You would think that a fright flick featuring Peter Cushing and John Carradine which concerned not only zombies, but Nazi zombies, and underwater Nazi zombies at that, would at least be fun to watch.   Well, in the case of the film under consideration, you'd be dead wrong.  Even the spectacle of a young Brooke Adams skinny dipping can't raise this cadaver of a cut-rate creep flick from the dead.  Indeed, one of the true horrors of Shock Waves is not the attack of the drippy dead on the dippy living but the fate of the poor film reviewer who finds himself...

By J. KNIGHT

Here’s an example of moviemaking logic going horribly awry:

Nazis are scary. Zombies are plus-scary. So Nazi zombies must be double-plus-scary, right? It stands to reason!

Well, no. Actually, when a rotting, undead corpse shuffles after you in the dark, you rarely stop to ask its political affiliation. At least, I don’t. Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Nazi...they’re all the same when they’re hungering for your flesh.

In fact, it’s even more unsettling when a good person comes back as a zombie. Your spouse, the little girl next door, your pet hamster...they’re all creepier than any Nazi zombie I’ve ever seen.

Not that I’ve seen all that many. The Nazi zombie sub-sub-genre of the zombie sub-genre of the horror genre is mercifully under-populated. In fact, I’ve only seen two Nazi zombie movies and they both fall into the sub-sub-sub-genre of "underwater Nazi zombie" movies.

The DVD cover of Shock Waves hails it as "the best of the Nazi zombie movies." I can agree to the extent that it’s better than the other underwater Nazi zombie movie I saw, Zombie Lake (1980), but that’s not saying much. It’s kind of like "better than a sharp stick in the eye," in case you were thinking about renting Zombie Lake this weekend. I don’t know how it stacks up against the out-of-water Nazi zombie flicks, but the reviews of those films are not kind.

Back to Shock Waves, aka Death Corps, aka Almost Human. You can usually gauge the quality of a motion picture by the number of aliases it goes under, kind of like human beings. (And yes, you wags, I’m aware of the irony of that statement coming from someone who writes under a pseudonym. But that only substantiates my point.)

In the Nazi zombie sub-sub-genre, three titles is a nice, conservative number. Zombie Lake has three titles in English, Oasis Of The Zombies (1983) has five including the deliciously cheesy Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies, and 1981’s Night Of The Zombies (directed by Blood Sucking Freaks director Joel M. Reed) has seven if you include Night Of The Zombies II, making it the only movie I know of that is, somehow, its own sequel. Maybe it comes on a continuous loop, spliced with a half-twist, a Möebius strip on celluloid.

But I digress, which is incredibly tempting when you’re talking about Nazi zombie movies.

Anyway, Shock Waves came out in 1977, which also makes it the first of the Nazi zombie movies. It was written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn who went on to write and direct Return Of The Living Dead Part II, a movie I’ve seen at least three times, not because it’s so good but because it’s so non-memorable that I kept renting it, forgetting that I’d seen it once or twice already. I started carrying a note to myself in my wallet that read, "Yes, you’ve seen Return Of The Living Dead Part II."

Shock Waves was Wiederhorn’s first movie, clearly establishing the Wiederhorn writing style (hitting keys until one hundred pages have been filled) and his signature directorial technique (aiming the camera at the actors and turning it on).

Writing-wise I knew I was in trouble with Shock Waves from the very first, before the opening credits, with Exposition Sequence #1. As we look at a photograph of real German soldiers, the narrator describes a crack unit of supernatural warriors who killed with their bare hands, closing with: "No one knows who they were or what became of them, but one thing is certain: Of all the SS units, there was only one that the Allies never captured a single member of."

And one thing is certain about that sentence: Of all the sentences you could use to describe a supernatural SS unit that disappeared mysteriously, there was only one that Ken Wiederhorn wrote the worst possible version of.

Exposition Sequence #1 concisely explains the origin of the Nazi zombies, neatly heading off any possible mystery about who or what or why when they actually appear. Then, lest viewers accidentally experience suspense when characters start dying, Wiederhorn gives us Exposition Sequence #2, letting us know right off the bat that the sole surviving cast member is going to be Brooke Adams. It’s like getting a little Cliff’s Notes at the start of a novel in case you have to write a report and don’t have time to read the actual book.

