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Peter Cushing’s Nazi Zombies! – SHOCK WAVES Midnights at The Hi-Pointe This Weekend

By Tom Stockman | November 9, 2014

SHOCK WAVES screens midnights this Friday and Saturday (November 14th and 15th) at The Hi-Pointe Theater (1005 McCausland Ave., St. Louis, MO 63117)

Nazi Zombies! – we know you well. DEAD SNOW 2 just had its St. Louis premiere at the MX last month, but the subgenre dates back to at least THE FROZEN DEAD in 1966 and maybe earlier than that. But the undisputed king of undead Gestapo cinema has to be the 1977 shocker SHOCK WAVES, a great, low-budget atmospheric gem that will be playing this weekend (November 14^th and 15^th) midnights at The Hi-Pointe as part of Destroy the Brain’s monthly Late Night Grindhouse

A pleasure cruise goes horribly wrong, two couples and the boat’s three-man crew get stranded on a nearly-deserted island. An aging Nazi scientist orders them to leave before horrible things start happening, the N.Z.’s rise up from their watery graves, and, well, horrible things start happening, until only one person remains to tell the tale. That’s really it, in a nutshell.
But SHOCK WAVES fleshes out this simple skeleton of a story with piles of creepy visuals and effective characterizations. For starters, we’ve got a couple of veteran genre actors in the mix – Peter Cushing as the Nazi scientist, and John Carradine as the irascible captain of the pleasure boat, the standard “angry old man who’s out of the movie by the end of the first reel” role he portrayed too many times to count in the later years of his career. But the real stars of this film are the N.Z.s themselves. With their simple, gray SS uniforms, intimidating black goggles, identical blond haircuts, and makeup that mutes the actors’ individual features, they really look like you would imagine unstoppable, undead, Nazi killing machines should. The scenes where they rise up out of the water, or stride ominously back down beneath the surface, are supremely creepy each and every time they occur. Plus, since they are not technically zombies, but scientifically re-animated super-soldiers, they are allowed to show much more intelligence and forethought than your typical ghoul, laying traps, co-operating, and toying with their victims before doing them in.