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SHOCK WAVES
(from Shock Waves, 1977)
Manufacturer: Resin
From The Grave
Sculptor: William
Paquet
Material: Resin
Scale: 1/6
This is a great little kit! But I’m
biased. I love the movie. It’s got Peter Cushing as a German
scientist who turned SS soldiers into zombies to create the
Totenkorp. How cool is that! If you’ve never seen it, check it out.
It’s also got Brooke Adams and John Carradine.
Anyway, the kit is a nice, early
sculpt of Bill Paquet. I really like it. He hates it. But then
artists are their own worst critics. The proportions are great and
pose is excellent. It also has a nice swampy base. When assembled,
it stands 14.5” tall. RFTG says it comes with 2 different bases but
it didn’t. I only got the dirt base and not the water base.
The biggest problem I had with this kit was the quality of the
casting. For you veterans of the GK industry, this comes as no
surprise to you being it is a RFTG kit. For you newbies, RFTG was
one of the first kit companies and had great sculptors and great
designs. They just had horrible castings littered with air bubbles
or pinholes, and bad joints. While the actual assembly fairly easy,
this caused the paint prep to be very time consuming. A great deal
of putty work was required. The kit originally had the film title
carved into the base but I didn’t like it. It looked a little cheesy
to me (sorry Bill), so I puttied it over. Once completed it was fun
to paint.
In the film Cushing explains the
history of the soldiers that became the zombie super soldiers. With
this info you can do a little internet research and find some good
reference material on the uniform styles. I tried to be as
historically accurate as possible so I used Tamiya acrylics and I
airbrushed the uniform. The rest of the kit was brush painted using
acrylics. I added some Woodland Scenics water to create some puddles
at our boy’s feet. Between each layer I painted in some muck to give
it depth.
The 3” high pedestal
base was scratch built using a regular wood base like you get at the
craft store. I jacked it up by building sides for it out of poplar
wood strips from Lowes. I then cut molding to trim out the bottom.
It was all glued, tacked, puttied, sanded and painted satin black. I
went to all of this trouble because I wanted to have a place to
mount the name of the kit since I had done away with the original
nameplate. The letters were cut out of plastic from a sign shop. I
also wanted a place to put an SS medal. The medal and ribbon is an
exact replica of those worn by an SS Stormtrooper Division from a company the
makes German uniforms for the film industry.
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