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 Back in WWII, the Nazis created a "top secret race of indestructible zombie storm troopers" known as the Death Corps. None were ever captured alive, but now some have turned up "somewhere off the coast of Florida." 1976, 85 minutes, Widescreen DVD
Among the various secret Nazi plans to win WWII that involved the occult, clones, brain transplants, looted gold, and lost arks, the most fearsome of all (according to this movie at least, but it's probably a bit biased) was the creation of the Death Corps. The Death Corps, as both the narrator and later Peter Cushing would explain, were a bunch of thugs and murderers that were turned into zombies that lived only to kill. Now, I would have just thought that those things would be called Nazis, but these Death Corps guys were apparently Nazis that had turned it up a notch. Like regular Nazis, they were inhuman bloodthirsty animals that craved only violence, but unlike regular Nazis, they couldn't be killed. In fact, they even went as far as to engineer these Death Corps types so that they would be particularly adept at surviving in the deserts of Africa or the winters of Russia. The particular Death Corps group that runs amok in this movie are of the underwater variety (this way they could man submarines that never had to surface).
The fact that our boys went over there and banjaxed these barbaric boobs is all the more impressive when you consider all the covert missions they must have undertaken to destroy the catalog of B-movie projects Mengele had cooked up. However, and I'm not trying to take anything away from Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation (we are to the point where his name precedes that phrase like he's somehow the exclusive chronicler of their accomplishments aren't we?), if those legions of Nazi monsters were anything like the ones depicted in this film, the only question I have is why it took us so dang long to win the war in the first place. Sure, these pasty-faced blonde SS guys looked like a million bucks of scare when they silently rise out of the depths and start walking around, but you have to question the success of the program when these killing machines can be defeated by simply tearing their sunglasses off in the middle of the day, causing these goofs to flop around screaming "mein Blue Blockers! Mein Blue Blockers!"
What was the reason for that particular weakness? They're supposed to be running around underwater in subs all day long. Presumably, it isn't going to be pitch black in the sub, just because it's got a crew of zombies. Besides, if the whole point of the program is to get a bunch of troops that don't have to surface in their subs, why does it have to be a bunch of killer zombies? If their job is to sail around in their sub sinking crap and never surface, they aren't ever going to get involved in hand to hand combat. Just find a way to re-animate dead sailors and stick them on the sub. If you can create a race of super soldiers that exist somewhere between life and death and rip people up with their bare hands, doing a little voodoo on a submarine crew should be stuff any loser in the Hitler Youth could do.
Despite the fact that the people involved with the movie don't really seem to have a firm grasp on the finer points of their monsters or their origins, since they looked pretty neat I was willing to overlook that. Even the business with sunglasses didn't bother me when I stopped to think that it probably wasn't any stupider than the usual zombie movie where they had to be shot in the head. Heck, at least in this one, you actually had to get right up the zombie's grill to dispatch him. Takes a lot more guts than sitting around some mall playing sniper against a bunch of slow moving rotters. Where the movie really started to smell like a thirty year-old waterlogged SS uniform was when it became apparent that nothing beyond a bunch of people running around an island while these expressionless freaks chased after them was going to happen. No plan for world domination. No plan to turn other people into zombies. No plan to resurrect the Third Reich. No plan to even fix up the old abandoned hotel that their old commander Peter Cushing was living in! To be fair, Peter did mention that the hitch in the Death Corps' giddyup was the fact that while these guys loved killing people, they never really distinguished between the enemy and their fellow Nazis, resulting in a lot of what we'd probably call "friendly fire" incidents. But really, couldn't they come up with something better than just having the former child star of the Flipper TV series running around swamps and using his getaway rowboat to escape the clutches of these things?
