Revenge of the Revenant Review 30: The first one with Nazi Zombies

 

Title: Shock Waves aka Almost Human

What Year?: 1976 (copyright)/ 1977 (US release)

Classification: Prototype/ Runnerup/ Mashup

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

With this review, I’m hitting review 30, what I had considered the finale for this feature. Alas, in getting here, I had a series of epic failures, including a movie I disqualified (yes, it happens). With one big hole in the lineup, my fallback was something I had originally meant to be another project: Re-review the movies I had covered for the original Revenant Review on my Exotroopers blog. With Sole Survivor and Shanks already covered, that at least left just one, and it is definitely worthy of the name of “weird” zombie movie. Here is Shock Waves, the movie that introduced Nazi zombies to the world, and put them underwater to boot.

Our story begins with a woman found at sea, disheveled and incoherent. She still supplies narration for a flashback to group on a pleasure cruise that doesn’t give them much pleasure, thanks to a rickety chartered boat and a crew more motley than usual. During their trip, the sky turns an eerie color as the group see something we don’t get a look at ourselves. While the group are still arguing over what they have seen, they collide with a mysterious wreck that has suddenly emerged from the deep. Mishaps continue as they make their way ashore on a nearby island, trailed by strange, pale figures that pop in and out of the swamps and inlets. After further losses, they soon find a compound that looks like a colonial manor converted into a second-rate tourist outpost. There, they meet a mysterious stranger who admits to being a former German officer left behind on the island. As the strange pursuers draw nearer, their reluctant host reveals that he is an SS officer assigned to a unit of stormtroopers revived or transformed as part of an unwholesome experiment. He warns that his former comrades are uncontrollable except by confinement, and having escaped their ship, are sure to kill all in their path. As night falls, the stormtroopers begin their onslaught, and will anyone survive to see the sunrise?

Shock Waves was directed and co-written by Ken Wiederhorn, who went on to direct Return of the Living Dead Part II (which I might still get to). The film cast John Carradine and Peter Cushing (see Horror Express) in the top-billed but limited roles of the captain and the unnamed SS commander, with Brooke Adams in the actual leading role of Rose. Alan Ormsby, known for Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and Dead of Night, was credited with makeup for the undead stormtroopers. The film was reportedly filmed in 1975 with the working title “Death Corps”, and bears a copyright of 1976. Its US release was reportedly delayed until 1977. Posters and promotional material bear the tag line “Once, they were almost human”, which became an alternate title in certain releases. It went on to become one of the more popular 1970s zombie movies prior to Dawn of the Dead, and received further notoriety as the first to feature “Nazi zombies”. It has remained available on home video, including VHS, DVD and streaming. A 2003 Blue Underground release includes significant archival material including concept art.

For my personal experiences, this was yet another movie I heard of from The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, and for once, I found and watched it on a used VHS tape very soon after I started looking for it. After one or two viewings, however, I traded back the tape, and my feelings have remained conflicted ever since. There’s plenty that’s good, especially the unnerving zombies and Cushing’s high-tension performance. There’s also a lot that’s bad, awkward and flat-out random, egregiously John Carradine’s incoherently rambling captain, whose early demise has no appreciable impact on ensuing events. It remains most fascinating as yet another example of a movie that feels like a “ripoff” of movies that really came out at the same time or somewhat later, conspicuously Jaws and Halloween. To mark 30 reviews for this feature, I decided it was time for a rematch, and gave it a whirl with a digital copy I purchased years ago. After this much time, I finally found myself appreciating it far more than I have before.

If there’s one thing to get to off the bat, it’s that this movie is all atmosphere. This time around, we have an effective combination of environments, the foreboding beaches and swamps of the island and the truly desolate compound. This brings in some chronological wonkiness. The stormtroopers’ uniforms, which already detract from their dignified appearance, should have rotted away. Far more problematically, the kitchen and cafeteria in the compound don’t look nearly old enough for World War 2 and certainly aren’t of military or German origin. What the latter anomalies really suggest is that the commander and his charges haven’t been alone as long as he lets on, with all the ominous possibilities that implies. The ambiguity extends to the castaways’ first encounters with the stormtroopers. At first, the revenants seem nearly indifferent to the newcomers, who make enough mistakes on their own to account for the failure of their best chance at escape and at least one of the early deaths. As their situation deteriorates, the castaways seem to exhaust the troopers’ patience as they do the viewer’s, until the climactic assault feels like an editorial on just how foolish and irritating most of them are.

Needless to say, the centerpiece of the movie is the stormtroopers themselves. By way of introduction, we get two significantly different stories of their origin, which raise some question about their status as “undead”. An unnecessary opening narration states that they are reanimated Nazi soldiers killed in battle. The commander gives a more intriguing account, describing them as originally “cheap hoodlums and thugs, and a good number of pathological murderers”; on their condition, he describes them rather unhelpfully as “not dead, not alive, but somewhere in between”. Whatever their actual backstory, the stormtroopers are astoundingly menacing in appearance, notwithstanding the trademark goggles, and even more so in their movement, always marching or wading in even strides and in disciplined formations when more than one are present. Their habit of popping out of the water is incongruously like a “Marco Polo” game, comical if not for the fact that they take out several victims in this manner including the commandant. Unusually, the attack sequences downplay their numbers. Certain establishing shots suggest 12 or 20 of them, and perhaps many more, yet only two or three at a time will go after a victim. There’s also absolutely no suggestion that they could multiply to overrun the world. Several of the most brutal scenes (in a “’70s PG film!) are shots of their clearly unrevived victims, including a surreal discovery of a woman shoved into the commandant’s aquarium.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and I’m staying with one I singled out when I first reviewed this movie for my Exotroopers blog. At the 40-minute mark, a guy who is apparently the ship’s cook is wading through the brackish marshes for no obvious reason. We get the usual effective framing shots as he sloshes along with a sack slung over his back. In what will be a fateful moment, he pauses to remove his shoes. Right about then, one of the stormtroopers emerges from the woods. The guy clearly senses the trooper’s approach, but I’ve never been satisfied whether he actually sees the stealthy revenant. The cook calls out, then backs away, which is when the camera shifts underwater to reveal several large sea urchins. He screams and falls, without any action by the stormtrooper, and pops up with a face full of spines. Exactly what happens next is debatable, but all we actually see is the trooper staring down in total contempt.

In closing, all I can add is that this is the kind of movie I have come to debate covering at all. While it may be a low-flying “cult” movie by mainstream standards, it’s an impressive success story within genre films, a plucky little film that made good in its own time and stayed in public consciousness right up to present day. I myself have found that I have to give it far more respect as time goes on, just for remaining accessible and relevant. If it comes to that, it still gets my vote as at least equal to any other entry in the niche “Nazi zombie” genre, which I’ve seen go far enough downhill that introducing the undead tends to be the least of their historical liberties. Not bad, for a guy who directed a sequel to Meatballs.