House III: The Horror Show (1989)
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Max Jenke is one of the meanest serial killers of all-time and he’s got a particular chip on his shoulder for Detective Lucas McCarthy. On execution day, the electric chair doesn’t completely get the job done and soon he has turned into an energy source and begins to slowly torture the cop’s family.
Overall: Does the above sound familiar? Guy gets executed but turns into electricity so he can live on and take revenge on the person responsible for putting him in jail? It is...the same plot as “Shocker” released the very same year. The comparisons between these 2 is really interesting. “Shocker” was made by Wes Craven, director of “Nightmare on Elm St” series – “Horror Show” features boiler room shots and has the bad guy entering into the protagonists dreams and altering reality, including some scenes of inside a girl’s stomach. See, the word is this film was to be “House 3” but doesn’t in anyway resemble it – doesn’t even have connections to parts 1 or 2. And, of course the famous pseudonym, Alan Smithee, is the director – meaning the real director didn’t want to be associated with the film. So my surmise is that someone associated with Craven (or Craven himself) was gonna do “House 3” and perhaps in a legal battle lost the rights to that title and decided to ridicule Craven. Craven decides to do his own film which includes his favorite actress, Heather Langenkamp. Craven wins with $16M made to “Smithee’s” $2M. I have a few basic problems with “Smithee’s” film. The detective takes a leave of absence between the time he arrests Max to the time Max is executed. Even in 1989, the delay between the two could be decades...and the film makes it seem likes months. Executions do not take place at 8am and even in 1989, the electric chair would never be in the same room as the viewers – there are/were always separate rooms with barriers in case “old smokey” had an accident. And no how matter how much practice someone got, 50K volts is too much to handle for one person to be remotely realistic. “Shocker” is more “realistic” for it’s execution scene. The ideas of the energy going from unit to unit (“Ghost & the Machine”) is more realistic there too. So, factoring those 2 films and the ideas in the movie “Powder" we have later films which exercised better judgment and film making than this film. If anything, this film really comes out as a sequel to the “Elm St” films. No Comparison |
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