Shock Waves

Writer/director/producer Ken Wiederhorn was born in the Rego Park section of Queens, New York. Wiederhorn attended Kenyon College in Ohio for two years, but dropped out during his sophomore year. Ken returned to New York and got a job as a mail boy at the CBS television network. He worked his way up from gofer to editor and eventually became a news producer. Wiederhorn studied film at Columbia University, where one of his professors was noted movie critic Andrew Sarris. Ken made his promising feature debut as director and co-writer of the supremely eerie and effective Nazi zombie horror winner “Shock Waves.” Wiederhorn’s subsequent pictures have been a decidedly mixed bag: the uproariously raunchy “Animal House” cash-in “King Frat,” the nifty slasher item “Eyes of a Stranger,” the dopey “Meatballs Part II,” the disappointing “Return of the Living Dead, Part II,” and the excellent thriller sleeper “A House in the Hills.” Moreover, Ken has also directed episodes of the TV shows “Dark Justice,” “Freddy’s Nightmares,” and “21 Jump Street.” Ken produced the made-for-TV drama “A Single Light” and co-wrote, co-directed, and was a co-executive producer for the lackluster supernatural shocker “Dark Tower.” Wiederhorn worked on an early draft of the script for Brian De Palma’s “Body Double,” but didn’t receive any on-screen credit in the final finished version of the movie. More recently Ken Wiederhorn has been either directing and/or producing episodes of the documentary TV series “U.S. Marshals: The Real Story” and “Breaking Vegas.” —IMDb