"Danger Stranger / Better Paint Your Face" - '1977' The Clash
"Still, stomping Nazi butt is always a worthwhile endeavor." - Delta Green
1977. Jimmy Carter is President. Star Wars whooshes into theaters. Elvis plays his last one-man show. And on a mysterious island, down south in snorkeling territory, the Nazi exploitation genre gets a macabre, undead twist.
Nazis make perfect bad guys, chiefly because you can do so many things with them and almost none of them lack a soupcon of truth. Torture? Check. Human experiments? Check. The occult? Check. Sexual depravity? Check.
And unlike other films, where having a certain demographic as bad guys opens you up to complaints from the easily offended and politically correct, no one but no one minds if the bad guys are Nazis. Except, of course, for Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, White Nationalists, Racist scum, and people who think the genre is getting tired. In other words, no one who matters.
So if you're a filmmaker stuck for a bad guy for a horror movie or political thriller, there's always the big box marked "N" to fall back on. From the looks of things, the 1970's had a lot of stuck scriptwriters.
It was the era of the so-called Nazi Exploitation film, in which the deviant goings-on in camps were made vivid for audiences. Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS being the primary instigator of popcorn-munching young men wanting to pop a boner over something more wholesome and patriotic than, say, Deep Throat. In fact, Ilsa was so popular that she cheated death and came back at least three times, each less wholesome and patriotic than the last. That's more than can be said for Pier Paolo Pasolini after Salo -- possibly the most notorious Nazi exploitation movie of all -- got his ass run over by his own car.
There were also less salacious exploitation films, like The Odessa File, The Boys from Brazil, or Marathon Man, in which the remnants of the 3rd Reich walked amongst us, like Frankenstein's monster in a monk's hooded robe. "Nazis still threaten our way of life! Righteous people take them down! Credits roll upward towards the heavens!"
("Please throw your popcorn boxes away while exiting the theater....")
Shock Waves, made in 1977, is not about sexual exploitation, nor is it about righteous people taking down the fearsome, goose-stepping menace. It is about zombies - specifically aquatic, ageless, reasoning, and sadistic Nazi zombies - and therefore has more in common with the horde of slasher films that had yet to descend with John Carpenter's iconic Halloween, a year later. It also owed its existence to such memorable trash as They Saved Hitler's Brain, in which mad scientists kept the Third Reich going well beyond its allotted shelf life.
The plot in a nutshell: here's some people who really should not be on a tour boat together, on a tour boat that really shouldn't be afloat. Here's a weird thing that both creates atmosphere and facilitates their getting hopelessly lost. Here's a shock in the middle of the night that fucks up their ride and forces them onto the island. Here's a great but dilapidated old hotel, and a mysterious old man who makes Ebeneezer Scrooge seem hospitable.
And here's the zombies, walking out of the surf, by onesies and then by the dozens...
You can guess the rest, and I wouldn't want to rob you of the experience of actually watching this film which, though it is bad, isn't actually all bad. It gets major points for starring the ever-excellent Peter Cushing as the mysterious old man of the island, who guards a terrible secret about as well as he hides his past political affiliations (which is to say, not very well at all). It also gets mad props for the effective use of the island's landscape to create foreboding and danger.
And those zombies. Fuck me, those zombies.
Admittedly, the first few times you see them, you'll probably be wondering why Front 242's roadies were around in the late 70's. (See Figure A) Indeed, I think the film tips its hand a little too early by having one of them be fully seen before we really know what we're up against (unless you looked at the movie poster, or the back of the dvd box).
But by the time the shoe's dropped, and the characters know what they're up against (courtesy of that old guy who can't keep secrets so well) the sheer, silent malice radiated by those things makes the groaning, shambling hordes of post-Night of the Living Dead films seem as menacing as Smurfs huffing glue. They can think. They can hunt. They take a great deal of satisfaction in playing with people before closing in for the kill.
And they do. Not. Make. A. Sound.
(until you take off their Front 242 goggles and they die for some dumb reason)
Recently, I attended an author panel discussion about the newfound popularity of zombies in horror fiction. The comment was made that zombie fiction is the same genre as disaster movies, only the zombies are the dangerous element: the flame in the Towering Inferno, the sea in the Poseidon Adventure, and so on.
In this case, the zombies are not an element, but an active character -- just one without any real lines. And the director plays them for all they are worth, especially when the characters start losing group cohesion and entropy takes its inevitable toll...
Badfilm? Not really. Not entirely a bad film, either, though it has some flaws. It has two opening framing devices and really only needs one. And there's the glaring question about why they didn't make for their own damn wrecked ship at some point.
I think the best part in the film, other than the scene where the zombies walk into the water in a line while staring at Peter Cushing's character -- silently sneering at his mangled German orders -- is the bit where the characters who've survived the initial onslaught are paddling through a claustrophobic waterway out to the ocean on an overloaded rowboat. We know, courtesy of framing device #2, that this is not going to work. But we can't not root for them as we cut to scenes of the zombies under the water, in the treeline, ahead of them...
We know they are doomed, but our hearts pound for them all the same.
Shock Waves has been a horror aisle staple in video stores since the early 80's, and is easily found and viewed on a certain video media website as of this writing.
Assignments:
1) Did you like the movie or not?
2) Which framing device do you think it doesn't need, if any, and why?
for extra credit, someone who has some leet videomaking skills should do a mashup of Front 242's Headhunter using key scenes (and maybe some quotes and sound effects) from the movie.
Jim,
ReplyDeleteI thought it was Nitzer Ebb whose music had the footstomping, martial beats in their music and had many people wondering about their political allegiances, back in the day?
The whole litany of Nazi exploitation films seemed to have emerged to both titillate and shock the fans of women-in-prison (or captivity) films, but had become increasingly de-sensitized to the formula of oppressive prison guards who were NOT Nazi's.
Zombies build up a dizzying tension and an uncomfortable sense of no matter how hard you fight or how clever you are, you will eventually be defeated.
Obviously, just like in the disaster films, they are a metaphor for death, a reality that few of us want to acknowledge consciously and wiillingly.
I will watch it, per your recommendation, but you got to tell me, does Grand Moff Tarkin get choked out in the end or not?
He gets it well before the climax, actually. He might be the second person to get drowned by the zombies.
ReplyDeleteNitzer Ebb (sp) was before Front 242, IIRC. But they are part of a long and venerable line of European stomp-music whose members' political proclivities are suspected to be to the right of Ernest Rohm because they like black leather and march in place as they synthesize.