Movie Review: SHOCK WAVES (Wiederhorn, 1978)

For years, Shock Waves bided in the depths of the "saved" section of my DVD queue, dreaming of murder. I assumed that this 1978 zombie-Nazisploitation film would deliver the things one wants from 1970s zombie and exploitation films: gore, nudity, drugs, and caricatures of real-world politics. The patient Shock Waves had other ideas.

Four tourists are not quite enjoying a cruise on what looks like a freighter, when the ship nearly collides with a drifting hulk. Their engine then breaks down while some filter effects make the sunlight change colors, and the captain (John Carradine) goes missing, leaving the six remaining crew and passengers to disembark for the jungly island nearby. There they meet a reclusive old Nazi (Peter Cushing), who warns them that his squad of amphibious zombie SS, the Totenkorps, are rising from the sea to kill them all. This happens, but one character escapes to tell the tale. (Spoiler: it isn’t the old Nazi.)

The first character to run afoul of the Totenkorps is the ship's cook, caught after he suffers a fall on some sea urchins. The movie is careful to set this up: the sequence alternates between shots of the frightened cook splashing through the mangrove swamp, shots of the revenant pursuing him, and underwater shots of the urchins, which have spines as long as knitting needles, and lurk mere inches from the cook’s unseeing bare feet. We know where this is going, and since it will be the first on-screen kill of the movie, we have high hopes.

 

If your cinematic imagination resembles mine, you are thinking, “I bet he gets a bunch of spines through his foot, and then falls and gets a bunch more in his face, like in his eye, and the zombie's going to eat his eye right off the spine, then stab it into his other eye, like ‘Let’s have some more of that’.”

You might want to adjust your expectations downward. Yes, the cook does take spines in the forearm, and in the face, but the wounds are superficial. Furthermore, the revenant doesn’t eat any part of the cook. It turns out that the Totenkorps do not even bite.

“But the zombie,” you say, hopeful. “The Nazi zombie is going to langen Messer that cook into a bloody… ribcage-and-skin lampshade or something!” (You then shake your head in disgust at yourself, and at your species.)

No. This killer, who combines that most infamous perversion of modernity, Naziism, with the eschatological horror of undeath, merely drowns the cook. The Totenkorps dispatch their victims by holding them underwater. The method has an economy of movement that an actual death-camp administrator could admire. (“You must kill ze undesirables kvietly,” says the commandant, “vile I listen to Tristan und Isolde on ze phonograph in mein office, ja? ”). However, I submit that such economy has no place in a zombie-SS movie with shock in the title.

"They're coming to get you, Barbara."

(“I’m shocked,” you blurt, “to find myself watching a zombie movie that could play unedited on broadcast TV.” Reader, you are not alone.)

"Drugs, at least?” you say, hope struggling against the SS-hands of disappointment. “Somebody’s got to be getting high in this picture--it’s from nineteen seventy-eight!” Surely this island is a haven for Rastafarians, or moustached narcotraficantes whose machine-pistols fail to save them, or a clean-cut US tourist lugging a suitcase full of heroin, one last score so he can start a legitimate business and maybe get his ex-wife to come back, a suitcase in which the ravening deceased show no interest. (A shot might track the zombie-ignored suitcase drifting out to sea on a tide of irony.) Shock Waves denies us the comfort, and the moral instruction, of these scènes à faire.

“Oh, but the scenery-chewing Strangelovian speeches by Peter Cushing,” cries your hope, rallying. Thus you wait for his Big Scene. Cushing will start slowly, addressing the shipwrecked American tourists in measured, professorial tones about his plans for a Fourth Reich. At this point, Cushing looks like he’s not even trying, just enjoying the elegance of his own voice, but he warms to the rhetoric, a sheen of sweat now glistening on his forehead, as he tells of his ambition to conquer first South America, with its warrens of race-adulteration and bikini-waxing, then the United States, republic of junkies and historically-black universities. By now Cushing is talking to nobody in particular, and altogether too loud for anything other than Nazi zpeechmaking, as he raves zat he shall train a sexless, deathless, remorseless army of carrion, adaptable to all climates, and chosen from only ze most sadistic of criminals and pychopaths, and finally, hiss voice cracking vith mania, spittle flies as he shrieks zat he, Sturmbannführer Klaus von Somesing, he shall rule a new sousand-year Reich, a ten-sousand year Reich of ze marching dead! Sieg HEIL!

None of that happens. Cushing plays one of the quietest Nazi villains in screen history. He even drowns quietly.

On the bright side, Brooke Adams, who goes full-frontal in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (also 1978), spends her first few scenes in Shock Waves wearing a bikini.

“I saw Zombi 2,” you say, “so I’m betting part of that bikini is coming off by the third reel, probably for some T&A scuba diving. Odds are good that either she or that tourist lady with the big ass is going to be showering, or still naked, whatever, when the zombies--”

Let me stop you there. If you are watching Shock Waves, you might also want to pause the video at this point and reconcile yourself to the idea that Brooke Adams in a bikini is as close as Shock Waves is going to take you to Brooke Adams (or anyone else) in the nude. Consider reviewing Adams’s nude scene from Invasion, because in Shock Waves, she will put on progressively more clothes as the story develops. You can find stills of the nude Adams on the Internet. (A warning to the curious: there is apparently a pornographic actor who also uses the name "Brooke Adams," so expect to find many pictures of her, in addition to our Ms. Adams.) Shock Waves can wait while you search, as the Totenkorps waited, to drown your expectations with a half-heard sploosh.

"They're still coming to get you, Barbara."

I must give this picture credit for its surprising attempt at being a "serious" weird tale in the manner of a William Hope Hodgson story, complete with unreliable framing narration, implacable monsters from the sea, and oscillations between unsatisfying explanations of the weirdness (i.e. are these science zombies or occult zombies?). Many scenes achieve the eerie, a rare tone for horror movies, which too often opt for the gruesome, or the autonomic scares of cats jumping out of closets.

Thus the problem with Shock Waves is twofold. First, the movie appears to be “a zombie movie,” which by 1978 had already become a genre with imitable conventions, conventions that Shock Waves ignores. Its zombies do not eat the living, their undeath is not contagious, and they are not part of some geographically widespread (or potentially so) corpse-uprising, so the viewer who expects these tropes will be left wanting. Second, in the context of low-budget 1970s genre movies, the brooding, Hodgsonian menace of Shock Waves comes off not as a tone deliberately achieved, but as the absence of the thrills we expect from exploitation cinema, a failure to deliver. We feel cheated.

If this movie’s poster or DVD cover had shown William Hope Hodgson seated at a writing desk overlooking the sea, I might have gone into it in the right frame of mind, but the poster shows a King-Kong-sized, waterlogged SS corpse lifting a yacht out of the water, as if he were considering either gnawing it in half or throwing it at you.

May I please see that movie?