Post by No Personality on Mar 15, 2010 8:07:09 GMT -5
Horror films wouldn't be what they are today were it not for the trend to say something about the world we live in. Nobody takes advantage of that quite like Wes Craven, who's been one of the horror genre's most popular and well-known directors ever since 1996's Scream. Leading many people to want to take a look back at his career. The Last House on the Left had its' finger directly on the pulse of what was "happenin'" in the 1970's. Shocker in the 80's stands more as a painful reminder that as we all get older, we lose touch with the times. A Nightmare on Elm Street was an attempt to plug into some of the problems and attitudes of the 80's high school-aged teens. And the teens certainly responded- the film was a great success. But I think a lot of people felt the teen elements were secondary to the slasher mayhem and had practically nothing to do with real life problems.
New Line thought Nightmare was really about teen angst, so they continued it as a franchise, focusing on teen issues as much as on the slasher mayhem. And they made a superstar out of their icon, Freddy Krueger. Freddy was such a success, in fact, that eventually, people started to copy him. And nobody copied him more publically as Craven himself did. 1988's The Serpent and the Rainbow features an equally unstoppable, sadistic killer with supernatural powers who terrorizes people over and over again through their dreams and by getting inside their head. The film was kind of a minor success in theaters, granting Craven something of a picture-deal setup at Universal. 2 more horror films. What they wanted is what New Line and Paramount had- a franchise and a new slasher icon. A character with a name and a gimmick people would remember.
So Craven takes the entire framework of Nightmare and copies it, with a few slight alterations. Serial killer - known by media, feared by public, and dispised by law enforcement. On the loose, so we're dealing with the backstory to Nightmare that we never saw play out in the movie (until Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, that is). He's got to be stopped. So, a relative of some of his prior victims decides to use his new dream power (Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors) to sabotage the killer's - Horace Pinker - plans. Maybe save another victim. This is all a big and fairly pointless setup for what you saw on all the posters: Pinker getting fried in the electric chair. They want you to hate this guy so much that you can't wait for him to fry either. And it takes literally almost an hour for us to get to him in the chair. Or should I say- for him to get fried?
Shocker begins with a montage of images on TV that show various forms of devastation- wars, tragedies (in mostly black and white). A theme I think Richard Stanley (Dust Devil, Hardware) would incorporate much more effectively in his films. Where Craven goes wrong here is in how he chooses to highlight the suggestions of ain't-it-sad and the-world's-falling-apart by setting the images to a really pathetic hair/heavy-metal tune. Sort of an 11th rate Van Halen / Bon Jovi wannabe wailing along to a somewhat socially-conscious power ballad. An obvious attempt to tap into Dream Warriors' use of Dokken's excellent "Dream Warrior." If it worked "like Gangbusters" (as Craven likes to say) for them- it'll work for him, right? I think this devise has never been more effectively utilized than in the ultra-low budget Sleepaway Camp sequels.
What's also going on during this sequence is a man is grunting and yelling "come-on!" and "yeah!" offscreen in short, very sexually-frustrated bursts as he tries to hook up a cable connection to his TV set. That's Horace Pinker. And boy, is he obnoxious! When you finally see him onscreen, he exceeds obnoxious by so much- obnoxious as a world loses all meaning. Pinker truly is the lost Stooge. He looks like Curly and acts a lot like Moe. Ridiculously short-tempered, aggressively anti-social, full of misdirected and poorly managed energy, and cartoonishly unrealistic as a serial killer. This guy sure missed his calling as a WWF pro-wrestler. Oh, I'm sure Craven's team wanted him to come off more like a really nasty, really intimidating street brawler / brutal criminal type. But this guy is so self-implosive and "look at me!" silly with his brainless, out-of-place one-liners and insipid name-calling that he lacks all power to menace and make us afraid.
