<\/p>\n
Peter Cushing, John Carradine, Brooke Adams in a bikini and Everyone’s seen Shock Waves<\/em>.\u00a0 Even if you don’t know Oh, let’s pause there.\u00a0 This is one of those Executive Decision<\/em> We open with a nice little prologue Turns out the Nazi’s Aboard the pleasure boat are our Meanwhile, our no-name heroes, Filmed in 30 days on no budget,\u00a0Shock Waves<\/em> Not that I would ever, in my sober moments, mention those two films and Shock Waves<\/em> in the same paragraph.<\/p>\n There’s Drinking will help you The Nazi zombies spend much of the movie in If you’re 15 and you’re sitting on your bud’s rat
\ninvincible Nazi zombies hiding in the Florida Keys?\u00a0 No, it’s not Mrs. Doubtfire<\/em>, it’s the 1976 horror Shock Waves<\/em>.\u00a0 You know you’ve lost the thread in life when you spend Friday night watching this baby.<\/p>\n
\nit, you’ve seen it.\u00a0 If you’ve seen, read or played games
\nfeaturing Nazi zombies, you know all about\u00a0Shock Waves<\/em>.\u00a0 And Oasis of the Zombies<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 But\u00a0 Shock Waves<\/em>\u00a0is
\nmore the first person shooter type movie. You’ll think to yourself,
\nwhenever someone dies, that it’s a shame movies like this aren’t being
\nreleased today.\u00a0 Can you imagine the product tie-ins?\u00a0 The
\nmovie just screams video game, then there are the sanitized “Nazi”
\nuniforms (jack boots and what appear to be mechanic outfits) and the
\ngroovy zombie goggles.\u00a0 Come to Burger King today and get your own
\nGeneric Hotel Mirror, just like the ones Peter Cushing’s character
\ncollected.<\/p>\n
\ntype movies.\u00a0 When they say it stars John Carradine and Peter
\nCushing, what they mean is that it stars them for about five minutes
\neach.\u00a0 Especially in the case of Cushing, it feels like they don’t
\neven belong in the film.\u00a0 As if they were brought in and had no
\nidea what the movie was about.\u00a0 Many of Cushing’s scenes involve
\nrunning around the beach and through the jungle, completely out of sync
\nwith the rest of the film.<\/p>\n
\nabout a deadly force of super Nazi soldiers who vanished at the end of
\nthe war.\u00a0 Remember “In Search Of…” hosted by Leonard
\nNimoy?\u00a0 Think like that, except narrated by the guy who did the
\nvoiceover intro for Evil Dead II<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\nescaped to “the islands off of” Florida in a “Nazi freighter” at the
\nend of the war, where they were so zombified and terrible their
\ncommander (Cushing) trapped them aboard and scuttled the ship.
\nEver since then, he has lived undetected in an abandoned hotel.
\nAll of that is just dandy until a pleasure ship crosses over the
\nwreckage of the freighter and does absolutely nothing to incur the
\nwrath of the trapped zombies.\u00a0 Why they waited 30 years to get
\nmad, we’ll never know.<\/p>\n
\nseven stranded castaways here on Nazi Isle – the babe, the wealthy and
\nwhiney married couple, the smart guy, the goofball cook, the skipper
\nand the tough guy.\u00a0 Carradine plays the skipper and he dies after
\ndelivering his twelve lines, all of which refer to cut scenes from the
\nfinal release and make no sense at all.\u00a0 After that, we’re
\noff.\u00a0 Spooky Florida Key, occupant:\u00a0 One.\u00a0 SS Commander
\nPeter Cushing, who is either “involuntarily exiled” or “in voluntary
\nexile.”\u00a0 He slurs his lines after his big monologue, so we may
\nnever know the truth.<\/p>\n
\nheaded up by Brooke’s breasts, get knocked off one by one in the most
\npainfully formulaic way imaginable.\u00a0 Well, 28 years later, I guess
\nit might be unfair to say such things.\u00a0 Nazi zombies hunting down
\nhapless tourists may not have been formulaic in 1976, but that sort of
\nthing happens every day in 2004!<\/p>\n
\nis also one of those weird movie wonders.\u00a0 Scrape up 15 grand and
\nyou get a movie that not only stars two big names and is filmed
\nentirely outdoors, on location, but you also get two releases – 1975
\nfor the drive-ins and 1980 for the indoor theaters – and a multi-region
\nDVD release that makes more than those two theatrical releases
\ncombined.\u00a0 The location is an old hotel in Florida – building and
\ngrounds rented for $250.\u00a0 Cheap locations make the film, again and
\nagain.\u00a0 <i>Session 9<\/i> has that same story, as does Pi<\/em>.\u00a0 Pi<\/em>
\njust went ahead and filmed illegally – hey, why pay even $250?
