Tag Archives: Wes Craven

The Curator of Schlock #109: Shocker

30 Friday Oct 2015

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The Curator of Schlock #109 by Jeff Shuster

Wes Craven’s Shocker

(This movie had better be shocking)

Shocker1 I picked up Wes Craven’s Shocker a few years ago in a double pack with Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs. I liked that movie back in the early 90s along with Child’s Play and Candyman, the last gasps of 80s horror before we entered a decade without any real horror movies. Wes Craven’s Shocker had escaped me somehow until I had bought that double pack. Was I pleasantly surprised? I’m guess…

Wes Craven’s Shocker is about a psycho serial killer that goes around murdering families. Pretty harsh stuff and the police are finding it impossible to capture the guy.

Our hero of the film is a college football player named Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg) who bumps his head and I guess develops a psychic connection with the serial killer.

Shocker5When Jonathan goes to sleep, he dreams about the killer murdering his adoptive family. Turns out it wasn’t a dream! His foster dad is the lead detective on the investigation and the serial killer wanted to send Detective Don Parker (Michael Murphy) a message: Stop hunting me or I’ll kill your family. Oh wait. I just did kill your family. Hahahahaha! I’m that evil! (That taunt may not have been in the actual movie.)

So Jonathan managed to see the killer’s face in that dream he had, notices the guy has a limp and that the guy owns a dilapidated TV repair shop. They figure out the killer is a man named Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi). Pinker manages to murder every single arresting officer sent to the shop save for Detective Don Parker. Pinker then tracks down Jonathan Parker’s girlfriend and murders her. Then he writes Happy Birthday, Jonathan in her all over the walls of his apartment. Like I said, this guy is really evil.

Shocker4Pinker is trying to murder another family when Jonathan uses his dream/psychic powers to track Pinker down. The police follow him in close pursuit.

Shocker3Jonathan and Pinker have a fight to the death on a rooftop, but the police break it up so I guess it really isn’t a fight to the death. While awaiting death row, Pinker does some weird ritual to a television demon (just watch the movie). Oh, it turns out Jonathan is adopted and Pinker is really his father. Pinker murdered Jonathan’s mother too. Jonathan has had a pretty sad life up to this point, but he gets to watch Pinker get the electric chair so hopefully that will help ease his pain.

shocker2Except that Pinker is now pure electricity and he can posses anyone he comes into contact with. I guess they shouldn’t have allowed him that final devil-worshiping ceremony in his cell! Eventually, Pinker jumps into a satellite stream allowing him to murder random people in their living rooms just by jumping out of their TV sets. You know, why did they show Pinker murdering people in their living rooms when he could have been murdering TV characters instead. Imagine if he had murdered Gilligan or Captain Kirk, leaving the characters on those shows to do nothing but mourn. Pinker had the ability to ruin all of the classic TV shows. Now that would have truly made him a monster.

Five Things I Learned from Wes Craven’s Shocker

  1. Keep your gun drawn when hunting a serial killer.
  2. Never give mouth to mouth to a serial killer.
  3. The ghost of your dead girlfriend can save your life from scary electricity man.
  4. Electricity man can possess easy chairs.
  5. If Pinker were to have murdered Jay Leno on live TV, would the real Jay Leno be dead or just the television version? So, I guess I learned nothing! Happy Halloween, folks!

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Photo by Leslie Salas

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #108: Summer of Fear

16 Friday Oct 2015

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The Curator of Schlock #108 by Jeff Shuster

Summer of Fear

Fear5

Wes Craven Appreciation Month continues here at The Museum of Schlock with a made-for-TV movie entitled The Summer of Fear! The movie was also known as Stranger in Our House. I like the first title better because it’s less confusing. I mean are they saying there’s a stranger in our house or are they saying our house is stranger, or maybe our house is stranger because there’s a stranger in our house?

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See The Summer of Fear is a much better title except that I’m reviewing this movie in the fall, but I save the super scary movies for October. I’ll be doing a retrospective month the Summer Movies of 2001 this summer so you can be afraid of that.

Summer of Fear is a 1978 made-for-TV starring Linda Blair. Wes Craven must have directed this hot on the heels of The Hills Have Eyes. It aired on NBC on October 31st, but lost the ratings war to Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell on CBS.

This begs the question as to why the 1970s so awesome and why can’t we get made-for-TV movies about devils dogs anymore?

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We don’t get devil dogs in Summer of Fear, but there’s enough devil-worshiping nonsense going on to make it worth your while. The movie starts out with a car about to going off of cliff while this creepy woman with blood red eyes pops in and out of view.

