Very Underrated.


Anyone else agree?

FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS! "Charlton Heston"

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I go back and forth. I really love the concept and the brutality of the killings, but then the whole jumping in and out of bodies and electrical current thing kinda killed all of it. I like it otherwise. I wasn't expecting the girlfriend to die at all. Or even the family. Very gruesome.

A bit of the old ultraviolence...

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I think this film gets less credit than it deserves. People tend to take it seriously and then say that it's a stupid film. I think it's a clever film that does stupid things on purpose, which is entirely different.

Craven always had a sense of humor and a penchant for inverting the genre's tropes. And he made this film after spending the latter half of the decade watching New Line produce garbage sequels to his own franchise (ANOES) without his involvement. Just as New Nightmare was a meta-rumination on hacky sequels, so too does Shocker play out like a satire of the genre and its habit of producing increasingly ridiculous sequels. It just isn't on the level of Craven's ANOES finale.

The film starts out about how you'd expect, then just gets progressively more absurd. The first act had more than enough plot for most horror films. A young football player loses his family to a serial murderer to whom he is mysteriously linked, and then uses his ability to find the killer in dreams and supernaturally sense his presence in the real world to help the police track him down. That's a whole movie right there. But that's just one third of the film and each subsequent act plays out like its own mini-sequel. By the time they end up on TV in the finale, it should be rather obvious to anyone watching that Craven was having a bit of fun.

In that light, I think it's much easier to enjoy Shocker. It's an intentionally ridiculous horror movie that, despite its flaws, is still quite entertaining - even more so if you appreciate the genre commentary within.

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[deleted]

I love to champion underrated movies and i like most of Craven's films but i can't defend Shocker, it's pretty bad. That's not to say it isn't entertaining. As far as underrated Craven films go I'd say Swamp Thing is underrated. I'd even say the first two Scream films are underrated now because it's become so in vogue in the last decade or so to say they're crappy films that they don't often get recognized for how good they are.

What are words for when no one listens anymore

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Yes. Extremely underrated.

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[deleted]

The movie is a dud. Incoherent. Half assed. Supposedly a response to the decline of the Freddy franchise. Did they think "Hey. We can make crap that's as poor as that."?

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