Unlike Freddy, who used the shadows to highlight creepy facial features, Pinker as a killer is like- Jim Carrey meets a pro-wrestler. Not to mention, his performance screams: overcompensating. And since later he tells us his wife couldn't stand him, that probably means that he can't have successful relationships with women. Cue laugh here. Or maybe it's having "Pink" in his name. And how much scarier do you think he looks decked out in one of those Crash Test Dummies' outfits? None of this however is actor Mitch Pileggi's fault. In an interview, he made sure to tell everyone that it was Craven who insisted he go more over-the-top. More Jack Torrance (The Shining). Which means mugging for the camera to the point where he's almost doing standup with his body movements- mostly his head and face. And... his voice.
No scene calls more attention to how big a mistake this all was than Pinker's final words before they throw the switch for the chair. This is Pinker giving us even more backstory. But more importantly, this is a moment to show us this guy is actually human and that his hatred is motivated by something real. Even in this sequence, Pileggi's character can't muster a breath without a retarded laugh or throat-strained comic insult. This moment though is actually interrupted for a character to give us the standard "prisoner has a right to speak" dramatics. In bold, serious-face too. Why is everyone else taking this movie's story seriously but Pinker? The fact that he finds these situations so amusing - and I do mean all situations, there isn't a thing Pinker won't laugh at hoarsely - doesn't make him more intense. It makes him a jerkoff. A nobody who thinks he's a bigger deal than he is.
I imagine in the movies, with his cover as a handyman driving a TV-repair truck, any man would have the proper tools to be a mass murderer in the mind of a screenwriter, if they're writing down for the low opinion the studio may have for the genre. Pinker can't think he's that clever. He doesn't have any profound, Charles Manson-esque things to say about life and society. Which is fine, I'm not complaining about a lack of intelligence in the character's speech patterns. He just has a knife and a beefy, muscular build. Which of course means his endless streams of faux-intense insults feel more like a wrestler challenging his opponent, on TV - in front of an audience, to bring-it-on. Something legitimately funny does happen, however, when a person does bring-it-on with Pinker. A few times during the body-switching half of the movie. But the movie misses its' bus on being an entertaining action-horror hybrid by trying to milk drama out of the running theme of the media exploiting human tragedy on TV.
Craven has always been fascinated by the way the media feeds us the information that forms our attitudes about the world. And that we sometimes use to educate ourselves. It's also the thing that gave Craven the material he used so terrifyingly to drive 1972's seminal, take-no-prisoners no-budget epic The Last House on the Left. It formed the basis for his career, along with his ability to relate stories of horrors and tragedies in history to the present day. Shocker is driven by little more than a shallow intent to copy a past success. But there's nothing here to suggest that ambition would pay-off. It's the ultimate example of a movie that thinks the way to repeat success is to take the thing that you owe your existence to, and the audience who responded positively to it, for granted. Aside from that, the material here is not strong. Nor can it stand on its' own.
Aside from the killer, who is naturally everything to the posters and trailers- Universal want you the paying customer to know they think this guy is your new worst nightmare, this film is a sappy adult drama. Main character Jonathan lives on his own, can't possibly be in high school anymore, has no sense of humor about anything, and would seem to have considerable issues with his equally humorless father. Of course, by the time we see his father- his entire family was just brutally murdered. "Dod"dy (I'm dead serious, actor Peter Berg physically cannot say the word "Dad") is a police lieutenant. Following an accident where he incurs a bonk on the head, Jonathan sees the murder of his family happen right before his eyes. He's now developed a dream power which enables him to find Pinker wherever he goes. Which is Pinker's worst nightmare because he lives for 2 things: to kill and not to be caught.
At first, Pinker doesn't ruin things too much. He just seems a bit of an odd choice for a killer since he kills with no intensity. He swings his knife like a punch, like he's not even there. Like, "take that! Yeah! Got ya!" Murder is not supposed to be like a street fight. Real serial killers consider what they do to be more like an art. They take more time with it. They get-off on suffering. Pinker seems much more interested in the reaction of Jonathan, who he plays with like we assume a cat toys with a mouse. This is where he really gets-off. And again, he constantly challenges Jonathan to bring-it-on and when he does get his hands on Jonathan, he takes his time. Presumably, this is because (spoiler warning) he's actually Jonathan's father. Which, during the execution scene, he tells Jonathan. Craven has a thing for the threat of fathers in his stories. And Pinker is no Krug! This is why I insist Craven is taking this movie for granted.
