SHOCKER (1989)

A serial killer is terrorizing Los Angeles. At the same time, the lead detective's college age stepson is having extremely vivid dreams about the murders. Shit happens and soon the murderer's soul is jumping "...in and out of people like a goddamn crab or something".

Obviously, I don't know the story behind the creation of SHOCKER, but it seems, from the advertising and the actual feel of the movie, that the filmmakers were trying to use Wes Craven’s name and the popularity of the Elm Street series to create another successful horror franchise. The trouble is Freddy was initially scary, cool and unique. It wasn’t until things started getting cheesy later in the series that things went to shit.  But with SHOCKER, things are goofy as fuck from the very beginning! First off, the killer has a shitty villain name. Horace Pinker. What the fuck is that? Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, Darth Vader…Horace Pinker. It ain’t happening. More like Boreus Stinker, amirite? Secondly, the dude is boring looking. He looks just like a normal dude you’d see at the grocery store. Yeah, yeah, so does Patrick Bateman or Norman Bates, but still, they have a sinister feel about them. Thirdly, the dude is too loud and has absolutely horrendous one-liners. Example: “… let's take a ride in my Volts Wagon.”  Kill me.  Motherfucker comes off more like a cartoon character than a vicious serial killer. Fourthly, the hero character (played by Peter Berg) was a fucking dweeb! Dude could barely put together a coherent sentence. Plus, he was falling all over the place, walking into a table, running into a pole and tripping on everything. I wouldn’t trust him to deliver a pizza correctly. Fifthly, the entire feel to the movie was off. Lots of weird camerawork, needlessly complicated story, disappointing (and abrupt) ending, crap dialogue, dreamy lighting, extremely confusing timeline (Why did our hero wait until after the funerals to talk to his stepfather about his visions? What was the time between Pinker's arrest and his execution?), a newspaper with gibberish in it, televisions mainly showing old stuff from the 1940's and 1950's, very little on-screen violence, rock soundtrack that felt forced, overacting, zero gore, zero tits, zero dicks.

I don’t know. I really wanted to like this film back when I was a kid in 1989 and I didn’t. Revisiting it again for this review, outside of some nostalgic feelings, I still didn’t like it. One thing that disappointed my friends and I back in the day was we thought the killer was going to have some kind of evil superpower to use electricity to kill people. Like having machinery attack people, electrocuting women during a wet t-shirt contest or making a baseball pitching machine hit somebody in the nuts…to death.

For what it is, SHOCKER is a mid-level 1980’s slasher flick, but too cheesy to be taken seriously.

BODY BAGS (1993)

Made by Showtime as a test run for a "Tales from the Crypt"-style horror anthology show, BODY BAGS has horror legend John Carpenter dressed up like a corpse in a morgue.  He greets the audience and tells some fucking horrible jokes.  It's pretty bad.  Cheesy jokes are forgivable though as long as the stories are dope.  They're not...

"The Gas Station" The best thing I can say about this one is the main actress, Alex Datcher, is a good actress.  Unfortunately, the script gives her nothing to work with.  There's barely even a story.  She reports in for her first night as an overnight attendant at a secluded gas station.  Random people show up...including a serial killer.  That has the potential to be scary, but nothing here is even remotely scary.

"Hair" Stacy Keach (who's performance is the highlight of the entire movie) plays a dude who is super sad about his thinning hair.  He tries various concoctions, but none of them work.  Eventually, he goes to a hair growth doctor he saw on TV and before you know it, he's hairier than Cousin Itt's ballsack. 

"Eye" Luke Skywalker is an up and coming baseball player on his way to the big leagues.  Unfortunately, he can't drive for shit and while looking for a B-52's cassette (of all things), he wrecks his whip and ends up with piece of glass in his right eyeball.  The hospital replaces his damaged eyeball with an eye from a serial killer.  You can guess what happens next.

Book-ending the stories and sprinkled between them are more bad jokes by John Carpenter about drinking formaldehyde and stuff like that.  It's pretty easy to see why this was never made into a TV show.

BODY BAGS is more watchable now than it was in 1993, because when I watched it back then, it was just lame and the stories all drug on forever...but nowadays, it's an interesting time capsule full of 90's as fuck fashions and hair, a truly impressive cast of genre legends, Barney the Dinosaur on the cover of TV Guide, vintage electronics and so on. With a runtime of 91 minutes, there should have been four stories instead of three. Also, bump up the terror and blood. Three scary stories and one campy one. Or a mixture like in CREEPSHOW.