“Not that I’m complainin’, mind ya. I’m only doin’ my job.”

Drake’s rating: Some castaways get to mingle with professors and movie stars, others have to cavort with the undead.

Drake’s review: When I say “zombie Nazis,” what movie instantly springs to mind? I’m guessing that for most of you out there, it’s Dead Snow, Tommy Wirkola’s wild, campy take on the idea which pits a group of young Norwegians against zombified Nazis in the freezing reaches of their homeland. And that’s fair, of course, since Dead Snow is probably the most well-known take on the concept.

Still, a few years before Wirkola was even born, another young director took the concept of zombie Nazis and built a movie around it. And, sure, while it may lack the energy, gore and humor of Dead Snow, Shock Waves does have Peter Cushing sporting both a huge scar and a German accent, so that’s something.

The film starts off with a woman who we’ll come to know as Rose (Brooke Adams, 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), alone and adrift in open waters in a small rowboat. Nearly catatonic, she’s rescued by a fisherman as her voice-over provides the segue into the flashback that is the main story. A passenger on a small cruiser traveling through unspecified waters, Rose and a group of other passengers whose names are totally irrelevant to the story* run into a series of problems including engine issues, an orange sky and a nighttime collision with a massive freighter.

It’s the latter issue that gets the story moving, as the cruiser is damaged and the crew and passengers have to abandon ship. They make for a seemingly uninhabited island because this is, ostensibly at least, a horror movie, and uninhabited islands are notoriously safe havens in that genre. They find an old building there, in a state of disrepair, and sans even older Peter Cushing, whose character has similarly seen better days. Unnamed but menacing, with his thick German accent and patented Grand Moff Tarkin glower, Cushing tells the hapless travelers of Nazi experiments that turned dead men into super-soldiers, and how he, as the commander of a group of such undead horrors, sunk his zombie unit in their transport, leaving them trapped at the bottom of the sea.

Which has worked to keep the zombie Nazis out of trouble for the past three decades, but the transport has recently surfaced and the undead have escaped, so they’re about to be jerks and menace the world once more. Or at least the island. They’ll try to menace that first, and then maybe the rest of the world.

Shock Waves has a great concept and enough acting talent to make it a worthwhile watch, but at the same time it’s unfortunately lacking in the one thing every horror movie needs: Some actual horror. It’s tense at points, but lacks any true bite.** Although Cushing describes his undead charges as “vicious and bloodthirsty,” the actual zombies that we get are a muddled, shambling lot, generally content to drag their victims into the water and drown them, eating nary a brain along the way.

More of a thriller than a horror flick, Shock Waves does provide us with a few good moments and a fairly tense atmosphere, but it never really lives up to its promise. The tourists and crew are a fairly undeveloped lot, and their demises at the hands of the zombies lack any emotional response since the characters are primarily there just to be killed. They might as well be counselors at Camp Crystal Lake.

Still, for a debut flick, Shock Waves isn’t too bad. Ken Wiederhorn had only made student films before landing himself a gig behind the camera for this movie, and he showed promise right from the start. Despite a minuscule budget, a small cast and modest locations, Wiederhorn made the most of what he had to work with, hiding the production’s limitations with a professional eye and deft direction. And even if Shock Waves does lack in good old zombie mayhem, Wiederhorn would get another crack at the undead bat with Return of the Living Dead Part II a decade later.

So come for the zombie Nazis, and stay because it’s only an 86-minute watch and you’ll get to see what Peter Cushing was up to right before he got the call from George Lucas to hitch a ride on the Death Star.

*Except for Norman, because Norman is an ass.

**Sorry.

Intermission!

• I don’t know about you, but if I see that John Carradine is the captain of the ship I’m traveling on, I’m canceling my ticket and finding another ride. There’s just no way this trip ends in anything but disaster.
• I think the captain is supposed to go down with the ship, not end up under it.
• I mean, corpses in the water or not, I’m not sure swimming in that lake is a great idea.
• If I walk into a room with a big Nazi flag hanging from the balcony, I’m breaking out my lighter. That sucker’s going up in flames.
• Bye, Norman. We won’t miss you.
• Note to self: Firing off a flare gun in a small, enclosed space is an incredibly bad idea. You learn something new every day!
• The zombies have been in the water for over thirty years. Maybe don’t jump into the swimming pool to try to escape.
• She’s writing with her left hand! She’s obviously insane.