If Pinker wanted to kill Jonathan and managed to succeed in doing so, afterward- he would maybe bark out a one-liner and walk away as though he didn't care about getting even with Jonathan that much in the first place. And now you know the stakes of the movie. The dynamic between killer and intended victim. Nothing more complicated than Jason Voorhees throwing a tent spike at a victim, watching them squirm for 3 seconds, then going off to look for the next victim. Which only serves to make Pinker more of a cartoon character than he is already. What the movie really is is one of those brainless 70's exploitation / revenge pictures. Almost like I Spit on Your Grave, only where murder is substituted for rape, and the idea of social justice is subtituted for murder. Where you can't trust The Law to take care of the movie's threat. That the film's characters are the only judge and jury that matter.
That's all well and good, though of course first of all- it's heavier than what can fit within the framework of the typical 80's slasher film. Which Craven creates room for by making the movie an unbearable almost-2 hours long. This movie doesn't even resemble the 80's slasher movie. True to the revenge movie- the thing is all action, would-be grit, talking and yelling. And true to the studio action film of the time- the characters are stamped with flat, lame hero and villain labels and the interplay between them is dominated by the "battle for superiority" cliche. This movie is so preoccupied with revenge, in fact, that by the halfway mark, it's become a mockingly annoying "Tag- you're it!" game of two-way revenge. And I mean that every bit as literally as it sounds. Until the movie degrades into chase scene after chase scene after chase scene of the two running back and forth from each other as the other wields a gun (Pinker) or a secret weapon (Jonathan) with supernatural abilities.
The movie is one big fight scene. And it's not even a fair fight! Either Craven thinks we want to root for Pinker so much - or he had some freaking MAJOR issues with his own father (they'd have to be major-major to in any way explain this amount of absurd, obvious advantages Pinker has over Jonathan in every single battle) - that we would completely ignore our own morals about cheering a murderer on to kill more people when it's actually no fun. This isn't a slasher film. A slasher film would have some sense of style or flair to the way they showed us the violence. This movie focuses on the sappy drama. So you know you're in for what feels like dozens of aftermath scenes. After awhile, it begins to feel like Nightmare on Elm Street again - how many funeral scenes can we have, for God's sake?! Or, scenes of the police cleaning up a house following a murderer having struck there.
However, the entire film isn't completely drab. Craven with a bigger budget was becoming quite the horror stylist after all, though again he started with two of the grittiest, dirtiest horror films in any director's resume. Unfortunately, he only really brings out the style when someone's having a dream sequence. And when that happens- by God it's almost enough to make you forget how much the movie sucked up to that point. (Spoiler warning) Jonathan's murdered girlfriend, Alison, becomes a gorgeously ethereal spirit and can sort of Freddy-Krueger him into a fantasy world at any time where she video-games him a power-up tool of one sort or another. One of these moments takes place at a lake in a very fuzzy, blurry scene set to a beautifully ambient piece of score music and further compliments the insanely awesome visuals with some zombies. They could have made a whole other movie from this subplot, a movie I'd much rather have seen than this one.
Craven's never been one to let his imagination run away with him. And that's a shame. Because the shortest bright spots here suggest that this guy could do a lot with a big budget and some crazy ideas. Instead, he let his ambition run away with him and played the story safe by insulting the audience. Maybe like John Carpenter in his movies of this time, Craven was just looking for the easiest way to earn a fat paycheck. Because had this become a franchise, he would have finally been given his dues from what he didn't make on Nightmare. Which was a success that he was excluded from in terms of financial gain. Shocker of course was a failure, didn't spawn a franchise, and lead to Craven making his multi-millions instead on a series of godawful new-millennium remakes of his classic cult horror films from the 70's and early 80's that seek to further destroy the legacy of the genre when it relied less on the money and more on the quality of filmmaking. I guess that's show-business for you. Colder than Alison's corpse!
