JFL

On the one hand, The Boneyard is completely inconsistent trash. On the other hand, its irrational bombast and unbridledness provide tremendous viewing pleasure that’s actually more of the sincere than guilty variety. Though it starts out as a mysterious horror movie with an unexpectedly unconventional female protagonist, we soon encounter demons in child form and occult rituals, and formulaic characters with bizarre features (for example, a pathologist with a long ponytail and rose-tinted glasses) start to pile up. There is even an extremely phantasmagorical rip-off of Aliens, which ultimately results in an absurd variation on classic happy endings. Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t know what they actually wanted, so they just threw every possible attraction at viewers, but everything surprisingly somehow fits together and, thanks to the entirely respectable effects, turns out to be a magnificent spectacle. Furthermore, where else will you see the lead roles played by a mannish obese woman and a dandy past his prime with a grey moustache who looks like something out of a seventies television series and plays opposite a purely nineties rookie from an embarrassing buddy comedy. And then there’s the moulting old lady, who is obviously a very good actress, and the poodle... The Boneyard definitely offers things that you will never see anywhere else, at least not in the given combination.

If not for allegedly being the first to employ the Nazi SS zombie concept, this trash flick in which a group of people run back and forth on a tropical island would have been forgotten long ago. A telling characteristic of Shock Waves may be the fact that, whereas in Romero and post-Romero zombie movies people usually meet their demise because they can’t set aside their egos and join forces against a common threat, here they die simply because they are klutzes, and also because the screenwriter simply wants them to die, since a good bit of runtime has passed without anyone going toes up. Nevertheless, it’s necessary to admit that the film has a certain distinctive charm and is a lot of fun, albeit unintentionally. The film’s central attraction, namely the unit of underwater undead Totenkorps killers, is put to utterly absurd use when the filmmakers first make viewers wait twenty minutes before they finally appear on the screen and then they have the zombies constantly climbing out of the ocean and then crawl back into it for the next twenty minutes. As soon as the action begins, however, the entertainment goes full-throttle. Space-time ruptures as the SS zombies and their victims disappear under the surface or in the dense undergrowth and emerge somewhere else, logic goes out the window and the mechanically simple killings alternate with bizarre scenes like “Who killed our buddy? How about we ask the pale guys in SS uniforms?” And when the characters happen to come up with a way to kill the monsters, the charm of sincere trashiness is achieved. Though Shock Waves doesn’t provide absolutely wild entertainment, it is a likable and stylishly unadulterated diversion in the genre of zombie flicks.