Who’s more villanous: Zombies or Nazis?  What’s a worse way to die: flesh eaten off the bone or drowning?  These are, perhaps, the two most pressing questions that man has ever pondered.  No longer must we choose, for now, we get all of the above in one undead package!  It’s the ultimate in cinematic horror! 

Unfortunatley, the Aquatic Nazi Zombie Movie is an oft-neglected sub-genre of Zombie filmdom.  We feel that this is a gross oversight in the world that we intend to rectify.  As such, Gimorozo has viewed and reviewed every ANZM known to man.  Read on for enlightenment!

The genre got kicked off with a bang in 1977 with Shock Waves.  It has John Carradine as some grizzly sea captain somethinornother and Peter Cushing as a (gasp!) bad guy.  Freakin’ awesome movie.  The Aquatic Nazi Zombies (ANZs) were created by Cushing to be some sort of awesome ubermench army that could survive underwater (cuz you never know when that might come in handy).  The war (that would be World War II for those of you who didn’t do so well in history class) is long over, and Peter Cushing is living on some island with his creations when some meddling kids stop by and the killing starts.

This movie has some genuinely creepy moments.  There’s no gore, really and most of the violence is off-screen.  This is the gentleman’s ANZM.  8/10.

Ah, but things would take a quick nose-dive in the land of ANZMs…

1980 is the next time that some intrepid filmakers decide to bring man’s greatest fear back to the silver screen.  Zombie Lake is the touching story of a lake infested with Zombies…and lots and lots of naked women. 

This movie is awful.  The acting is awful, the dubbing is awful, the special effects are mind-numbingly awful.  And none of this is in a so-bad-it’s-good sort of way.  Just a so-bad-I-think-I-ruptured-my-spleen-just-from-watching-this sort of way.

However, this movie can be used to illustrate one of the most basic laws of b-movies: if you make a movie that you know is crap, then you must fill it with nudity.  The converse of this law is: if a movie has copious amounts of wanton nudity, then the filmmakers themselves already know that the movie is crap.  This movie is so sure of its soul-sucking craptasticness that it has full frontal nudity BEFORE the opening title.  Wow.  So, if you haven’t gotten the message yet: THIS MOVIE SUCKS.  0/10.

Oh yeah, there’s also some sub-plot about one of the Aquatic Nazi Zombies recognizing his daughter as one of the villagers so he becomes noble or something.  Ugh.

From there, the genre could only go up, right?  …right?  Surprisingly enough: wrong.  One year later, Jess “the king of Eurosleaze” Franco unleashed Oasis of the Zombies on an unsuspecting world.  The zombies in Oasis are not quite as laughably craptacular as those in Lake, but that’s about the only good point this movie gets.  It is slooooow and boring.  In fact, I have never watched this movie to the end (and I own it…don’t ask).  I don’t know how it ends and, frankly, I don’t care.  All I can remember is that it takes place in the desert of Africa, there’s some plot about Nazi gold and there are ANZs.  Yet another 0/10. 

Ok, so maybe there’s a reason this sub-genre isn’t more popular…