31 Nights of Halloween Horror - Shock Waves

Shock Waves

85 mins.

Dir. Ken Wiederhorn

1977/USA

When it comes to Nazi zombies, few films deliver the goods like Shock Waves.  Zero gore, but high on the creep factor, add in John Carradine  and Peter Cushing and you have a bonafide classic on your hands.

A group of tourists take the budget cruise with salty ole Carradine as the captain.  While they are out on their three hour tour the sun flares up which immediately makes everyone think something is wrong.  The ships engine is having trouble, the navigation doesn't work and at night a large ghost ship comes out of nowhere and sideswipes Carradine's boat.  The next day Carradine is missing, because his 5 day shooting schedule was up, and the boat is taking on water.  With no other choice, the group piles into a small dingy and rows towards a remote island.  While on the island they discover an abandoned hotel and encounter Nazi Commander Peter Cushing, who will also disappear after 5 days of shooting.  Cushing tells them he was a commander of the Death Corps, an experimental branch of the Nazi army developing super soldiers that could withstand any environment and weapon.  But because these soldiers were based on murderers, thugs, the lowest of the low, they proved difficult to control and after the war, he sunk the boat with all these creatures on it while he held up refuge on this island.  But for whatever reason, be it the sun glare or a shock wave?  These creatures have returned with only one intent.  To complete their mission of killing everything in sight.  Cushing urges them to get off the island before it is too late, but guess what?  It is already too late and the Nazi zombies are popping up out of the water everywhere, from ocean, to the creek to the swimming pool at the hotel.  If there is water, there is a Nazi zombie.

These monsters have a fantastic look of pruned aged flesh with goggles that somehow keep them going, once the goggles are stripped off and I assume their eyes exposed to the sun, they die.  This memorable make-up design is all courtesy of our good friend Alan Ormsby, who you remember as the man behind the make-up in Deathdream that we watched earlier this month.  Peter Cushing is just a master of his craft as always, and right after this movie played another commander in charge of some death corps in a little film called Star Wars.  Carradine is Carradine, always professional and doing his job.  The rest of the cast holds up their end to make this an enjoyable 70s romp unlike most other films before or after.  

The synthesizer music by Richard Einhorn (Don't Go in the House, The Prowler) greatly adds to the atmosphere of the movie.  The shriveled zombies slowly rising from the water with their goggles and continuing on their death march are scenes nightmares are made of.  Director Ken Wiederhorn unfortunately never went on to do anything else as effective as this, his first film.  He followed up most notably with Meatballs II and Return of the Living Dead II, both complete flops with large shoes to fill from their predecessors.  But luckily he did make this low budget horror classic, which I imagine had to be a grueling task considering all the amount of water everyone was submerged or had to walk through involved with this movie.  The Nazi Zombie subgenre, while not a big one, does have a few standouts with hits like Shock Waves and Dead Snow being some of the forerunners over stuff like Oasis of the Zombies or Zombie Lake.