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Cue Linda Blair as Rachel Bryant waking up from a “What the hell was that?” dream. Turns out the dream was a kind of premonition. Her aunt and uncle get killed in a car wreck along with their housekeeper. Their daughter Julia wasn’t in the car so she moves in with the Bryants.

The Bryants own this fancy horse ranch and, frankly, they’re little well to do. This comes as kind of a shock to Julia considering she’s from the Ozarks. In fact, Julia keeps insisting that it’s not like she was born there. Hey, coming from the Ozarks is nothing to be ashamed of!

So what if the “hill people” eat squirrel. You’d probably like it to if you just tried it. The “hill people” are also very superstitious in that they practice black magic and move into stranger’s houses in order to ruin the life of poor Linda Blair by making her family turn on her, putting a hex on her favorite horse, covering her with measles, and stealing her boyfriend!

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Did I mention that Fran Drescher was in this movie? She doesn’t laugh once, so I guess we can be grateful for that. The actor who played the young Clark Kent in Superman: the Movie is also present, but he’s got some kind of Brady Bunch perm going on. This made-for-TV movie was released theatrically in Europe.

Suckers!

I have a craving for Devil Dogs now.

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Five Things I Learned from Summer of Fear

  1. Linda Blair is good in anything.
  2.  “Hill People” are bad news especially when they’re trying to seduce your dad. Ewwwwww!
  3. If you find a human tooth in someone’s suitcase, best to plan for a stake burning in the near future.
  4. Never get into a car chase with a witch cuz she’ll like take control of your car and send you crashing over a cliff.
  5.  ’70s made-for-TV movies ain’t half bad.

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Photo by Leslie Salas

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #107: The Hills Have Eyes

09 Friday Oct 2015

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The Curator of Schlock #107 by Jeff Shuster

The Hills Have Eyes

(Now that’s a scary title for a movie)

Hills Have Eyes Poster

Your Curator of Shock continues our celebration of the Maestro of Maniacs, Wes Craven! Tonight’s feature presentation is 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes. To think, this movie came out a couple months after a little movie called Star Wars. I mention that for no reason in particular except that the country has Star Wars fever and there’s no reason why this blog shouldn’t be saturated with it. Let’s just say I’ve got a surprise for you Star Wars fans coming in November.

The Hills Have Eyes is a fun little film about a family on vacation who get attacked by a family of mutant cannibals.

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Right off the bat, I’m getting very frustrated with this movie because they’re just way too many characters. It’s like watching The Fellowship of the Ring again. I guess you could argue that this movie is about two families. One is the Carters, an all-American family who have the same last name as the then-sitting President. The other family doesn’t have a name, but we’ll call them the Cannibals.

The patriarch of the Cannibal family is Papa Jupiter. I guess the US government was testing nukes nearby while his mother was pregnant and all that radiation made her give birth to a mutant cannibal. Now I don’t want to hear your hippie objections. The Cold War was still running strong and we had to show that bear in the woods that we meant business. If a few mutant cannibals got born as a result, so be it. We were a number of years off before Sylvester Stallone would end the Cold War for our great nation.

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As for the Carter family, I’ll do my best run through the family members. We have old man Carter, a retired police officer with a bum ticker, his wife cooks hamburgers and screams at him while he’s driving so he’ll crash into a bush leaving them stranded in the middle a desert.

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They have a daughter who’s played by Dee Wallace and her husband who’s played by Sonny Bono or a guy that looks like Sonny Bono. They have a baby daughter named Katie that Papa Jupiter will later refer to as “tenderloin,” but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There are also a couple of teenagers named Bobby and Brenda and a couple of dogs named Beauty and Beast.

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After the car accident, the Carter family decides to set up camp. Old man Carter heads back to a gas station run by a guy who kept warning them to “Stay on the main road!” Sonny Bono heads on out to an abandoned military base. I’m sure the two of them will be fine. The dogs go running off into the hills. Bobby finds Beauty gutted like a fish and gets spooked by one of the crazy men in the bushes. Bobby gets back to the camp, but keeps a tight lip on what happened to the dog. Yeah, maybe this is vital information that your family needs! They’ll be cannibal food regardless.

 

Five Things I Learned from The Hills Have Eyes

  1. Mutant are people too…No, they’re not. They’re mutants!
  2. Blueberry Frosted Mini Wheats are the cereal they serve in hell. Okay, I didn’t learn that from the movie, but they really are awful.
  3. If you kill Beauty, you’d best be sure to kill Beast because dog will seek revenge. I’m serious. He’s the most competent member of the Carter family.
  4. Casual wear from the 1970s looks terribly uncomfortable to wear.
  5. Never go outside when you hear a noise!

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Jeffrey Shuster 3

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.