Review: Shock Waves (1977)
Directed by: Ken Wiederhorn
Starring: Peter Cushing, Brooke Adams, Fred Buch
Written by: John Harrison, Ken Wiederhorn
Music by: Richard Einhorn
IMDb
Although I’ve seen my fair share of zombie flicks, Ken Wiederhorn’s Shock Waves eluded me. Now that I think about it, I haven’t seen any of the many Nazi-themed zombie flicks. I regret waiting so long to watch this, though, because it’s a very eerie experience. The movie is about a group of shipwrecked tourists forced to take refuge in a creepy abandoned beachside hotel, where they are attacked by undead Nazi soldiers who rise from the ocean floor. Shock Waves takes its gentle time from the start, focused more on building mood than scares. In fact, the scares never really come. This a pretty even-keeled horror movie that maintains a sort of simmering dread through its beautiful but ominous setting — including a number of chilling shots of the zombies traversing beneath the water’s surface — and a low-key sinister and unrelenting score from Richard Einhorn. Many shots are awash in sepia tone, adding to the other-worldliness of the film. There aren’t a ton of scenes in the genre more unsettling to me than when the zombie super-soldiers first rise from the ocean to descend on the hotel. While the soldiers themselves aren’t particularly frightening in appearance — looking like regular, if soggy, SS troops with bad skin and large goggles — nor are they very gruesome in their methods of execution, the way they silently stalk about and efficiently drown everyone is kind of unnerving nonetheless. However, there are definitely points in the movie where you’re expecting that horror to finally boil over, and it just never does. Though Shock Waves takes a unique approach, it does fail to deliver any gore, which is sort of a staple of zombie cinema. I don’t think even a single drop of human or ghoul blood is spilled, actually. But I can’t in good conscience dock the movie too harshly for that when it’s atmospheric as hell and offering something interesting and unconventional in a subgenre brutally slavish to convention. The movie is well worth a watch, even if, like me, your every cell cries out in anguish when you hear about another zombie movie, show, book, game, whatever.
Rating: 8 out of 10