Mikes Film Talk

The 2009 Norwegian nazi-zombie film Dead Snow does not disappoint. It is fun and weird. It almost carves out its own niche in the zombie genre.

Directed by Tommy Wirkola (Kill Buljo: The Movie, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters  and co-written with Stig Frode Henriksen (Kill Buljo: The Movie, Kurt Josef Wagle og legenden om fjordheksa), Dead Snow is a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Dead Snow itself could almost be a ‘fan-film’ of all things horror and zombie related. It opened to positive reviews. There is no reference to the film’s shooting budget. It earned, however, a respectable one million plus dollars in gross profits. The film does feel a little like an updated version of the old ‘Andy Hardy’ films and their, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show in the barn!” It doesn’t suffer from it though. It actually causes the film and it’s paper thin plot that bit more appealing.

The story

Dead Snow opens with a Nazi-zombie pursuing a young lady through deep snow in the Nordic mountains. The Nazi-zombie corners her and kills her. A group of Nazi-zombies then eats her.

We then meet a group of seven students who are on holiday in the Norwegian mountains. They are on a skiing trip and on the way to a friends cabin in the mountains. The students are all typical ‘film’ students, in other words they all focus on sex, drugs and rock and roll.

The students make their way to the cabin and their first night there they encounter a ‘hiker’ Turgåer (Bjørn Sundquist) who tells the students about an old Norwegian curse that affected the Nazi’s who occupied Norway during the second world war. Greedy Nazi’s are cursed after searching for a pile of hidden riches. Nazi’s who die in their forbidden quest, must forever roam the mountains. They are now the undead. Corpses brought back to ‘life’ by the allure of riches.

The students, Martin (Vegar Hoel), Roy (Stig Frode Henriksen), Vegard (Lasse Valdal), Hanna (Charlotte Frogner), Liv (Evy Kasseth Røsten), Erland (Jeppe Laursen) and Chris (Jenny Skavlan) have been invited by Vegard’s girlfriend Sara (Ane Dahl Torp) to stay at her cabin. Unfortunately, the young lady we saw at the beginning of the film being snacked on by zombies was Sara and she won’t be showing up.

Sara’s absence confuses and concerns the small group. They discuss where she might be and whether they should be search for her. They go through the cabin to see if they can find a clue about where Sara might have gone.

Levels of comedy

This film is a combination of a comedy of errors and a possible homage to the Evil Dead films. The students are dispatched quite messily, and truth be told, comically by random Nazi-zombies. At one point two of the survivors arm themselves with assorted power tools.

The group at different times in the film discuss popular myths and legends about zombies in films and other cultural elements. For the most part they try a lot of the more culturally prevalent means of dispatching  zombies. Hilariously they either succeed or fail and it is their realization of the danger of their predicament that amuses the most. By the time they begin to take things seriously it is, for most of them, too late.

Milking it

The filmmakers are not afraid to milk the most laughs possible out of any given scene. At one point in the film, one of the students, Vergard, is fighting with a zombie while they both hang on the entrails of another zombie. Both are dangling from a cliff face.

The cursed zombies are attracted to riches of any kind. When the students discover a box full of ‘treasure’ in the basement of the cabin, this lures the zombies to attack and kill the cabins inhabitants.

I laughed as much as I groaned at some of the more apparent ‘clichés’ that the film-makers included in the film’s set pieces.

But I loved Dead Snow and it’s ‘cliffhanger’ ending. Fan’s of horror films and zombie films should enjoy this one. Once they realise that it’s not taking itself seriously at all it become glorious fun. Watch it with the idea that it is a combination of satire and spoof and you’ll get a kick out of it.

The Verdict

This is, just for the references to other horror film and the audacity of it all, 4.5 stars. Dead Snow is just good snowy, bloody fun. Plex and YouTube are streaming the movie at the moment.

The Trailer