Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka Almost Human

• Directed by Ken Wiederhorn
• Written by John Kent Harrison and Ken Wiederhorn
• Starring
  • Brooke Adams
  • Luke Halpin
  • Peter Cushing
  • John Carradine

So as long as I had to drive clear to the far side of another county to find a copy of Satan’s Cheerleaders, I decided to make the trip worthwhile and picked up a copy of another flick that’s not too common in your local video store: Shock Waves, which I had heard touted as the best underwater Nazi zombie movie over made. (Granted, I can only think of one other entry in the genre off the top of my head, but it certainly seems a fertile topic.)

It seems inevitable, then, that I should compare Shock Waves with Satan’s Cheerleaders in my mind, for the following reasons:

1. I watched them both the same weekend.
2. Both were made in 1977.
3. Both feature John Carradine and his big arthritic knuckles in what amounts to extended cameos.
4. Both were rated PG (at least upon initial release), and released on video in big black clamshells.

That’s really where the similarity ends; while Satan’s Cheerleaders is an example of unmitigated lameness, Shock Waves is a seriously flawed but enjoyable attempt at visually evocative horror.

The unhealthily skinny John Carradine is the captain of a past-its-prime passenger cruiser in the (one assumes) Caribbean, touring with four lonely passengers — Rose (the exquisite Brooke Adams of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, who spends a great proportion of her screen time in a yellow bikini), outdoorsy Chuck, and petulant used-car salesman Norman and his wife Beverly. Also aboard are first mate and leading man Keith (Luke Halpin, whose career never seemed to take off — he spent most of his four-decade career playing roles like Holdup Man #2 and Man in Crowd), and Dobbs, the galley hand.

After some unexplained solar phenomenon which makes everything look orange one day (no, that’s not just a faded negative), that night the boat runs into another vessel without running lights. The next morning they find that the offender was a rusted old hulk; they also find that the captain is missing, and that they’ve got hull damage bad enough to force an evacuation. Fortunately, a small island is nearby, and Keith rows the passengers ashore in two trips of the tiny dinghy. It’s on the second trip that they discover the whereabouts of the captain, as they pass over his corpse and see it through the dinghy’s glass bottom (a cunningly understated shot).

Once on the island, they discover a grand old abandoned hotel, which the soon find has only a single occupant: Peter Cushing, scarred and ragged. (That’s right, Carradine and Cushing — it’s Skinny Genre Actors Night at the Rialto!) He warns them to leave the island, and seems very agitated to hear of the wreck off the island’s shore.

And with good cause. Our next shot is underwater, of a pair of black boots striding purposefully along some undersea structure. And then we see the boots’ occupant: A man in an SS uniform, with grey-green skin, pale blond hair, and round black goggles over his eyes. This leads directly into the signature shot of the movie, an effective image that director Wiederhorn uses several times to great effect: The Nazi’s head and shoulder emerge eerily from the water and he strides for land.

By the next day, we get to see handfuls of Nazis, emerging in staggered formation from the ocean…

Their first casualty is Dobbs, searching for some fresh water. He ever-so-conveniently manages to rip off the SS insignia from his attacker, so that the rest of the survivors can find it and confront Cushing with it. (Alas, Brooke demonstrates here why she never became a Scream Queen — upon discovering Dobbs’ body, she yells. Yells, not screams. Sorry, it just ain’t the same.) It turns out that near the end of the war, the Germans had experimented with special units called “The Death Corps” — soldiers, usually culled from prisons and insane asylums, who had been turned into zombie warriors especially suited for different environs. Cushing was the commandant of a unit designed for undersea combat; at the end of the war, he had evaded Allied patrols and sunk his ship off this island, remaining in voluntary exile ever since.

And now his soldiers were back — and, as he shortly discovers, they no longer feel like taking orders from him. Bye-bye, Petey.

The remaining five try to escape in the old lifeboat that Cushing told them about, but they accidentally lose it in a zombie attack, and end up split up in the woods, trying to make it back to the comparatively safe haven of the hotel. Naturally, this makes for an increased body count (especially because they insist on using the streams as their path, from which the Nazis can conveniently bob up).

But even the hotel is not safe… Even though they demonstrate intelligence by barricading themselves inside the huge walk-in freezer for the night, they didn’t count on one thing — Chuck’s overpowering claustrophobia…

This is a minor classic, admired for one thing alone: that damnably creepy imagery of the Nazis slowly rising out of the water, first one then another, until finally a throng of them stand, staring with their black goggles.

Otherwise, there are numerous major flaws. Apparently Wiederhorn was hoping to evoke subtle, atmospheric misgivings rather than full-bore terror, perhaps along the lines of Tombs of the Blind Dead, but in this he falls far inferior; aside from that repeated imagery, the setting doesn’t build quiet tension nearly so well as Ossorio’s Templar ruins, with the result that tension doesn’t really build until the last twenty minutes or so, when things keep getting worse for our heroes.

On top of that, the solar whatsis is never explained, nor is it explicitly linked to the revival of the Death Corps. And to top it off, the ending is given away from the opening credits, because the entire movie is a flashback from the point of view of Rose, who is found floating in the dinghy far out at sea by a fishing boat.

And I refuse to believe that the electonic soundtrack, even when it wasn’t horribly dated, was ever less annoying. That damned ABCD, ABCD, ABCD, DCBA theme did more damage than simple silence.

Nevertheless, there are signs that Wiederhorn had more talent than his few later directing assignments (such as Return of the Living Dead Part 2) ever let him demonstrate. For one thing, even though we expect as a matter of course for there to be a whiny and disagreeable passenger (Norman the used-car salesman), he isn’t demonized or caricatured to the point where we lust for his disposal; no one’s got much of a character, but what they’ve got is sympathetic.

And any movie in which Brooke Adams at her prime runs around so much in a yellow bikini has really got a lot going for it, no matter what anyone says.

A Notable Quotable:

“The sea spits up what it can’t keep down.”

- Dobbs

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 9
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0