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After a series of unusual dreams young football star Jonathan Parker Peter Berg captures serial killer Horace Pinker Mitch Pileggi a diabolical television repairman responsible for the deaths of several families. Pinker is sentenced to die in the electric chair but the execution goes awry and more people are mysteriously killed. Jonathan realizes that Pinker has used black magic to transfer himself into electricity able to travel through power lines into homes through television sets. Despite the skepticism of his police detective father Michael Murphy only Jonathan can track Pinker down and destroy him once and for all. Director Wes Craven combines his serial killer thriller with a dash of social criticism satirizing the modern obsession with the media in ways similar to his later hit SCREAM. Horace Pinker is a tough slasher in the Freddy Krueger mode making wisecracks between murders making SHOCKER a tense but funny horror movie with appearances by John Tesh and Dr. Timothy Leary as a televangelist as well as a cameo by Craven himself. The film climaxes in a wild chase between Jonathan and Pinker through the dangerous television landscapes a realm where anything can happen.

Wes Craven's horror pictures always have a few wild ideas knocking around inside them, and this 1989 slashfest is no exception. The electrocution of a mass murderer turns into a kind of cosmic jump-start: evil Horace Pinker is reborn as an elusive electronic phantom, capable of leaping from one body to another. (This trick is also used to good effect in The Hidden and Fallen.) Pinker's a stinker, and Craven was clearly trying to set up another franchise villain in the vein of his Nightmare on Elm Street champ, Freddy Krueger--perhaps a bit too baldly. However, amidst the mayhem, the film's real subject is the poisonous presence of mass media, as Pinker (played by The X-Files' Mitch Pileggi) insinuates himself as a free-floating spirit run amok in television itself. In its own pulp way, Shocker gets at the heart of media-culture inanity quicker than a ten-week college class on the subject, and although Craven occasionally lapses into generic bloodletting, he always snaps right back with some crazy angle on the TV nation. The hero is played by a young Peter Berg, the Chicago Hope star who would go on to direct his own shocker, Very Bad Things. Shocker failed to catch on with audiences (somewhere there's a warehouse full of unsold Horace Pinker action figures), but it's definitely worth a look for horror fans. --Robert Horton