Saturday Scream Queen: Brooke Adams

Born and raised in New York City, Brooke Adams started acting professionally in theatre productions while still a child and graduated from New York's High School for the Performing Arts and the School of the American Ballet. As an adult, she broke into film, and has appeared in film and TV programs of just about every genre, although horror and thrillers, mostly low-budget, have been the mainstay of her career.

Among her notable horror films are starring turns in "Song of the Succubs", "Shock Waves" and the first remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" during the 1970s; "The Dead Zone" and "Haunted" during the 1980s; and "The Unbord", "Sometimes They Come Back" and "Probably Cause" during the 1990s.

Noteworthy small horror parts include a role in of the best of the Black Dahlia movies "Who Was the Black Dahlia" and a tiny but fun appearance in "The Stuff".

Adams married actor Tony Shaloub in 1992, and after the birth of the second child in 1993, she increasingly shifted her attention to the stage, although she has continued to appear in small film and television roles. She appeared as three different characters during the seven year run of the television series "Monk", which starred her husband, and she will next be seen in 2012 in the big-screen docu-drama "Hemingway & Gellhorn", which will star Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman as the title characters.

Reluctant psychic enters 'The Dead Zone'

The Dead Zone (1983)
Starring: Christopher Walken, Tom Skerritt, Brooke Adams, and Martin Sheen
Director: David Cronenberg
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

Johnny Smith (Walken) awakens from a five-year coma to discover he has psychic abilities, which he gets visions of the past, present and a terribly deadly future. He uses his new powers to help a sheriff (Skerritt) to solve a murder and to save a life, but his visions tell him that nothing he does will matter unless he manages to stop Greg Stillson (Sheen) from gaining the US presidency--because Stillson will bring about a nucular holocaust.


"The Dead Zone" is one of the very best Stephen King adaptations (and the novel upon which it is based happens to be one of his very best books). The director does a spectacular job, especially in the area of using visuals and sound effects to pull the viewer into Johnny's psychic visions. The cast is also perfect, with Walken really shining as the tragic psychic who wants nothing than to just have his old life back, but who has to face a destiny that is being thrust upon him.





(An amusing side note is that Martin Sheen did become president on the TV series "The West Wing".)

Underwater Nazi Zombies terrorize island!

Shock Waves (1977)
Starring: Brooke Adams, Luke Halpin, Fred Buch, Jack Davidson, D.J. Sidney, Peter Cushing, John Stout and John Carradine
Director: Ken Wiederhorn
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Two young couples (Adams, Halpin, Buch and Sidney) are stranded on a remote island as undead Nazi supersoldiers rise from the ocean's depths to take revenge on their creator (Cushing) and all the living.


"Shock Waves" sounds like it should be the ultimate cheese-fest--how can something featuring underwater Nazi zombies NOT be? Especially a movie from the 1970s, made by inexperienced filmmakers on a shoestring budget?

Well, in the case of this film, the inexperience worked in their favor.

With classic horror stars Peter Cushing and John Carradine available each for four days of the film's four-week shooting schedule, director Ken Wiederhorn set out to make a movie in the vein of the old fashioned 1950s and 1960s Hammer horror fests but with a more modern sensibility. What he ended up with was a film that included some of the sexiness of a Hammer picture--Brooke Adams spends much of a film in a bikini and the rest of it in a barely buttoned shirt--and the mood over high velocity splatter that was increasingly in vogue during the late 1970s.

But, Weiderhorn, mostly be accident if the coversation on the DVD commentary can be believed, created a film that is far more of a mood piece than a horror show, with the zombie attacks being as horrorfying as they not so much because they are underwater Nazi zombies that seem to be able to pop up anywhere there's water (even in a disused swimming pool), but because there is an atmosphere of hazy, nightmarish dread that permeates the entire film from the moment our protaganists encounter a strange weather phenomena at sea to the final image of a sunburned, blistering Brook Adams.

With creepy locations, creative camerawork, surpringly creepy Nazi zombies and good performances by all cast members, "Shock Waves" is a film that is undeserving of its obscure status. It's almost worth seeing for Brooke Adams alone, as she is one of the better "damsels in distress" I've encountered in a horror movie, possessing a pretty face, an attractive body, and vulnerable quality that makes you fear for her safety throughout and whince with extra sympathy when she is terrorized or injured.

And then there's Peter Cushing. While this isn't is best performance--his "German" accent is even more suspicious than the "Swedish" one he tried to do in "The Beast Must Die,"--he still draws your attention like metal shavings to a magnet in every scene he appears in. He is thoroughly believable and repulsive as the Nazi commandant who eventually gets what he deserves.

But even setting Adams and Cushing aside, this film is undoubtedly the masterpiece of underwater Nazi zombie movies. Maybe Oliver Stone can do a remake, once he's done showing us all how Hitler really wasn't such a bad guy,(as explained at Shades of Gray) with the Nazi zombies being heroic champions of a Greener Planet. After all, Underwater Nazi Zombies have no carbon footprint whatsoever!