The movie itself, of course, doesn't quite live up to the brilliance of its cover art, but it's still a fun, diverting bit of undead horror that can at the very least claim both originality and influence, as it is arguably the first horror film to include Nazi zombies (it was ripped off a few years later by the Spanish-Italian coproduction Zombie Lake). The zombies here aren't your typical resurrected corpses, but rather the result of nefarious scientific experiments during World War II aimed at creating unkillable super-soldiers for the SS. They descend on a small Caribbean island, having been reawakened after spending the previous three decades at the bottom of the ocean, which gives Wiederhorn and cinematographer/co-producer Reuben Tate ample opportunity to show us the decidedly uncanny image of undead Nazis walking along the ocean floor and emerging from the waves.

The victims consist of a group of tourists on an overnight yachting trip under the command of the cantankerous Captain Ben Morris (John Carradine in one of the many cash-grab roles he took at the end of his long career). At the beginning of the film we see one of the tourists, Rose (Brooke Adams), badly dehydrated and sunburned, being rescued from a dinghy in the middle of the ocean, so know that she survives. The fate of the others, which include the boat's handsome navigator Keith (Luke Halpin, then best known as the kid from Flipper), a squabbling married couple (Jack Davidson and D.J. Sidney), and the boat's often drunk galley hand (Don Stout), is left up in the air once they are all stranded on a strange island whose only inhabitant is an isolated SS commander (Peter Cushing) in voluntary exile. The commander's sole purpose in the film is to dispense exposition about the history of the zombies, which is actually redundant given that a pre-credits sequence has already laid that groundwork. Nevertheless, Cushing marshals all the sophisticated menace of his Hammer glory days and imbues the film with a sense of gravitas that virtually no one else could have realistically supplied.

Although there are a few brief bits that drag, overall Shock Waves proves to be surprisingly robust in pacing and tension, as Wiederhorn draws out the film's rather flimsy premise for all its worth. He and the production team make fantastic use of existing locations, including two different deserted hotels that are seamlessly combined to create the commander's cavernous jungle hideaway, as well as underwater photography that gives the zombies a unique waterlogged eeriness. There isn't a whole lot in the way of make-up special effects, with a few fleeting zombie close-ups and not a single drop of blood spilled (gorehounds will definitely be disappointed, but I was impressed by how much violence Wiederhorn was able to suggest without showing much of anything). Unlike most zombies, these aren't out for guts to eat; rather, they kill out of pure homicidal ideation, which is exactly what they were created for. Composer Richard Einhorn is also quite good at amplifying the tension with his off-kilter electronic score, which utilizes all manner of discordant sounds and effects that sometimes give us the feeling that we're listening to it underwater. The result is a film that is decidedly creepy and quite clever in masking its limitations and highlighting its strengths.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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