After the two exposition sequences, we launch into the movie proper and see Brooke Adams in a bikini. She’s young and pretty and does a good job with the material she’s given, but she seems to be biding her time until 1978 when she will have much better roles in Days Of Heaven and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. We meet the rest of the party who are on a low-budget boat tour led by Captain Ben (John Carradine) and First Mate Keith (Luke Halpin, who played the little boy in Flipper). Halpin was hot off another water movie, Mako, The Jaws Of Death, where he absolutely freakin’ nailed the role of "3rd Patrolman."

So anyway, they’re out on this boat and Carradine is crusty as hell and the sky turns a vomitous yellow like it did in The Quatermass Conclusion. Then something weird floats up from below the boat but we don’t see this happen because it got cut from the film, but the characters talk about it later and if you switch to the commentary track on the DVD at this point you’ll find out what they’re talking about. The people who saw Shock Waves in the theater wouldn’t have had that option, so count yourself lucky that you waited to see the movie until technology caught up with the filmmakers’ vision.

The boat gets sideswiped by a ghost ship and ends up stranded on a reef. The cast rows to shore in a glass-bottomed boat that Captain Bill floats up dead under (as Ken Wiederhorn might say). On the island they find an abandoned hotel run by a former SS Commander (Peter Cushing) who says they should get off the island for their own safety.

The underwater Nazi zombies start appearing, and this part is pretty neat. The Nazi zombies all wear goggles and they rise up out of the shallow water and walk to shore, and they look cool, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. We see them rise from the water several times in the movie, from several different angles, and it never gets old.

The castaways try to escape (though where they think they’re escaping to, I’m not sure, since their boat is still stuck on the reef) but they end up back on the island and the Nazi zombies continue killing them. Peter Cushing explains where the Nazi zombies came from, which we already knew from Exposition Sequence #1, and he gets killed and more of the castaways get killed and First Mate Keith gets killed because Flipper wasn’t around to save his sorry ass and he floats up under the glass-bottomed boat because, hey, if it was cool the first time it’ll be cool a second time, and Brooke Adams escapes, as we knew she was going to do, the end.

Somebody on the commentary track said that he didn’t really "get" horror. I think it was Ken Wiederhorn, which would make sense if you’ve seen either Shock Waves or Return Of The Living Dead Part II. The weirdest thing about Shock Waves is that it isn’t scary at all. I mean, not at all. The goggle-wearing Nazi zombies rising out of the water is more cool than frightening, and their prolonged killing rampage with the castaways running for the boat then through the muck then back to the hotel then back through the muck and back to the boat and on and on and on will have you scrambling for the fast forward button. The movie Spellbound, a documentary about the National Spelling Bee, was a lot more suspenseful than anything in Shock Waves.

In all fairness to the filmmakers, they were young when they made Shock Waves and inexperienced and they admit, on the commentary track, that they didn’t know what they were doing. They know that scenes were sometimes poorly filmed and didn’t cut together, that the plot had holes, and so forth. But they conclude that these flaws give the movie a dreamlike quality and make it "work." Well, okay. I guess no baby is ugly to its mother.

The film itself may be lackluster, but the commentary track is a hoot. Carradine was apparently as crusty as a sea captain and Cushing had a thing for IHOP pancakes and Adams had a fling with the Flipper guy, and the makeup kept washing off the underwater zombies and filming in Florida was hell, but ultimately a good time was had by all.

It’s too bad that the whole underwater Nazi zombie thing seems to have gone downhill since Shock Waves. Or maybe not. If you’re tempted to explore this particular sub-sub-sub-genre, you can sample the best it has to offer and be done in about eighty-five minutes. And if you decide to skip it completely, you won’t miss out on much. 

(J. Knight is the author of two horror novels, Risen and Boo. He works in Hollyweird and is a frequent contributor to HORROR-WOOD.)

Thanks, Jan.  We really can't recommend sitting though Shock Waves (despite the admittedly effective "rising-from-the-water" sequences) without a six pack of beer or a similar palliative handy.  Unfortunately, even the presence of horror icons Peter Cushing and John Carradine can't lift this watery muck from the filmic mud it's firmly stuck in.   However, those of us who suffered through the original TV version of Flipper (because our parents insisted we watch it instead of cool shows like Ultraman) might get a certain grim satisfaction at seeing Luke Halpin become Nazi zombie bait.

Article copyright © Jan Strnad

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