Nazis and zombies make effective cinematic monsters. Compelled by a force beyond will, and with essentially no minds of their own, they also make for good kills, their gory deaths ethically unproblematic due to their figurative and literal inhumanity. Combine the two, and you’ve got some heady B-movie horror material.
Nazi zombies have become a horror trope in the decades since 1977’s Shock Waves, and several flicks featuring Nazi soldiers as pre-Romero zombies preceded it. But Ken Wiederhorn’s directorial debut takes these villains a step further and also makes them underwater ghouls to boot. Throw in late-career turns by John Carradine and Peter Cushing, as well as a young Brooke Adams right before she hit it big, and the table is set for B-movie mayhem.
Unfortunately, Shock Waves never quite rises to the occasion. Framed by Adams’ character, Rose, being rescued from a drifting glass-bottomed tourist rowboat at the film’s opening and then convalescing in a hospital bed at its conclusion, the story is told in flashback. Rose is part of a small, motley tourist group on a boat helmed by a grizzled captain (Carradine) and hunky first mate, Keith (Luke Halpin). Early on, everyone just blathers and bickers and there’s very little forward momentum to the film. That changes when the group runs into engine trouble on the high seas.
Soon, the captain is dead—Carradine isn’t long for this film—and the surviving passengers discover that a hulking, decaying vessel has washed up on a reef nearby. Everybody heads to a nearby island, where they encounter Cushing’s nameless character holed up in an abandoned hotel. Turns out he’s a former SS Commander and can provide a heaping helping of exposition about just what the hell is going on here.
The encroaching Nazi zombie super-soldiers were part of a “Death Corps” of fighters imbued with superhuman ability, and this group, once led by the Commander, focused on aquatic tactics. Wouldn’t you know it, though, Nazi zombies with superpowers don’t take orders particularly well. The Corps was scrapped, with the Commander sinking the underwater zombies’ ship, which he’s disturbed to learn has now resurfaced, despite the inherent futility in attempting to kill aquatic creatures via drowning.
Shock Waves’ best moments occur during the underwater sequences, as there’s something unsettling about watching protracted scenes of a human form walking along the bottom of a body of water. The Nazi zombies don’t just keep to the sea, but they traverse the swamps and rivers of the island as well, and Wiederhorn captures some striking visuals of the submerged ghouls.
Unfortunately, the film’s worst moments are almost everything else. The PG-rated movie contains very little violence and virtually no gore, a particularly egregious misstep for a zombie movie. As the members of the group get picked off one-by-one, it’s clear these zombies are not the biting kind; instead, they just kind of grab people and eventually drown them offscreen. One exception is the tour boat’s cook (Don Stout), who trips and falls into patch of giant sea urchins before the Nazi zombies get him, in the only remarkable death scene among the bunch (and perhaps cinema’s greatest sea urchin-related fatality ever). Even the zombie deaths themselves are tame. No need to remove the head or destroy the brain with this crew—for some reason ripping off their big, dark goggles not only blinds them but causes them to stumble, collapse and gradually wither.
Shock Waves serves far more as a curious, schlocky artifact of its time than as the campy midnight-move romp that it should be. The film was released the same year Cushing gained his career’s greatest mainstream role in Star Wars, and only a year later, Adams would burnish her sci-fi bona fides with a memorable lead role in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and would also break through in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven). The still-prolific Carradine was firmly entrenched in the trashy B-movie downslope of his career—he’d be starring in a little flick called Vampire Hookers within the year, amid a half-dozen other cheapies. And a decade later, Wiederhorn would take a woeful second crack at zombies by directing his pointless retread of a cult classic, Return of the Living Dead Part II.
Don’t be surprised if Shock Waves should bubble to the surface if you wade through the backwaters of Streaming Hell. As of this writing, it appears on Amazon Prime, Peacock, and Pluto TV. You could do worse. While it’s a flawed attempt at something original, it’s at least notable for some ominous atmosphere and a handful of visually impressive underwater scenes, even if there’s precious little else to sink your teeth into.
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