Cult Culture: Shock Waves

Peter Cushing, John Carradine, Brooke Adams in a bikini and
invincible Nazi zombies hiding in the Florida Keys?  No, it’s not Mrs. Doubtfire, it’s the 1976 horror Shock Waves.  You know you’ve lost the thread in life when you spend Friday night watching this baby.

Everyone’s seen Shock Waves.  Even if you don’t know
it, you’ve seen it.  If you’ve seen, read or played games
featuring Nazi zombies, you know all about Shock Waves.  And Oasis of the Zombies.   But  Shock Waves is
more the first person shooter type movie. You’ll think to yourself,
whenever someone dies, that it’s a shame movies like this aren’t being
released today.  Can you imagine the product tie-ins?  The
movie just screams video game, then there are the sanitized “Nazi”
uniforms (jack boots and what appear to be mechanic outfits) and the
groovy zombie goggles.  Come to Burger King today and get your own
Generic Hotel Mirror, just like the ones Peter Cushing’s character
collected.

Oh, let’s pause there.  This is one of those Executive Decision
type movies.  When they say it stars John Carradine and Peter
Cushing, what they mean is that it stars them for about five minutes
each.  Especially in the case of Cushing, it feels like they don’t
even belong in the film.  As if they were brought in and had no
idea what the movie was about.  Many of Cushing’s scenes involve
running around the beach and through the jungle, completely out of sync
with the rest of the film.

We open with a nice little prologue
about a deadly force of super Nazi soldiers who vanished at the end of
the war.  Remember “In Search Of…” hosted by Leonard
Nimoy?  Think like that, except narrated by the guy who did the
voiceover intro for Evil Dead II.

Turns out the Nazi’s
escaped to “the islands off of” Florida in a “Nazi freighter” at the
end of the war, where they were so zombified and terrible their
commander (Cushing) trapped them aboard and scuttled the ship.
Ever since then, he has lived undetected in an abandoned hotel.
All of that is just dandy until a pleasure ship crosses over the
wreckage of the freighter and does absolutely nothing to incur the
wrath of the trapped zombies.  Why they waited 30 years to get
mad, we’ll never know.

Aboard the pleasure boat are our
seven stranded castaways here on Nazi Isle – the babe, the wealthy and
whiney married couple, the smart guy, the goofball cook, the skipper
and the tough guy.  Carradine plays the skipper and he dies after
delivering his twelve lines, all of which refer to cut scenes from the
final release and make no sense at all.  After that, we’re
off.  Spooky Florida Key, occupant:  One.  SS Commander
Peter Cushing, who is either “involuntarily exiled” or “in voluntary
exile.”  He slurs his lines after his big monologue, so we may
never know the truth.

Meanwhile, our no-name heroes,
headed up by Brooke’s breasts, get knocked off one by one in the most
painfully formulaic way imaginable.  Well, 28 years later, I guess
it might be unfair to say such things.  Nazi zombies hunting down
hapless tourists may not have been formulaic in 1976, but that sort of
thing happens every day in 2004!

Filmed in 30 days on no budget, Shock Waves
is also one of those weird movie wonders.  Scrape up 15 grand and
you get a movie that not only stars two big names and is filmed
entirely outdoors, on location, but you also get two releases – 1975
for the drive-ins and 1980 for the indoor theaters – and a multi-region
DVD release that makes more than those two theatrical releases
combined.  The location is an old hotel in Florida – building and
grounds rented for $250.  Cheap locations make the film, again and
again.  <i>Session 9</i> has that same story, as does Pi.  Pi
just went ahead and filmed illegally – hey, why pay even $250?
Film until the cops show up, then play dumb and run away.

Not that I would ever, in my sober moments, mention those two films and Shock Waves in the same paragraph.

There’s
only one good way to get through the film – turn it into a drinking
game.  There are even very clear chugging moments – Brooke Adams
falling on her face.  She falls twice, and she hits the ground
like a sack of flour, face first, both times.  I don’t know how
they filmed that without laughing.

Drinking will help you
cope with the overall story problems.   For instance, the
zombies, who are sensitive to daylight (it’s the only thing that can
defeat them), hunt and kill primarily in the daytime.  Yes, I
know, cheaper to film during the day, but then why make daylight their
only weakness?    It is possible that the Daylight
Factor is just a script error, though.  First of all, our heroes
seem to learn through osmosis that removing the zombie goggles kills
the zombies.  They all start doing it without explaining anything
to the audience.  But then one of the zombies who gets de-goggled
appears, some time after his blinding and death, to kill one of our
girls, only then to reappear in a totally unrelated scene, roughly
intercut in the finale showdown, blind and stumbling once again, dying
a second time in the sunlight.   (Take a drink whenever you
see zombie goggles.)

The Nazi zombies spend much of the movie in
the water.  This is the one great effect in the film – uniformed
zombies walking around on the sea bed, dropping below the waves,
appearing from the muck in the disused swimming pool.  They grab
our folks and drag them down to a silent, watery grave.  They can
do this because, inexplicably, all of our heroes stay waist deep in the
water whenever possible.  Instead of taking the forest path, for
example, they wade through a creek that cuts through the island.
Sometimes they’ll even take off their shoes or their
blouses.   To avoid a zombie Nazi, they’ll climb down into
the muck of a swimming pool and splash around frantically.  It’s a
very watery movie and, traditionally, I avoid watery movies, but I’m on
my fifth vodka tonic and, let’s face it, the whole world loves Nazi
zombies.

If you’re 15 and you’re sitting on your bud’s rat
infested couch in his mom’s basement, staring at the weird 1982 cabinet
TV, then go rent Shock Waves.  If you’re 30 and
you’re drinking vodka tonics and wondering what’s happened with
everything, watch something else.  But, at some point, everyone
will have to see Shock Waves.  Now that I’ve mentioned
it, it’ll come up at a Christmas party, and you’ll get laid if you’re
able to say, “Yes, Bernadette, I’m aware of the work.  Is this
real caviar or is it from California White Sturgeon?”