Take a Trip to TV Land with Horace Pinker, Psycho Cable Guy

Jesus. That chair really kicks ass

Craven had been through some highs and a lot of lows as a filmmaker. I can tell you that if you have visited the IMDb Horror Board, Craven has always been topical. I have read opinions on both sides of the fence, some defending him while others consider him unworthy of defense. I have always considered him a relevant director. He really had some good work later in his career. His ‘New Nightmare’ is a polarizing Freddy Kreuger movie, but it was unique in its storytelling and use of the character. ‘Scream’ and its sequels took up a small portion of his latter-day career, but he made a drama which got Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination (‘Music of the Heart’) and directed a humdinger of a thriller in a plane starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy called ‘Red Eye’. His final two films were perhaps considered faltering examples of Craven in decline (this happened to him almost every decade since he made Last House on the Left, with Sean Cunningham producing): Scream 4 & My Soul to Take. Neither was *that bad* but not quite as good as Red Eye.

If you look at his career, there seems to be good films and not so good films. Interestingly, His career was plagued with projects that endured punishing production hell. Like Shocker, the film I’m reviewing here. It went through the censorship ringer. At the time of 1989, the MPAA was putting the screws to horror films in regards to violence. Amazing, isn’t it? Today, grisliness is ripe for theater screens but after the slasher craze of the first part of the 80s, into the mid part of the decade, the industry was changing. Tolerance for violence changed. Cursed, a werewolf film Craven made in 2005, was a developmental hell that went through a nightmarish process or re-writes and re-casting.

I can only imagine how tired he was. Exhaustive is the process of seeing films started and finished. In the can, so to speak.

I admit that I’m not the biggest fan of Shocker. God, is it a mess. The special effects are for the most part very impressive. When Horace Pinker (Michael Pileggi) is in his “electrical free-floating form”, it looks quite cool. But certain scenes just don’t make any fucking sense. Like when he’s in his cell. How does he get access to jumper cables and how can he make them perform the electrical current gag hooked to the television set? The big lips “giving Horace what he wants” (even including “Baby” in the lips dialogue to him when he wants to use electrical current as a means to move from one human host to the next), the funny type of “astral travel” that allows him to stay active even after his body perishes (it just kind of combusts into flames and all that is left is Pinker’s prison suit!), his using a light socket to eventually move through the current so that he can shock and take the body of detective Michael Murphy (his wife and foster children are victims of Pinker), the specter of Peter Berg's dead girlfriend (yet another victim of Pinker's) actually protecting him using her "power of good", and the final battle between Berg and Pinker at the end as the many shows / broadcasts on television offer the psychopath freedom to remain a threat and alive.

This is perhaps Craven's outcry against the infiltration of television on the viewing public. The killer is a cable repair man. Televisions or their importance in the lives of society is almost emphasized in every scene. It is only when all the power is knocked out where no televisions can play their programming that the psychopath is quelled.

Lots of rock on the soundtrack which appealed to me, I will say. I think whatever Craven intended in regards to his opinion on television gets lost in all the hopping, whether it is from television show to television show or body to body. The message he wants to convey (Boo Television! Boo!) gets lost in the shuffle of Pinker transforming from a chair or running after Berg as he begs Beaver from Leave it to Beaver for assistance. There's the visits from the dead girlfriend or seeing Pinker travel in the broadcast waves of a satellite dish out of Murphy's body that he had been possessing.

I had forgotten how physical the performance for Berg was. He really bumps around for Pinker, takes leaps over furniture, dives out of the way of bullets, takes tackles from football teammates (he's a wide receiver; maybe he gets help from a stunt double, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt), fights off Pinker and those he possesses who are always coming at him with a knife or blade to stab him, and runs around as he attempts to stay alive. Murphy is quite a grouch. He's always yelling or ordering poor Berg around. I get why he's so ornery, though. Pinker kills a lot of people. Every news broadcast mentions another family Pinker butchers. The crime scene of Berg's lovely girlfriend has a hell of a lot of blood.

There's a psychic link where Berg goes into a dream like state and can actually travel to where Pinker is "at play", only avoiding the knife when waking up (shades of Elm Street), telling this to Murphy. This is how they eventually put a face to the serial killer and eventually find Pinker's hideout, loaded with television sets, set in a rather trashbin-stylized warehouse.

This is all told in a high energy style thanks to Craven's direction which might hurl a lot of crazy at us, but he does so in a pace that sure as hell doesn't lag. All the "shock" that comes with how Pinker moves, animated for us to see and sound-recorded for us to here is so cartoonish, I found it hard not to laugh. Craven applies such a maddening approach to the material, I couldn't take this movie seriously even if the intention was all the while underlying what we see and hear. That and Pileggi holds nothing back, his performance perhaps meant more for a silent film. There's no nuance with Mr. Pileggi; its all force-of-nature and absent any restraint. Berg tries to be the calm while Pileggi is the storm. 

And how those invaded by Pileggi swear like a sailor (including a little girl who attempts to plow through Berg with a forklift!) while trying to murder Berg is a tour-de-farce of comic gold. So when trying to make a statement about television as it meant to Craven, the ghost of a slain victim telling the electrical spiritual form of her killer that he will not invade the body of her boyfriend kind of interferes with it. That and a necklace that was shared between boyfriend and girlfriend that actually *hurts* Picker. The developments of the plot are full of wild ideas that make 'Shocker' quite a yarn.