\nFilm until the cops show up, then play dumb and run away.<\/p>\n
\nonly one good way to get through the film – turn it into a drinking
\ngame.\u00a0 There are even very clear chugging moments – Brooke Adams
\nfalling on her face.\u00a0 She falls twice, and she hits the ground
\nlike a sack of flour, face first, both times.\u00a0 I don’t know how
\nthey filmed that without laughing.<\/p>\n
\ncope with the overall story problems.\u00a0\u00a0 For instance, the
\nzombies, who are sensitive to daylight (it’s the only thing that can
\ndefeat them), hunt and kill primarily in the daytime.\u00a0 Yes, I
\nknow, cheaper to film during the day, but then why make daylight their
\nonly weakness?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is possible that the Daylight
\nFactor is just a script error, though.\u00a0 First of all, our heroes
\nseem to learn through osmosis that removing the zombie goggles kills
\nthe zombies.\u00a0 They all start doing it without explaining anything
\nto the audience.\u00a0 But then one of the zombies who gets de-goggled
\nappears, some time after his blinding and death, to kill one of our
\ngirls, only then to reappear in a totally unrelated scene, roughly
\nintercut in the finale showdown, blind and stumbling once again, dying
\na second time in the sunlight.\u00a0\u00a0 (Take a drink whenever you
\nsee zombie goggles.)<\/p>\n
\nthe water.\u00a0 This is the one great effect in the film – uniformed
\nzombies walking around on the sea bed, dropping below the waves,
\nappearing from the muck in the disused swimming pool.\u00a0 They grab
\nour folks and drag them down to a silent, watery grave.\u00a0 They can
\ndo this because, inexplicably, all of our heroes stay waist deep in the
\nwater whenever possible.\u00a0 Instead of taking the forest path, for
\nexample, they wade through a creek that cuts through the island.
\nSometimes they’ll even take off their shoes or their
\nblouses.\u00a0\u00a0 To avoid a zombie Nazi, they’ll climb down into
\nthe muck of a swimming pool and splash around frantically.\u00a0 It’s a
\nvery watery movie and, traditionally, I avoid watery movies, but I’m on
\nmy fifth vodka tonic and, let’s face it, the whole world loves Nazi
\nzombies.<\/p>\n
\ninfested couch in his mom’s basement, staring at the weird 1982 cabinet
\nTV, then go rent\u00a0Shock Waves<\/em>.\u00a0 If you’re 30 and
\nyou’re drinking vodka tonics and wondering what’s happened with
\neverything, watch something else.\u00a0 But, at some point, everyone
\nwill have to see Shock Waves<\/em>.\u00a0 Now that I’ve mentioned
\nit, it’ll come up at a Christmas party, and you’ll get laid if you’re
\nable to say, “Yes, Bernadette, I’m aware of the work.\u00a0 Is this
\nreal caviar or is it from California White Sturgeon?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,352],"tags":[403,353,158],"class_list":["post-2556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cult-culture","category-gsarchive","tag-cult-culture","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-horror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2556"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2802,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions\/2802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}