"Shock" and Awe

There have been quite a few times that I've gone over "Shock Waves" in my collection and really wanted to watch it. The blurb on the front explained that this movie was "The best of the Nazi zombie movies!" Now, what took me by surprise with this was the fact that there was actually a subgenre of film that was that specific. I mean, really, how could you go wrong? You have a zombie, you make them a Nazi and you have a pretty entertaining movie, right?

Right?

Well, that's what I thought. No one's ever accused me of being discriminate with my movie buying. I, most of the time, will buy any movie that catches my eye. Sometimes, I'll actually go for a movie that looks absolutely terrible. I don't know what it is that attracts me to these types of movies and I never have. I used to have pretty decent taste in movies. Some people might say that watching crap rounds out my taste.

You could liken it to a regular person. Most regular people don't just eat meat or Reese's Peanut Butter Cups; they eat both. Making them more well-rounded. Or just plain round. Point being, variety is the spice of life. If you constantly watch good movies, then you'll never really be able to experience the highs and lows. If you watch a piece of shit, the good movies seem even better...as if they were graded on a curve.

While "Shock Waves" is not a total piece of shit, it's as slow as those Nazi zombies. Granted, it's pretty creepy, but there are only so many shots of white haired, goggle wearing zombies in SS uniforms coming out of the water before you become numb to them. Now that I think of it...

The movie doesn't really make a lot of sense. The Nazis in question are not really zombies. They're undead like a cursed mummy. Zombies, in my book, have an insatiable taste for flesh and blood. Sometimes brains. The Nazis in this just kill. Silently too. The whole backstory to the movie is that during World War II, Hitler trained a particular set of Nazis to be able to withstand death or something like that. Different troops were given different abilities. These particular Nazis are particularly adept at breathing underwater. Why Hitler would assume that breathing underwater would be a skill to be honed is beyond me. Maybe they could attack submarines or Allied schools of fish, who the hell knows.

It just doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. I mean, granted, it's a horror movie from the 70s so it doesn't really need to have a "Chinatown" plot, but still, it's basically a ship full of people get stranded on an island and killed off one by one by the Nazis.

That's another thing. These Nazis wear goggles. When the protagonists decide to fight back, they go immediately for the goggles which just happens to kill the Nazis. Or re-kill them. I don't fucking know. The point being, why does this kill the Nazis? Do they have a sunlight aversion? If so, don't you think that secluding yourself on an island off the coast of Florida might not be the best place to hole up? I guess the same "not thinking" argument could be said about the aliens from "Signs", but at least that had some kind of subtext to it.

The director and co-writer, Ken Wiederhorn, went on to direct "Eyes of a Stranger", "Meatballs Part II", "Return of the Living Dead Part II" and "King Frat" which incidentally has one of the catchiest trailers I've ever seen. Wiederhorn does know how to film creepy scenes. What he does not know is pacing. While the movie is 85 minutes long, it seems like it could easily be around two to two and a half hours. And you'd think with John Carradine and Peter Cushing that the movie would have been a little bit better than it was. Turns out after some research, it was found out that the two of them filmed their scenes in four days and were paid $5,000 a piece for their roles. Can't really say that Carradine made the best choices past 1960, but Cushing doesn't really have an excuse. The very next year he was in "Star Wars"

In short, "Shock Waves" is an interesting movie, fun for what it is, but it seems longer than it should. And it can't really be considered a Nazi zombie movie because they're more undead Nazis. I know it's splitting hairs, but when you think about it, it's kind of a rip off. It's sorta like watching "Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning" and expecting Jason because it's a "Friday the 13th" movie. But then it just turns out to be some lame EMT who's fat, loudmouth son got hacked up for overreacting to a rejected candy bar. Literally, the guy got killed because he pissed off some guy cutting wood and he offered the guy a candy bar, putting it right where the guy was cutting and then acts surprised when the candy bar gets cut in half.

Sorry, tangent.

Anyway...

Check the movie out if you get the chance. Don't go out looking for it unless you gotta see every movie that involves the word zombie. If that's how you want to go about it, put this one at the bottom of your list.

Right above Uwe Boll's "House of the Dead".