September 2022

Shock Waves (1977)

Long before Dead Snow thawed out a battalion of Nazi zombies, this low-budget creeper, written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn (Eyes of a Stranger, Meatballs II), spent a few decades bouncing around the Late Night Spook Show circuit.

Shock Waves stars horror vets Peter Cushing and John Carradine, as well as Luke Halpin from Flipper, all grown up into a blonde, mustachioed male lead, who must rally a crew of castaways marooned on an island awash in goggled zombies in SS uniforms.

Cushing brings a convincing accent, dandy scar makeup, and complete authority to his role as an exiled Nazi commander forced to live in an abandoned luxury resort on a nameless island somewhere in the ocean.

Guess he couldn’t make it all the way to Brazil.

Cushing patiently awaits the arrival of the soggy soldiers formerly under his command, who should be returning from Davey Jones’ Locker any day now.

Editor’s Note: Cushing plays Admiral Tarkin in Star Wars—the very same year!

John Carradine doesn’t get to do much as Ben, the cranky charter boat captain, but we do get to see him in a bathing suit. (Rrrrowr!)

Comely Brooke Adams stands out as Rose, a tourist who also looks smashing in swimwear.

The underwater photography, particularly when the Nazi zombies snap into formation and smartly march toward the surface, is eerie and strangely captivating, jarringly punctuated by Richard Einhorn’s dissonant electronic score.

No, they don’t eat flesh, but these genetically altered stormtroopers are consumed by a desire to kill, and they have thoroughly adapted to the life aquatic.

So what if they look like a techno band? Good stuff!

Speak No Evil (2022)

Trauma warning: Speak No Evil is very dark and will probably leave a mark.

Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) and Bjorn (Morten Burian) are an attractive Danish couple on holiday, with their young daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg). They happen to meet Patrick (Feja van Huet) and Karin (Karina Smulders), who are from Holland, traveling with their quiet son Abel (Marius Damslev), who is about Agnes’s age.

The two families have dinner together and promise to keep in touch.

Meanwhile, Sune Kolster’s musical score is erupting with sinister and ominous trumpet flourishes all over the place, as if Max Cady had just been released from prison and wandered over from Cape Fear.

What is happening here?

Director and writer Christian Tafdrup is actually tipping his hand. My first assumption was that the overblown soundtrack was parody and meant to mislead or exaggerate a threat.

This is not the case. The brass barrage is meant to be a warning of impending danger to the characters, and probably the viewer as well.

Speak No Evil is an excruciating slow death of a thousand cuts. What at first unrolls like a comedy of manners—urban, Danish sophisticates spend an uncomfortably rustic weekend as guests of less civilized Dutch acquaintances— gradually reveals itself to be mounting torments of the damned.

“It’s perhaps a bit too long to spend with some people we barely know,” Louise offers sensibly.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Bjorn asks a short time later.

This moment in time is played for (uneasy) laughs, but the answer to Bjorn’s question is a bottomless pit of micro-aggressions and red flags that culminate in a finale that is blistering, not only in the brutality it depicts, but in the utter hopelessness on the parts of Louise and Bjorn, who face a fate as grim as any I’ve witnessed at the movies.

Like Godard and Buñuel before him, Dutch director Christian Tafdrup has no sympathy for the bourgeoise.

Speak No Evil is not a cheaply made shocker. Tafdrup trains a razor-sharp eye on Bjorn’s smug boredom with middle-class domesticity as more than reason enough to seal their doom.

And what a dark little doom it is!

My advice? Never ever wonder out loud about how bad something can get, unless you want to find out. Or maybe you enjoy being punched in the stomach really hard.

Horror in the High Desert (2021)

Social influencers are horror movie gold!

I alluded to this situation in my review of The Deep House, as the answer to the burning question, “Why would otherwise intelligent people put on scuba gear to explore a haunted house at the bottom of a lake?”

The protagonists are compelled to take on insanely dangerous missions in order to attract (and maintain) followers! Building that brand is indeed hazardous to your health.

Horror in the High Desert is an 82-minute found-footage shocker about Gary Hinge (Eric Mencis), a popular outdoor adventure blogger who disappears under (you guessed it!) “mysterious circumstances,” while exploring a remote area of Nevada’s high desert.

Possibly based on the real-life case of Kenny Veach (Google that shit), writer-director Dutch Marich dutifully assembles realistic interviews with family, friends, and investigators, all of whom are trying to figure out what happened to someone who was, by all accounts, an expert at wilderness survival.

Spoiler alert: It ain’t good, and eventually the talking heads give way to Gary Hinge’s final creepy posts, from a location he clearly didn’t want to revisit.

The fearless blogger admits to increasing anxiety, and with good reason. All his instincts warn Hinge away from the nasty little shack in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada.

But his core followers have demanded video evidence, so he has no choice but to return to a cursed location. Film, or it didn’t happen.

As a blogger myself, I can only hope my dozen or so regular readers don’t start clamoring for personal peril on my part—unless you’d enjoy footage of me collecting dog poop in the backyard.

The ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel (or three), as it’s reported during the credits that no less than 17 teams of danger bloggers went out to find Hinge.

Horror in the High Desert is a more than ample warning to the foolhardy. Don’t let obnoxious fans push you over the brink and into the arms of … someone you do not ever want to meet.

Wer (2013)

I’m reasonably sure that this movie would have more of a following if it wasn’t saddled with such a clunker of a title.

Wer? Really, that’s the best we can do?

It’s a shame because Wer is top-shelf lycanthrope mayhem all day, every day.

Co-writer and director William Brent Bell wisely saved his nickels and dimes by filming in Romania and calling it France, where American lawyer Kate Moore (A.J. Cook from Criminal Minds) is defending a hulking peasant (Brian Scott O’Connor) accused of tearing up a family of tourists. Limb from limb.

And taking huge bites out of them.

The makeup and prosthetic work by Almost Human Inc. is worth the price of the ticket. The scene when Kate examines the shredded remains of the victims is startlingly savage. Seldom has bodily harm been rendered in such vicious detail.

A shaking hand-held camera gives Wer the appearance of a found footage police procedural, with lengthy talking sequences that flare into bloody chaos without warning.

Now that’s what I’m talking about. Modest movies that turn out to be way better than I expect are the coin of my realm. They’re my jam.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to make some toast.

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