“I told you we should have gone to the beach!” says one of the characters in Dead Snow, right after he witnesses his poor friend get his whole head literally ripped in half by zombies. And not just any zombies. We're talking about Nazi zombies, which is probably the worst kind imaginable.
It starts out as most do in this genre: we are immediately brought into the middle of a scene in which a helpless young woman running for her life from...something... in a dark, snowy woodland set deep in a mountain range in Norway. I don't think it'll come as much of a shock when I tell you she doesn't make it out okay. The following scene is a new day, and we are introduced to a handful of young, naive medical students, on vacation and currently en route to the very same snowy mountain range. Not long after they arrive at their cabin, a strange man comes knocking at the door, and leaves them with a foreboding, “Beware of what's in the woods” kind of message. A few scenes later, the zombies attack, and all hell breaks loose, with the terrified living running for their lives from the terrifying dead. Or undead, rather.
This movie is zombie absurdity to the max. If you don't like seeing masses of decaying zombies get hacked, sliced, shot, or chainsawed up, then skip this. Or maybe not. Maybe this will turn you into a fan. There hasn't been a zombie movie in a long time that was this much fun. To what degree you'll forgive the filmmakers for the shoddy production value depends solely on how much blood and guts you like to see on the screen.
The visual effects are great, but don't expect realism here. The last third pretty much plays out like Peter Jackson's Dead Alive meets Uwe Boll's Postal; it's chaotic, makes little to no sense, and is so gruesomely violent that you start to feel bad for the guy whose job it was to make the ten million gallons of fake blood you just saw get dumped into the snow. You'll see brains flop onto the floor, eyes gouged until they're nothing but oozing pools of red, and a scene where someone actually hangs on for dear life on the side of a mountain by holding onto nothing but a zombie's unwound intestines like a rope.
The filmmakers were resourceful with their low budget, but there were a couple less-than-slick parts to this movie: all the night scenes were filmed during the day and made to look like night in post-production. That's fine and all, but it's just that the footage was tweaked too dark, so that at times even the actors' faces were nearly invisible. Along with that, there were some poorly produced green-screen moments, and the subtitles may not have been done by a fully capable English speaker. There was a line one character said to another: “That passing you made me back there...” Not only does that not make any sense, but they didn't even care to complete whatever apparently nonsensical thought the character was trying to get across.
A couple beats were missed. Some really cool ones, too. Like how one of the main characters is afraid of blood, despite being a medical student. It felt like the story was setting this up as an obstacle for him for later on. But when the going got tough, it didn't feel like very much of an obstacle for the squeamish med-student to pick up a chainsaw and amputate his own arm. I also wondered why the Nazi zombies didn't use guns. They were, and for all intents and purposes still are, soldiers, and have guns. We don't find out until the end exactly why these undead are massacring everyone, but when we do, it seems like it would have made more sense for the zombies to just shoot everyone. Then again, wacky scenes like the one guy climbing the zombie's small intestine like it was the rope in gym class wouldn't have been possible if the zombie simply shot him dead.
A lot of love and work went into this movie. It's very watchable for any die-hard zombie fan, and will easily earn a special place in any gore-lover's heart. If you have a strong stomach and are ready to surrender all logic in the name of campy horror, this is one to see.
DVD Bonus Features
In addition to a couple trailers, there are a few fairly decent behind-the-scenes pieces, all of which look like they were recorded on my aunt's handycam. They mostly contain interviews with different crew members and gag reels and the like. Probably close to two hours of watchable extras, especially if you really dig seeing the inner-workings of a low-budget zombie film.
Editor's note: Thanks to user 'ss' for pointing out a syntax error. Corrected.
"Dead Snow" is on sale February 23, 2010 and is not rated. Horror. Directed by Tommy Wirkola. Written by Tommy Wirkola, Stig Frode Henriksen. Starring Charlotte Frogner, Evy Kasseth Røsten, Lasse Valdal, Stig Frode Henriksen, Vegar Hoel.
