Eric Thornett's Shockheaded is a zero-budget production of uncommon ambition. In both narrative and visual terms, Thornett's ideas and sensibilities are more complex than the average shot-on-video product. Drawing from influences as disparate as the two Davids (Lynch and Cronenberg), bondage porn and American film noir, he goes as big as he can with his limited resources. If Shockheaded isn't entirely successful, it still holds great interest and marks Thornett as a resourceful talent.
Shockheaded opens with fine, creepy promise: Noble (Jason Wauer) is a hard-drinking, hard-smoking fellow filled with reticence and defiant attitude. In other words, he's your typical noir anti-hero. He's holed up in an anonymous hotel room for reasons unknown (presumably to die, judging from the amount of whisky and aspirin he's consuming) when two cops show up and harass him about the whereabouts of the previous tenant, a pretty young woman who has disappeared.
If that's not enough, there are mysterious notes being slipped under his door, a creepy guy with an umbrella who looks like Robert Blake in Lost Highway also wants to know about the missing girl, and he keeps dreaming about a blank white mask. Clearly, there's some strange goings-on afoot, so Noble does what any protagonist worth his salt would do: investigate this woman's vanishing himself by descending into the underworld of pornography.
Noble's journey takes him to some seedy places, and one of the things that marks Shockheaded as more than your average B-movie is the tact with which Thornett handles the subject matter. Save for one brief shot that almost seems accidental, there is no nudity, and the flashes of sexuality we're shown are clinical at best, unpleasant at worst. Thornett has managed to pull off one of the rarest balancing acts — like Cronenberg's Videodrome, with which this shares several points of contact, he's made a film about prurient interest without succumbing to it.
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