The movie begins with a scene that's a real time saver for those of us who don't like to be bothered watching a movie all the way through to see who survives. Brook Adams is found floating in a boat by a couple of fishermen and starts telling us through some narration what happened to her that caused her to be found like this. Well, let me see if I can take a guess. With Peter Cushing, John Carradine, and Flipper's best friend all listed in the credits, but mysteriously absent from your boat, I think it' fair to say that it was Death Corps: 3 and legendary character actors and former child star: 0. Once we flashback in earnest, we meet the group of people on John Carradine's boat that are out for a trip. (And yes, in the interview included with the DVD, Luke Haplin, the non-dolphin star of Flipper, mentions "a three hour tour". He also notes the fact that one scene saw him and Brook hiding from the Nazi zombies in an oven which has to be one those "moving right along" moments.)
Brook is on this ship of fools with Luke, Carradine and a few other passengers and crew (including a drunken cook!). During their voyage the sky turns yellow, as if someone had slapped a yellow filter on the camera or something. Meanwhile, down below in the briny depths, this old rusty wreck is coming to life! Finally, in the middle of the night, Brook's boat runs smack dab into the suddenly risen rusty wreck. Somehow this results in Carradine becoming angry and chucking the radio overboard - quite an accomplishment for an actor who was 165 years old at the time! Their boat begins taking on water, so they make for a nearby island. Come daylight, Carradine is missing and once they locate his body, they realize that his five days of filming must have been up. Not to worry though, since Peter Cushing still has five days of filming himself to put in!
After locating an abandoned hotel, our castaways run into Cushing. At first they think he's just some crazy old hermit, but once the drunken cook steps on a jellyfish or stubs his toe while running from the zombies and croaks, they start to think that there may be more to this business with the strange old ship, the hermit with the German accent, the dead cook, and the dead captain than would normally be the case. "Oh yeah," Peter explains, "the Death Corps must have finally woken up after being submerged for the past three decades." After giving everyone the run down on the zombies, Peter tells them to take a boat he has and get off the island. At this point, the movie degenerates into simple stalk and kill territory with Peter being unceremoniously wasted by his own men, thus fulfilling his week of filming.
The increasingly irritating group of shipwreck survivors gets whittled down one by one until only Brook and Luke are left. You aren't sorry to see any of these people go either. The know-it-all and whiny husband who wears plaid shorts with a white belt is the most obnoxious of the group, but the others quickly grate on you as the crisis deepens. There's a guy named Chuck who first sickens you when he responds to the ship colliding with the Nazi ship by standing around in his tightie whities wondering what's happening. Later, he suddenly develops a really bad case of claustrophobia just as Luke comes up with the plan to hide everyone in a large refrigerator. This is before he came up with the plan to hide in the oven, by the way.
Chuck demands to be let out of the fridge and ends up firing a flare gun inside of it, blinding the know-it-all's wife (know-it-all was already dead by this time). She was a homely non-entity for the entire film so by the time she's found stuffed in an aquarium, you feel more sorry for the fish than for her. Brook and Luke end up trying to escape in the boat that Brook's eventually found in, so you can pretty much guess how things turn out for Luke. (Let's just say that the glass bottom part of the boat comes in real handy for Brook when she can't find him after he's dragged beneath the surface of the ocean by a zombie.)
Minimal action and even less story drops anchor all over this one. Both Carradine and Cushing are squandered (they don't even share a single scene!) in roles of little importance. Though Cushing is the commanding officer of these creatures, he doesn't do anything in the movie but explain what the zombies are before getting bumped off. While the film does sport very effective and creepy scenes of these guys rising from the waters, the movie gives them very little to do. They chase some people, choke them out, bust up some of the hotel, and get fried in the sun. Other than the menace they are to the five or six people on the island that we don't care about, they wouldn't seem to be much of a threat to anyone else. If they ever managed to make it to civilization, how much damage could six of these things do before we got around to hiding their Oakleys? They are the best looking Nazi zombies I've seen, outclassing their undead brethren from Zombie Lake , but the utter lack of ambition the movie has confines all of it to the category of forgettable, inoffensive (except maybe for that bit with the oven) time waster. And don't fret for John Carradine in this movie. Though he looks worse than the zombies, he actually went to appear in forty more films after this one!
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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