I Just Saw

Surprisingly cheesy and dull Wes Craven thriller, Shocker is nowhere near as good as The People Under the Stairs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and his other classics. It’s about a young man pursued by a serial killer, Horace Pinker, who kills most of his adopted family, his girlfriend, and sundry other people in the kid’s life probably including his mailman. He’s sent to the electric chair but the process allows the occult-savvy killer to become one with electricity and jump from body to body.

I think my biggest issue was that the characters are completely uninteresting. Pinker in particular is void of intelligence or personality and is just a ball of stupid childish aggression. Which is weird as the story explicitly states that he’s so intelligent he’s evaded capture while killing families for decades. I guess his connection to Satanic forces was giving him a lot of help.

The other characters aren’t much better. Most of the protagonist’s adopted family die in the first twenty minutes leaving just him and his foster dad, a high-ranking detective investigating Pinker’s crimes, yet no compassion or discretion is evidenced among the adults in the room. The dad seems constantly on the verge of slapping his traumatised son around; and heck, when the guy’s girlfriend dies, cops just let him wander in and find her eviscerated corpse with blood everywhere.

There are quite a few things I liked, such as when Pinker jumps into the body of a little girl, or an armchair that starts to grow eyes, or a Stay Tuned-esque trip through TV shows that’s clearly meant to be comedic. I also like the rock soundtrack.

There’s just no intrigue or power to the story, no reason to care.

Rating: 2/4

Described by Peter Cushing as the worst film he made, The Blood Beast Terror isn’t as bad as all that, but it is bad. The story is vague and sloppy, about a detective played by Cushing who in the 19th century investigates a series of murders somehow connected to an entomology school and its secretive master (Robert Flemying).

I never really grasped what the villain was trying to do in a larger sense, or why. Obviously, you don’t expect scientific accuracy from a film like this, but you do expect some pseudoscience explication and motivation.

On a technical front, the murder scenes are so poorly lit you literally can’t see anything. I felt like I might as well be looking at a black screen during some scenes.

I still enjoyed the film. Cushing’s great skill was to lend even trash dignity, and he elevates this nonsense far above its natural station. Flemyng’s okay, but his strategy is to just make his character either angry or on edge all the time. Oddly, the decision was made it seems to not have any occult element. Cushing is just a policeman and Flemyng just a scientist.

I enjoyed the depiction of lush rural England and the period touches, like a local inn that also serves as a mortuary. From the days when the pub truly was the centre of the community. There’s also some nice comic relief with a morgue attendant and Cushing’s daughter’s budding romance with a butterfly chaser.

Rating: 2/4