William Bibbiani Reviews Dead Snow!
In the 2009 Sundance favorite Dead Snow, a group of college students travel to an isolated cabin in the woods – to drink alcohol and have pre-marital sex – and are attacked by zombies. If it all seems strangely familiar, then you have obviously watched a horror movie in the last 20 years. But in Dead Snow these aren’t just any zombies… these are Nazi zombies. And if that sounds familiar then you’ve probably seen Shockwaves, played Call of Duty: World at War, read Hellboy, and so on. But if anything I’ve mentioned in this paragraph sounds familiar or appealing, then you’re in right smack dab in the target audience for Dead Snow, an entertaining splatterhouse comedy from Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola.
Ordinarily the second paragraph is a good place to start recounting the plot, but frankly I think “a group of isolated college students travel to an isolated cabin and are attacked by Nazi zombies” pretty much covers it. There are lots of subplots – a medical student who is afraid of blood, for example, and a missing girlfriend – but once the Nazi zombies finally show up in earnest, Wirkola and his co-writer Stig Frod Henriksen (who also stars as “Roy”) drop just about everything in favor of dexterous disemboweling and dismemberment. Frankly, that’s a good thing, because the first half of Dead Snow takes itself a little too seriously. There may be a few jokes and movie references, but for the first half of the film the Nazi zombies are just too classy to be be very compelling: they’re only viewed in the shadows, calculatedly murdering the protagonists one by one in a formulaic “Agatha Christie” kind of way. But once they start attacking en masse and the blood starts flowing the film never seems to let up for a moment and finally achieves the kind of breathless energy that makes Dead Snow worth recommending.
Dead Snow features some of the most memorable splatterhouse moments in years, and gets more out of its small intestines than I ever will. Zombies are chopped up, machine gunned and even thrown from cliffs with reckless abandon, and it’s all the more satisfying that they are dressed like Nazis (perhaps the only movie villains more demonized than zombies). But it’s interesting to observe how much hype can arise from something so incidental as Nazi uniforms. Apart from a few throwaway jokes and a couple of set pieces revolving around Nazi weaponry (not as many as you’d think), the film would have been exactly the same had the heroes run into a zombie nudist colony or something. Lots of zombie killing punctuated by striking costume design – a simple but effective formula for success. Still, it’s a shame that such a neat concept as Nazi zombies couldn’t be more integral to the plot. We don’t even find out how they became zombies, although that’s probably just being saved for the sequel.
If you love the splatterhouse comedy genre, then now isn’t a particularly good time to be alive. For every modern classic like Slither or Black Sheep there are literally hundreds of splatterhouse comedies that… don’t seem to be getting made. That’s one of the reasons that Dead Snow feels so refreshing despite its many familiarities (fans of Evil Dead 2 should have fun taking a drink after each “homage”), and engenders so much good will despite its flaws. It may or may not be the film that jumpstarts the splatterhouse comedy genre for the first time in decades, but Dead Snow will certainly help tide us over until something, inevitably, does.
Dead Snow, presented by IFC Films and directed by Tommy Wirkola, falls in theaters June 19th.
