The Spectrum Files : Shock Waves. (Samhain Project addendum)

 

When I was 9 years old I didn't know a zombie from a Byrd.  I came home one afternoon from school and flipped on Spectrum to see what was on, and the channel was between features.  I sat there in the falling afternoon sun and viewed the trailer for the Ken Weiderhorn fim Shock Waves.  

Between the eerie Richard Einhorn synthesizer score, and the images of the walking dead emerging from the waters of the Florida coast, I was kinda creeped out.  I hadn't seen Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead yet, so the whole thing seemed alien and made me uncomfortable.

 

The cast is led by a very young Brooke Adams, who most of you would know from the Philip Kaufman Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Dead Zone, among many others.  Horror legends Peter Cushing, very late in a career that began back in the gothic Hammer Horror days, and one time Dracula John Carradine lead the way.  Carradine's career dates back to the 40's so there's a pedigree of sorts here.  From what I've read, neither cinematic icon worked very long on set but were paid fairly well for short hours, and they didn't phone in their performances at all.  Both gentlemen brought it 100 percent, and considering that the budget on this film floated somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000, they probably could have gotten away with sleepwalking through it. 

Regardless, the images of what I would learn later to be morons running from goggled Nazi SS underwater zombies trained to murder, were unsettling for sure. These things were wandering around under the waters of the Florida coasts without emitting so much as a bubble, and raised up out of the water in a very unnatural way.  Richard Einhorns swirling score added an essence of creepiness that had to work on whatever grindhouse audiences would have seen it during its 1977 run, because it sure as hell was working on me.  I stood on our living room carpet, completely entranced in fear.  I probably couldn't have run from one of those soggy, water-logged Nazi goons if I wanted to.

And this was the goddamn trailer!

Oddly enough, the film was rated PG.  These zombies didn't eat people.  They were trained to kill in warfare for the Nazis.  So no blood and guts.  

Still, this makes a good Halloween view, if only for its creepiness.  So toss it in the Samhain Project file while you're at it.

It was pretty cool to see Joe Bob Briggs bring this movie up over my Thanksgiving break while watching his Lucio Fulci retrospective.  Of course he was referring to the ridiculous zombie versus shark scene that takes place in the movie zombie or zombie 2 or zombie flesh eaters.  Whatever you wanna call it, 

In other words Fulci’s underwater zombies concept was beaten to the punch by two years by Ken Weiderhorn who would go on to direct Return of the Living Dead Part 2.  

Shock waves was a low key groundbreaker.