Dead Snow (2009) [Blu-ray]
Comedy | Horror | Thriller

Get ready for the film that shocked Sundance, rocked Europe and knocked American horror fans out of their seats: When a group of medical students take a sex-and-booze-fueled ski vacation to a remote cabin in the Norwegian Alps, they uncover a dark secret from WWII that resurrects a battalion of uncontrollable, unstoppable and extremely undead Nazis. What follows is a blitzkrieg of bloodshed, body parts and action-packed zombie carnage that The New York Observer hails as "relentless thrills, unimaginable horrors and a shock ending guaranteed to make you scream out loud!" Writer/director Tommy Wirkola spares no amount of flesh-chomping, intestine-ripping, and chainsaw-slicing to deliver perhaps the finest Nazi Zombie movie of our time and one of the most ferocious, outrageous and over-the-top horror hits of the year!

The Norwegian Nazi-zombie-movie - Død snø.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, February 20, 2010 -- What's with the spate of Nazi zombies all of the sudden? Recent videogame Call of Duty: World at War includes a multiplayer mode dedicated to mowing down waves of Third Reich revenants. In 2008, low-budget British chiller Outpost found a band of mercenaries infiltrating a bunker teeming with the SS undead. And now, we have Dead Snow, a Norwegian splatterfest about a battalion of resurrected, swastika-emblazoned soldiers terrorizing a group of vacationing med-school students. Don't get me wrong; the amalgamation makes total sense. While not quite as commercially lucrative as combining vampires and bare-chested teen heartthrobs—the current craze—the pairing of Nazis and zombies is, or should be, pure horror gold. Both are soulless, lacking humanity, and intuitively scary. Combined, they create the ultimate in villainy: revived, tirelessly cannibalistic corpses with a racist ideology that's tinged with occultic connotations and rightfully reviled as evil incarnate. If any creature deserves a chainsaw to the face, it's a Nazi zombie, which is why Dead Snow, for all its flaws, is still a visceral overload of geeky fun.

Now, there's nothing new about Nazi zombies. Genre fans should be familiar with Peter Cushing and John Carradine's 1977 cult chiller Shock Waves, about a party yacht that runs afoul of a ghost ship filled with "Der Toten Korps," a cadre of long-lost SS soldiers who are "neither dead or alive, but somewhere in between." Likewise, 1981 gave us three schlocky, Nazi-centric, low-budget exploits, Zombie Lake, Oasis of the Zombies, and Night of the SS Zombies. (None of which are any good.) Even the idea of frozen Nazi zombies isn't unique to Dead Snow, as 1966's The Frozen Dead—arguably the first Nazi zombie film— features a crackpot scientist trying to literally revive the Third Reich by thawing out soldiers who were willingly iced at the end of the war. Then again, Dead Snow doesn't make any claims to be original, and it even willingly acknowledges that it's basically the same old clichéd horror scenario that we've seen countless times before.

Stop me if you've heard this one: a group of horny 20-somethings travels out to a cabin the middle of nowhere, where they plan to booze it up, play some Twister, and pair off surreptitiously to get it on. Well, that's Dead Snow. The sex-addled youngsters are med-school students on Easter holiday, the cabin is on a remote, snow-covered peak near Øksfjord, Norway, and the hasty couplings take place, disgustingly enough, in the cabin's chilly outhouse. The characters have just enough personality to make them stand out from the icy scenery. We have the all- around good guy, waiting patiently for his girlfriend to arrive via cross-country skis. (The tragic irony being that we see her get eaten in the first scene of the film.) There's a guy who cracks dirty jokes, another who grows queasy at the sight of blood, and the obligatory nerd, a portly blond—like a young, Norwegian Phillip Seymour Hoffman—who wears a Braindead t-shirt and notes how the group's situation seems exactly like the set-up for a horror film. Oh really? And, of course, there's a trio of Nordic beauties who have little to do but look pretty and, eventually, scream. For awhile it's all fun and games—snowmobile races, sled rides, snowball fights—but the beer-fueled party gets pooped when a scraggly-faced wanderer (Bjørn Sundquist) shows up to warn the gang of an "evil presence" on the mountain. Shortly thereafter, what do the kids find but a chest full of stolen Nazi gold stashed in the cabin's crawlspace. Thus, the undead soldiers come running.

When the legions of decaying Deutschländers are inevitably unleashed, the film's stolid and slow first act gives way to a non-stop goregasm of zombie violence, with gallons of crimson blood arterially spurting onto the virgin snow. Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II and Peter Jackson's Braindead (a.k.a. Dead Alive) are clearly director Tommy Wirkola's most treasured inspirations, as the film aspires to maintain that tricky horror/comedy balance, where the ridiculously over-the- top bloodshed is disgusting and hilarious in equal measures. And for the most part, he succeeds. Dead Snow seems a bit too affected in its attempts to be a latter-day cult classic—cult films just happen, you can't force them—but the film is genuinely funny and gorehounds will sniff out a lot to love. A skull gets forcibly pried open, sending the brain rolling out onto the floor, gutted zombies leak steaming piles of viscera, limbs are torn, hacked, and sawed asunder, a ghoulish face is grated into pulp by a snowmobile's spinning wheels, a chainsaw-severed arm is cauterized on an open flame, and in a moment of Looney Toons-meets-butcher shop deliriousness, one character dangles over a cliff, using a dispatched zombie's unspooled intestines as a slimy, slippery rope. There's no end to the insanity.

If you're looking for a coherent explanation for how these Nazis became zombies or why they're so enamored with a tiny chest filled with gold, you're barking up the wrong bloody tree. None is given. If character development, empathy, and a riveting narrative are even remotely important to your enjoyment of a movie, try a Merchant Ivory film instead. If plot holes give you aneurisms and horror clichés send you into epileptic fits, avoid at all costs. If, however, you're looking for a simple splatter comedy to be enjoyed in the company of a few moderately inebriated friends— alcohol almost seems like a prerequisite for this kind of film—Dead Snow fits the bill.

So now that the Nazi zombie phenomenon has—for the time being—run its course, what's next? Maoist werewolves? Feudalist ghosts? Sexy Stalinist witches? Bring it on, indie horror filmmakers. I'm up for anything. Dead Snow may cash in every cliché imaginable, but it's a lot of fun, especially if you're jonesing for a heaping serving of gore. Coolly recommended.

[CSW] -3.7- A great little horror show.

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