#deadsnow

Dead Snow 2 Fanart

How much you enjoy Dead Snow depends entirely on whether "Zombie Nazis" sound appealing. Is the idea dumb, but kind of awesome? Then this film is for you. If that sounds dumb and kind of gimmicky, perhaps consider something else to watch. For this viewer, the movie has its moments but is otherwise merely an excuse to have hapless teenagers fight a legion of undead SS soldiers.

Set during the Easter holiday, seven teenagers retreat to a cabin in the mountains for some fun in the snow. In a bit of what they assume to be good luck, they discover a large sum of Nazi gold. Hidden away during the tail end of WWII by a troop of particularly cruel SS officers who escaped through the mountains but were never seen again, the treasure re-awakens its original owners as flesh-eating ghouls.

Dead Snow has the good grace to understand how ridiculous its premise is. It commits to giving the audience what it wants. The best scene is easily one where two of our male heroes arm themselves with an arsenal of weapons: scythes, hammers, knives, axes, guns and even a chainsaw. They go to town and cut through at least a dozen living dead like they were made of butter. Blood flies everywhere, arms are lobbed off, one zombie even gets decapitated and before its head can hit the ground, it’s kicked away like a soccer ball. That’s awesome, hilarious, and worth seeing.

What’s not so good are the attempts at horror. To see those scenes where zombie Nazis are crushed beneath a snowmobile or blown up, you have to sit through the most generic horror movie you’ve ever seen. The synopsis speaks for itself; a cabin in a remote area, no cell phone reception, a creepy guy who informs the teenagers of what’s coming, followed by incredulous feelings that finally evaporate when blood begins to flow. Even then, stupid mistakes follow characters splitting up for no reason, which means most of the teenagers wind up dead. Even as this type of film, Dead Snow is badly written. That old man that shows up to tell our heroes about the Nazi army and their treasure? Apparently, he just wanders around the mountains creepily explaining to whoever he passes what happened in WWII because that’s his only role in the movie. I was convinced he'd tie into the plot in some other way, but no. Instead of this block of bad exposition, how about a flashback?

I've got to talk about another scene that might have been meant to be comical, but I can't be sure. In it, Jock Erlend (Jeppe Laursen) takes a break from his frat-boy drinking to go to the outhouse. While in there, in barges in the obligatory slut found in every horror movie (Jenny Skavlan), who jumps his bones... in the cold while he is on the toilet! That's disgusting! If this is what the Norwegians include in their movies, I'd hate to say what their nasty pornography is like. 

Unless you speak Norwegian you should watch the English dub of Dead Snow. While the lip-synch will be off and you won’t get the same kind of performances from the voice actors as you would from the ones on the sets, the film's subtitles flash by so quickly there's no way to catch all of the dialogue. Ultimately, the film is merely a way to tie together a bunch of gory scenes and show off the idea of Nazi zombies. Every moment that’s worth seeing could be stitched together and quickly edited into a 10 minute short. It’s like once those scenes where shot, the team realized they needed more material to make it to feature-length and looked at any random horror movie from the eighties, did a find-replace, a few quick edits and called it a day. For forgiving horror movie fans, I’ll give it a mild recommendation. For everyone else, Dead Snow is just average, something you can check out if you think it will be fun, but nothing special. (On DVD, August 20, 2014)