ann hale is awed by the shock…
Last week at this time, I was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3. Freddy Krueger is probably Wes Craven’s most notable creation but I feel like people should get to know other great films and characters he has created. Today, I pay homage to the little guy. Today, I introduce you to Shocker.
Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi) is a television repair man who sidelines as a serial killer. When Lieutenant Don Parker gets too close to finding him out, Pinker murders his entire family with the exception of his adopted son Jonathan (Peter Berg). Jonathan has dreams in which he has a connection to Pinker and is able to lead police to his whereabouts. Pinker is arrested and sentenced to the electric chair. When he is to be executed, he reveals that he is Jonathan’s father. When the switch is thrown, Pinker turns into pure electricity and can not only run through the power lines but can also inhabit the bodies of others, making it very difficult to tell who he is at any given time. Now Jonathan has to find and kill Pinker for good before Pinker does the same to him.
Shocker is the reason that bathroom death scenes scare the crap out of me. Pinker kills Jonathan’s girlfriend in the bathroom and they show her in a bathtub full of blood with bloody hand prints all over the walls and ceiling. I saw this as a kid and remember thinking that only someone insane could do that. As you can imagine, the deaths of Annie in Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2 and Rita in Dexter messed me up pretty good.
I feel like Shocker slipped between the cracks for horror fans. There weren’t an awful lot of commercials for it when it came out so it didn’t do horribly well in theaters but I feel like it could have done better. Fallen is basically a rip off of Shocker and it did better. Was it Denzel Washington that made Fallen a bigger success? Maybe if they had released the film after the huge success of The X-Files, Mitch Pileggi could have drawn in more viewers. C’est la vie.
