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One thing that becomes clear very early on in Dead Snow is that filmmaker Tommy Wirkola is a clever guy. The film, which finds a group of Norwegians staying in an isolated mountain cabin and attacked by a battalion of Nazi zombies, isn’t exactly groundbreaking in its narrative set-up. We’ve seen hundreds of horror films over the years send a group off to a cabin in the middle of nowhere-all the better to keep them cut off from the rest of the world when the bad stuff starts to happen. Wirkola, genre savvy director that he is, realizes this-and takes steps to counter the criticism before any of us could even launch it by having his characters discuss the very issue in the film’s opening segments (going so far as to name check other films that have used the same set-up). That in and of itself isn’t something entirely new (the postmodernist slasher films of the mid and late 1990s were also incredibly self-aware), but it does make the film sort of “critic proof” when it comes to people potentially complaining about narrative familiarity.Of course, that’s not the only place where Wirkola shows off his film smarts (and to be honest, I’d expect nothing less than this level of genre literacy from a guy crazy enough to have made a Kill Bill spoof entitled Kill Buljo). Wirkola shows off his horror street-cred by having one character running around in a Braindead t-shirt (better known as Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive here in the States) and a “gearing up” montage set in a shed that is a fantastic riff on a similar sequence in Raimi’s Evil Dead (right down to the sound effects and the inclusion of a chainsaw). All these winks and nudges, coupled with the always crowd pleasing Nazi zombies, makes Dead Snow a whole hell of a lot of fun. You could probably ask for more from the film-but that would really just be being greedy.

It takes Dead Snow the better part of forty-five minutes to get rolling-and it was during this first half of the film that I was ever so slightly worried that Wirkola’s movie wasn’t going to live up to the promise so inherent in its premise. It takes a long time setting things up-arguably more time than necessary since the film utilizes an instantly familiar narrative structure and the characters aren’t exactly deep (what passes for depth here is that one of the main characters is going to medical school-but blood makes him woozy. It’s an interesting idea-which makes it a shame that Wirkola never really comes back to it when it seems like it would be most obvious…during the film’s over-the-top splatter climax).

That being said, the cast and crew are clearly having fun. The ensemble group of performers have genuine chemistry and it was sad to see a few of them meet their grisly demise at the hands of the undead Nazi interlopers. The performances, when matched with the gleefully excessive blood-letting, make up for any of the minor flaws the film has. Dead Snow is more concerned with being an homage to the classic gore comedies of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson than it is anything else, and in this regard, it’s an almost complete success. It may not boast an iconic character on the same level as Bruce Campbell’s Ash or as much gore as the revered ending of Jackson’s Dead Alive, but Wirkola nails the tone of those films in a pitch perfect way that made me both happy and nostalgic. You could say they don’t make them like this anymore-but Wirkola has disproved the notion. Now if only we could get other talented filmmakers on the same page…

Clearly, though, the real star of Dead Snow is the special FX. There’s a Grand Guignol level of excess in the latter stages of the film, wherein Wirkola simply cuts loose and plays a game of “how can I top this?” with each new scene. To the director and FX crew’s credit, they manage to win most of the rounds. Chainsaws sever limbs, people hang by intestines, blood flows like cheap hooch at a wino convention, and no one here gets out unscathed. The gore FX are incredibly well done (as is the Nazi zombie make-up), but again, presented in such a humorous way that even people who generally avoid graphic horror films will find themselves laughing and groaning at the same time.

It’s hard to believe, given the current popularity of Nazi zombies (thanks in no small part to videogames) that there haven’t been more films focusing on the undead monsters of the Third Reich. A closer examination shows there have only been a handful of films to use the idea (Shock Waves, Zombie Lake, Oasis of the Zombies, and Outpost comprise pretty much the entire canon up to this point) and none has emerged as the “definitive” example of the form. Dead Snow won’t change that-but only because the Nazi zombies seem secondary to Wirkola’s desire to create a gore comedy on par with the work of his idols. That doesn’t make this movie any less impressive-just a bit different than what’s come before it in this relatively small subgenre. Horror fans looking for a splattery good time will not be disappointed.

Horror Geek Rating: 4 out of 5

Tags: Dead Snow, Film Reviews, foreign horror, gore, nazi zombies, Tommy Wirkola

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 6:57 am and is filed under Reviews, foreign horror, zombies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.