Friday, October 24, 2014

31 Days of Halloween - Day 24 - Movie 1



A group of tourists on a ramshackle pleasure boat find themselves wrecked after an encounter with a ghost ship. Stranded on a nearby island, they discover things are even worse than they imagined, as Nazi zombie super soldiers created to be able to exist underwater without breathing, have found their way to the island where they pick off the castaways one by one.


Shock Waves (1977) stars Peter Cushing as a reclusive former Nazi scientist, and John Carradine as the captain of the pleasure boat. Despite their starring status, both have small roles in the grand scheme of the movie's running time. Among the castaways is Brooke Adams, a guy that constantly reminded me of Richard Simmons, and a really whiny guy with the voice of David Sedaris, but none of the wit, or charm. For most of the movie nothing really happens. This inaction is broken up by periodic appearances of the Nazi zombies, who also don't do much of anything beyond walking across the bottom of the sea, rising from the waves, and wading through inland bodies of water where they can ambush and drown their victims. The zombies, with their uniform appearance (which includes uniforms which somehow didn't disintegrate after thirty-odd years at the bottom of the ocean) minimally decayed skin and big black goggles which protect them from the sun, are a welcome change from the rotting shamblers we're used to. Overall, this is another movie about an uninteresting batch of adults doing stupid things so that they can find themselves in one danger after another. It's somewhat entertaining if you haven't seen it before, but probably not something you'll want to go back to.



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