One of my most vivid memories of being a kid growing up in 1970s Oklahoma was looking through the movie ads in the newspaper. It was the ads for horror films that piqued my interest the most - for probably obvious reasons - and I was kind of a sheltered little kid, so the sort of things promised by these lurid assemblies of art and ad copy were absolute nightmare fuel to my very active, very vivid imagination. And I was raised to believe that the best way to deal with your nightmares was to face them, so I ended up being both afraid of what these films promised, and terribly curious about them at the same time.
Does this help explain why I, very much a grown adult human, like to write about scary movies for fun? Don’t be ridiculous. But in all seriousness, one of the benefits of living in an age where a lot of stuff is available on physical media or streaming is that I’m able to go back and revisit the films I remember seeing ads for in the paper as a kid. It’s interesting to see to what degree they do or don’t live up to what I pictured in my head. Rabid? Not so much. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Absofuckinglutely.
So Shock Waves is sort of an indulgence, in this sense. I always wondered what kind of film it was as a little kid, but there was no way I was going to get to see it at my tender age and it never showed up on cable. So here I am, years and years later, finally settling up with one of those films that burned their way into my tiny little brain. As it turns out, it’s a surprisingly restrained film given the subject matter, and somehow its limitations work for it, rather than against it. The result is something surreal, rather than gory or sensationalistic.
The film begins in voiceover on a static image of some German soldiers, circa WWII. We’re told about Nazi experiments into developing hardier, more resilient soldiers, and battlefield rumors of Nazi troops who fought barehanded through the harshest conditions without ever slowing down or stopping to rest. And how out of all of the divisions of SS troops deployed during the war, one unit was never accounted for. This shifts to a boat out on the water, a man and his son out for a day of fishing, when they discover a dinghy adrift with one unconscious passenger inside. It’s a young woman, who starts lashing out in fear as the two attempt to rescue her. And we shift to the woman in voiceover, saying when they found her, she wasn’t even aware that they were trying to help her, and that at that point she couldn’t remember any of what had happened to her. But clearly, something had. Something terrible.
It all started on a chartered boat trip - sightseeing, scuba diving, that kind of stuff. Seven people on the boat - Ben, the captain, Keith, his first mate, and Dobbs, the galley hand. Their guests are Chuck, an affable bachelor, Norman, a peevish, abrasive car salesman, and his patiently enduring wife Beverly, and Rose - the woman we see being rescued. Things were going along fine until they hit that patch of water where their compass stopped working. Until they collided with another ship and started taking on water. Our protagonists scramble onto the same dinghy we saw at the beginning, and head for a nearby island.
The ship they hit, it turns out, is an old, abandoned wreck. It looks like something from WWII. And then the figures begin walking out of the wreck, along the ocean floor. Figures in Nazi uniforms.
No, the math isn’t complicated. There’s old Nazi experiments unaccounted for and a bunch of people trapped on an island. What we have ourselves here is a movie about Nazi zombies. That’s not really spoiling anything. You could figure it out (as I did) from the movie poster alone. But it also doesn’t really play like any modern conception of a zombie movie, Nazi or otherwise. It isn’t hard to follow, and really there’s not that much story there anyway. The protagonists land on the island, they discover they aren’t alone, and it goes badly. But how that story gets told in ways you wouldn’t expect. This film has a narrative style best described as stiff - it’s not disjointed, per se, but every scene feels very much like a single, isolated sequence, and so the film as a whole feels less like a continuous story and more like a series of narrative snapshots arranged in a comprehensible order. It's not clumsy, but it’s definitely an assemblage of scenes rather than a movie, if that makes sense.
This extends to the performances, which are all varying shades of wooden, and dialogue that never sounds like anything other than lines being delivered. There’s also not a lot of overlapping dialogue or interruption or crosstalk, so that sense of narrative isolation burrows all the way down into the acting itself. It feels very much like everyone says their lines and then waits for the next person to say theirs before they start talking again. It’s not off-putting, but it does feel odd. And when the action really starts to pick up (which takes a little while), almost all of the actual violence takes place off-camera. I’m assuming it’s because they didn’t have the budget for a lot of effects work, but in some ways I don’t mind that - there will be a reveal (many of which work pretty well) and then a cut to the aftermath. There’s a terseness to it that actually sort of works with the stiffness of the acting and direction to create something almost like an aesthetic. Not minimalist…maybe brutalist filmmaking, since it creates a feeling of distance or remove. It’s like we’re not watching things happen to people, we’re watching people reenacting things that happened to other people.
That sense of remove means that it doesn’t generate as much heat or tension as I’d like. But there are also a number of interesting stylistic choices that I appreciated. It was made in 1977, so like a lot of other films from around that time period, it’s sort of making up its own conventions instead of adhering to an existing formula and that pays off at times. The film begins in voiceover and it’s several minutes before we get actual dialogue, the film itself is one long flashback, and I don’t know if it’s the first Nazi zombie movie ever made, but it’s a definite contender for that title, and the way it handles zombies isn’t really the “slow” zombie of something like
Night Of The Living Dead or the “fast” zombie of something like
28 Days Later. They’re stealthy - they hide, they pounce, and they’re utterly, unnervingly silent. There’s an eeriness to them, especially how they walk along the ocean floor, rise from the water when and where you don’t expect it. The restraint works in a way you rarely see in zombie films. Hell, that you rarely see in horror films much anymore in general. They’re more like Michael Myers in the first
Halloween film than they are what we’d think of as zombies. And there are some nicely off-kilter moments - an abandoned ballroom with a lone Victrola in the middle playing classical music, scenes plunged totally into darkness, long conversations with an off-camera character, some almost painterly uses of light and shadow, bodies lying motionless in shallow water. When I think of impressionistic filmmaking, zombie films don’t usually come to mind but there are some moments here that qualify.
The budget does show through at points, but more in how the story is told, rather than the quality of locations or practical effects. The cinematography is, with some notable exceptions, workmanlike, and the soundtrack is lots of simple early synthesizer, all burbles and swells and dissonant melodies and theremin-like ambience. But because this very simple, stripped-down approach carries through at every level of the film, it actually works.
It’s sort of a tradeoff - the film exchanges tension and thrills for strangeness, so it’s not as scary as it could be, but what we’re left with is something more interesting and unique, ending on a nicely unsettling and inconclusive note. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this, and I don’t know that it’s a forgotten classic or anything, but it’s very much one of a kind. Probably would have scared the crap out of me as a kid, though.
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