Film Title:
Shock Waves
Also known as:
Death Corps,
Almost Human (UK)
Released: July 15, 1977
Plot: A group of tourists on a pleasure cruise run aground on a deserted island. They soon discover that the self-exiled Nazi commander who lives there is being attacked by undead soldiers that he sent to a watery grave years before.
IMDb: 5.7/10
Rotten Tomatoes: No score
My Score: 2.5/5
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
Shock Waves is the 1977 directorial debut of Ken Wiederhorn, who also co-wrote the film. It stars Peter Cushing and John Carradine in really ancillary roles and focuses more on the group inadvertently trapped on the island. Carradine is the captain of a small vessel that has taken a group of vacationers on a pleasure cruise. Their ship is damaged by a the rotting remains of a "ghost ship" it encounters and they must head to a nearby island for repairs. On the island they believed was deserted, the group encounters Cushing, an SS commander who tells them they need to leave at once. But after they tell him of the mysterious soldiers they have seen lurking between the trees, he tells them that it is too late; the Death Corps have arrived! The premise of the film is decent but the execution lacks quite a bit. Carradine doesn't survive the first twenty minutes but Cushing is good in the scenes he's actually able to act in, not just run around in circles looking for the "zombies" he sent to the bottom of the ocean decades before. I disagree with the assertion that these guys are actually zombies in any sense in which we are familiar with so I refer to them as the Death Corps, which is what Cushing calls them. There are some pretty glaring inconsistencies regarding the rules of the universe presented in the film. For example, Brooke Adams seems to kill one of the Death Corps by knocking off his goggles. Okay, goggle removal equals death, I can live with that. But not more than a few scenes later, there are several other Death Corps members clearly running around without their goggles with no negative effects. The underwater photography of the Corps members walking toward the island is nicely done and the first shot of them rising from the water as a group on the beach is significantly creepy. But once the action switches to the jungle and rivers, there are repeated shots of Corps members going into or out of the water over and over and over again, weaken the impact each time. The one thing I liked the most was the repeated human errors. Every time the castaways almost made their getaway, it always was human folly that caused the escape to be foiled. Heightened emotions, lack of training or something similarly human was to blame no the monsters, as is so common in most horror movies. Watch the trailer below or the whole movie
here.
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