Porażające fale

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)

Given it’s small budget and oddball subject matter, Shock Waves is a surprisingly well-made film. It’s definitely not such unequivocal trash as the plot synopsis might suggest. The dialogue contains clichéd formulas and the music is ultra-cheap (and appropriately strange in a psychedelic kind of way way), but the atmosphere could be cut with a knife and the film’s overall sense of drive doesn’t let up. Not a trace of blood, but the suspense works. And the Nazi-zombies are cool. They might put a slight smile on your face at first, but you gradually come to respect them. Ken Wiederhorn knew how to film them so that they would be properly demonic. (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)