She begins to tell about the terrifying experience from which she has been rescued: Young and pretty, Rose is part of a group of tourists on a small de recreo boat run by a crusty old captain and his handsome mate, Keith.

Also on board are Dobbs, who is the boat's cook; Chuck, another tourist; and a bickering married couple named Norman and Beverly.

They see the huge wreck in the light of day; she appears to have been there for decades, nothing more than a skeletal framework, and now seemingly immobile, stranded on the island's reef.

As they pull the body to shore, Keith finds a piece of torn uniform bearing the insignia of the Nazi SS in his hand.

The creatures were intended to be a powerful weapon for the Nazis, but they proved too difficult to control, with incidents involving them attacking their own soldiers.

The close quarters and stress cause the survivors to begin infighting, and Chuck accidentally fires a flare gun, blinding Beverly.

The zombies attack, and although Keith manages to defeat one by pulling off its goggles, a second one grabs him and drowns him just as the dinghy breaches the reef and drifts free.

[1] An issue of Cinemagic magazine shows and details the film being shot under the title Death Corps in Miami and West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1975 with a budget of $150,000.

Then I came across this book called The Morning of the Magicians, which lays out a theory that the Third Reich was heavily into magic, so we thought: Nazi's [sic] always work!

[7] In addition to standalone releases, the film was included in the three-DVD box set Superstars of Horror: Volume 1: Peter Cushing (Umbrella Entertainment, 2005).

From contemporary reviews, Tom Milne of the Monthly Film Bulletin commented that the zombie Nazis looked "agreeably sinister when they first emerge from the bottom of the sea with dripping hair, hideously scarred faces and uniform dark glasses", but the film's "inadequate budget is all too evident [...] both script and direction are also much too ready to settle for simple repetitions: a sizeable chunk of the footage is devoted to assorted characters stumbling through swampy shallows out of which, naturally, zombies emerge with sinister intent.

"[8] Oktay Ege Kozak, also writing at DVD Talk, rated it 1 out of 5 stars, declaring, "Shock Waves is a cheap, uninteresting, and entirely too forgettable genre effort from the 70s, a decade that otherwise revitalized horror cinema.

"[9] Patrick Bromley of DVD Verdict commented, "More concerned with atmosphere than with shocks, it avoids a number of what would become the cliches of the genre; the flip side of that coin is that it delivers little of what we want from a zombie film.

[11] Writing in Horror Movies of the 1970s, critic John Kenneth Muir stated that despite Shock Waves being a "low budget exploitation film with a ludicrous B-movie premise", Wiederhorn nevertheless makes it work.