunity to mix humor and horror in some pretty effective ways. Had Shocker done more to differentiate itself and had Shocker not been as bloated in its running time as it wound up being, it would probably be better regarded than it is. As it stands, however, it's a mixed bag, albeit one worth seeing because when it works, it works quite well.

Video:

Shocker is presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition framed at 1.85.1 widescreen and while it's not a perfect transfer it is a pretty good one. Some minor noise reduction looks to have been applied here, resulting in skin looking a little too smooth, but it's not a total wax job. The image itself is pretty pristine, there's virtually no print damage at all, while colors are reproduced quite nicely and with some occasionally impressive vibrancy. Black levels are also quite strong here and the image is free of any obvious edge enhancement. There were no obvious compression artifacts spotted during playback and we get decent depth, texture and detail here.