Movie Review: Dead Snow

by Ryan

2.5/4 banana peels

Imagine being hunted down by a pack of snarling, grunting, bloody, disgusting, Nazi zombies straight from WWII. This is Dead Snow. The Norwegians (and most foreign filmmakers) are notorious for bringing a fresh view on the horror and zombie genre's, and Tommy Wirkola's film is no different. The movie follows a group of medical students into the mountains of Norway on vacation, but they soon find out they aren't alone on this trip. As night falls, the aforementioned Nazi Zombies begin their attack.

The movie opens with a woman being chased through the night woods by a pack of zombies, the pounding chords of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" driving in the background. Eventually she's cornered and torn apart. Needless to say, by this time I was pretty much hooked. I knew this had to be a good movie, but I thought wrong. The movie spends the next 45 minutes driveling through the stereotypical horror plot line. Including, terrible acting, snow mobile montage, and a hysterical woman slap. Much of the initial "terror" is sub par and yawn inspiring, but things do turn around.

The last 30 minutes of the film take on a bizarre Shaun of the Dead type feel. After the first few students meet a bloody and disfiguring end, the remaining students arm themselves with sledgehammers, scythes, chainsaws, and a snowmobile mounted heavy machine gun. In the final battle with the Nazi Zombies we get all kinds of gratuitous violence. One shot was especially stunning, it was a point-of-view shot of a woman, fading in and out of consciousness, witnessing her own disembowelment. There were at least 3 characters that saw their own intestine.

This movie is not short on beheading, disembowelment, exploding heads, amputation, fire, explosions, big guns, bad acting, paper thin plot, and medical students trained in hand to hand combat. Like many of the exploitation films we like to review here, this movie is saved by the massive amounts of spontaneous and utterly needless violence. I mean, Nazi Zombies? Cinema Gold! I like that the movie doesn't take itself too seriously and does what zombie flicks do best. Take it with a grain of salt and know what your getting yourself into; this isn't an Oscar film, not by a long shot, but it's still a lot of fun.



And beware of the subtitles!

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