Isn't It Shocking?
The movie opens with a man putting gel on the paddles of what would best be described as a "fibrilator," a device that does the opposite of a defibrillator, it causes someone to have a heart attack. He uses it to electrocute an old woman.
A man (Alan Alda) and a woman are in bed together, The doorbell rings waking them, and she has to answer it because it's a customer and she can use the $8. Implying something taudry, he suggests that the way she looks she could probably get $10. She tells him that if he'd move in with her, quit his current job, and they got married, he'd be able to stay later and not have to leave at 5 a.m. to go home, plus the kids would love to have him around. Also, she's heard a rumor that a nearby town might offer him the job of sheriff. We then discover that she's running a motel, the man who checked in (whose name is Oates) is the one who electrocuted the old woman. The man who was with her goes to his car and we discover he's a police officer. As he walks past a pedestrian while entering the police station, he is greeted as the chief
His subterfuge doesn't last long, as Blanche, the receptionist at the police station (Louise Lasser) smiles at him and asks him how things were at his girlfriend's place, since she had tried to call him at home because of a death at 5 A.M. (the one in the opening of the film), and he wasn't there. Since he probably wasn't going to 6 A.M. mass at the local church, the only other place he could have been was at his girlfriend's. She also wants to know if his girlfriend proposed to him again. Embarrassed, he tells her that's his private business.
He is throwing bird seed out the window, and over the movie we discover he is a very accomplished amateur ornithologist. able to identify very rare birds from a minor description.
The other officer, Jesse, arrives and tells him it looks like the old woman, who is identified as Janet Barber, died of a heart attack in her sleep, her husband Ralph is out of town at a VFW convention, and the only thing unusual was she wasn't wearing her nightgown, that she was naked. The receptionist laughs at this, saying she sleeps in the raw too. The chief decides to go investigate. At her house, he discovers that she has no nightgown at all, which seems suspicious.
When he gets back, Jesse mentions to him that he's also heard that the nearby town of Horse Creek may offer the chief the job of Sheriff. They go to meet Ralph to inform him about the death and later they attend Janet's funeral. Later, the chief is eating dinner with his girlfriend and her kids at a restaurant, and another police officer comes over to inform him that Ralph has died.
The town doctor arrives, and she says that there is no indication Ralph's death was anything other than a heart attack, no ligature marks, no needle punctures, no burns or other evidence of foul play. The chief finds it unusual that Ralph also died nude.
Later the chief goes back to the police station to discover that Jesse, who is 63, has also died of what is apparently also a heart attack. It is at this point he calls the local mortuary and identifies himself as Dan Barnes, and in tears, tells the mortician that Jesse has died.
When he attends Jesse's funeral, he notices that Jesse's dog is not there. The dog was always around the police station, and now suddenly is missing. Dan doesn't believe that Jesse just died, he suspects something and so he'll have the body exhumed and discover why. He drives off to get a court order.
When the autopsy is completed, discusses his feelings with the county coroner, feels three deaths from heart attacks this quickly is unusual, that old people get cold and are unlikely to not wear a nightshirt. The coroner states the only thing unusual is a smell, like turpentine or something. Later Jesse's dog is found, dead, and a smell that might be the same turpentine, or nutmeg, or something else. It's deduced to be a topical decongestant, a vaporizer ointment, and the dog did not die of natural causes, there were burn marks on it and it was murdered.
Fearing something worse might happen, Dan asks to borrow a couple of police officers from a nearby town.
While sleeping on a cot in the police station, Dan is woken by the receptionist, who calls him to tell him that all of the people who died were in the same class in school, the class of 1928. The two of them look at the records, and discover a potential future victim who lives just across the line in Vermont. Dan goes to check and is almost killed by someone in an automobile rams him in his police cruiser, then drives off after disabling it, only to return in a last attempt to finish the job, but Dan escapes. The other driver also disappears. Walking up to the house he was going to visit, Dan discovers that this person has also been murdered, so now there are only a handful of people left from the class of '28.
Returning to town, he discover's the town's cab driver is driving erratically, just as she did when she had to drive because the mortician's hearse is broken down, and she had to take Janet's body to the mortician. He discovers the shopkeeper is dead. The coroner then believes that the murderer was using a machine to stop hearts but ran out of insulating gel and is now having people touch something to ground them, But there is no such machine available that could do this.
Based on various evidence, Dan suspects that Mr. Oates, who has checked out of the motel, is the one committing the murders, probably because he is embittered for the perceived mistreatment he received from the members of his school class more than 40 years ago.
The murderer is caught, he had been in love with Marge, with whom Ralph had been having an affair for many years. He will probably end up in a mental hospital instead of prison. Dan decides he doesn't want to take the Sheriff's job, he's comfortable in the town.
murder