Shocker (1989) Worth Watching?

It’s about a serial killer who gets the chair but then comes back from the dead to continue serial killing.

Shocker was directed by Wes Craven (who also directed A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream 4 and My Soul to Take) and stars Michael Murphy (from Phase IV), Mitch Pileggi (from Night Visions), Heather Langenkamp (from Dream Warriors, The Butterfly Room and Hellraiser: Judgement) and Peter Berg (from Fire in the Sky).

"Jesus, that chair really kicks ass!" - Cop watching Horace get juiced

On of my favorite movies of all time is Fallen, a movie about a convicted serial killer who gets gassed only to bounce back to life to seek revenge on the cop that put him away. I've probably watched Fallen a dozen times.

Then one day I find out about Shocker, a movie that came out 9 years before Fallen that shares the same plot (along with House 3, strangely enough)! So needless to to say I had to sit down for this one. Turns out there's a lot of similarities, enough to make it clear where Fallen got its inspiration.

Shocker is your typical Wes Craven 80's horror flick that's not NoES. Fun concept, terrible CGI, over-acting, buckets of blood, weird out of place NoES style dreams and a lot of other things that make it a blast to watch... at least for the first 90 minutes. If Wes wrapped this up at 90 it would have been a pretty great movie. But the fact that it tacks on an extra 30 minutes of fluff and cheese really makes it hard to watch all the way through. I was seriously bored during the final act and hated the unimaginative ending.

I don't regret watching Shocker, but I definitely couldn't watch it twice.

Worth Watching?

Meh, probably not. I liked it because it was the model for a movie I've liked for years. So it was fun catching all the similarities, everything from Horace having to jump bodies as they died to the catchy song that clued you into who's body Horace was currently in. In Shocker it was "No More Mr. Nice Guy", in Fallen it was "Time Is On My Side". But if you don't have this connection and are watching it just to watch an 80's horror, I'd pass on this and pick up something else.