Shock Waves

Una película sorprendentemente lograda para un presupuesto reducido y un tema disparatado. Definitivamente no es una basura tan directa como podría sugerir la sinopsis de la trama. No faltan las fórmulas tópicas en los diálogos y la música es ultrabarata (y acertadamente psicodélicamente extraña), pero la atmósfera es muy densa y el drive general de la película tampoco se duerme en los laureles. No hay señales de sangre, pero la tensión funciona. Y los zombis nazis molan. Puede que al principio te hagan sonreír un poco, pero poco a poco les vas cogiendo respeto. Ken Wiederhorn sabía cómo captarlos para que adquirieran una cualidad demoníaca. (29.03.2004)

If not for allegedly being the first to employ the Nazi SS zombie concept, this trash flick in which a group of people run back and forth on a tropical island would have been forgotten long ago. A telling characteristic of Shock Waves may be the fact that, whereas in Romero and post-Romero zombie movies people usually meet their demise because they can’t set aside their egos and join forces against a common threat, here they die simply because they are klutzes, and also because the screenwriter simply wants them to die, since a good bit of runtime has passed without anyone going toes up. Nevertheless, it’s necessary to admit that the film has a certain distinctive charm and is a lot of fun, albeit unintentionally. The film’s central attraction, namely the unit of underwater undead Totenkorps killers, is put to utterly absurd use when the filmmakers first make viewers wait twenty minutes before they finally appear on the screen and then they have the zombies constantly climbing out of the ocean and then crawl back into it for the next twenty minutes. As soon as the action begins, however, the entertainment goes full-throttle. Space-time ruptures as the SS zombies and their victims disappear under the surface or in the dense undergrowth and emerge somewhere else, logic goes out the window and the mechanically simple killings alternate with bizarre scenes like “Who killed our buddy? How about we ask the pale guys in SS uniforms?” And when the characters happen to come up with a way to kill the monsters, the charm of sincere trashiness is achieved. Though Shock Waves doesn’t provide absolutely wild entertainment, it is a likable and stylishly unadulterated diversion in the genre of zombie flicks. (22.09.2013)

Zombie Nazis crawl out of the sea and drag the visitors of a remote exotic island underwater. Despite its absurd premise, the film abstains from cheap shock effects in favour of slowly building atmosphere. It surprisingly successfully uses water as a setting for horror, and like Jaws, manages to evoke a sense of unease about what may lurk beneath the surface. The horror here is not the zombie Nazis, but the water in which the characters die (even on land, where there are pools and aquariums). But the film can't sustain the unsettling atmosphere until the end, and eventually runs out of breath. (23.04.2005)