Cinematic comfort food takes many different forms depending upon who you are and what floats your boat, but when concerning hardcore horror fans, sometimes all they need to reach their own personal happy place is a good cheeky, goofy splatter film – and what’s the easiest and most convenient things to splatter? Well, yes – the actual answer is horny teens, but close behind them has got to be zombies, right? I mean, with their putrid flesh and easily crunchable skulls, the loving dead have got to be horror greatest stress balls as filmmakers over the years have come up with endless ways to pulp the rotting bastards for our entertainment.
But what if there was a way to make killing a zombie even more satisfying? Well, in 2009, fledgling Norwegian film director Tommy Wirkola figured out how to do exactly that with Dead Snow, a low budget horror comedy that took flesh eating ghouls and stuck them in Nazi uniforms in order to give popping their skulls that extra frisson. It may not be the first film to feature an undead Reich, but it certainly was the most fun…
All together now: eins, zwei, DIE!
Seven students who are taking a break from medical school have all decided to spend their Easter vacation blowing off steam by consuming large quantities of booze in a remote cabin near Øksfjord. The group is comprised of blood-phobic Martin and his girlfriend Hanna, horror film nerd Erland and his blind date Chris, final couple Liv and Roy and Vegard, who hoped to meet up with his girlfriend, Sarah, at the cabin. Unbeknownst to our gaggle of partygoers, Sarah has already been mauled during the pre-credits sequence, but the group still manages to get a spot of forwarning thanks to a random, curmudgeonly hiker who tells them the local legends of the area when it was occupied by a particularly vicious battalion of Nazis during the Second World War who were lead by uber-bastard, Standartenfüher Herzog who ultimately met their doom when the locals finally rose up against them as the war drew to a close.
As helpful as this information is to us, it proves to utterly useless to the students as they’re unwittingly picked off one by one by shadowy assailants who are stalking their prey through the icy snow, but once the youths finally catch up to the deadly danger they’re in, they fight back in order to survive.
However, undead Nazis are hardly a foe to take lightly and in the ensuing gore fest, different members of the group pick different tactics to survive with wildly varying results -however, as inflicting blunt force trauma with various power tools seem to work best, that’s what the survivors stick with. But while Martin and Roy make a stand at the cabin, Hanna and Liv flee in order to get help and Vegard explores the snowy wasteland in order to find the already dead Sarah, who will ultimately survive against the ultimate evil?
Nazi zombies aren’t exactly a new concept what with Ken Wiederhorn’s Shockwaves surfacing as early as 1977 and numerous other examples marching in ever since – but be it those bonus Call Of Duty levels I’d play ad nauseam or the likes of The Outpost, Frankenstein’s Army or the occasional Puppet Master prequel, nothing is a mindlessly fun as Dead Snow. It helps that’s Tommy Wirkola is obviously an endearingly aggressive horror nut who brings a huge love of the works of Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and Stuart Gordon to bare as he delivers a gore drenched horror comedy of his own.
However, Wirkola is far too smart to immediately start flinging gore around the very second the film starts and instead builds up to a crazed final act that proves to be a gift that keeps on giving. Of course, first he have to get there and this is where his inexperience begins to show a little. For a start, his human characters are comprised of every stock persona of every horror film ever made, from the lead character with a strange quirk/phobia that’ll undoubtedly be cured through attrition (blood makes Martin feel faint), to the stock, horror fan character who can seem to make it to the end of a sentence without feeling the need to make some sort of movie reference – although Erland admittedly does have a killer Braindead T-shirt. However, as it’s so obvious that he’s just as big of a fan of the genre as his slobby comic relief, there’s a very good chance that Wirkola is being so derivative on purpose, building up audience expectations in order to smear them across the wall the second his audience starts to feel complacent.
When the second half of the movie kicks in and all of his players are either scattered or dead, Wirkola throws things into overdrive as zombie Nazis pop up bloody everywhere and thus channels all of his energies into inventing as many gore gags as his budget and his overworked effects crew could possibly muster and suddenly, Dead Snow becomes the crazy, fairground ride you already hoped it would be. WWII MG 34 machine guns are strapped to snowmobiles, people are bloodily torn limb from limb, genitals are bitten and the director stages an audacious cliff hanging sequence involving one of our characters dangling over a chasm while using a zombies intestinal tract as a life line. Simply put, it’s a fucking gas and it’s remarkable how simply sticking a smoldering corpse in a uniform with a swastika on it really makes a zombie all the more threatening.
However, while all this gleeful bloodletting is all very well and good (and trust me, it’s very, very good), Wirkola also keeps things feeling as fresh as a winter morning by utilizing his surroundings in a truly impressive way. Sure, zombies are imposing, while zombie Nazis are even more threatening still… but zombie Nazis in the snow make for something of an unforgettable image that the movie uses beautifully. In fact, the sight of hundreds of the bastards rising out of the snow to heed Herzog’s command is a neat spin of the old dead rising from the grave schtick and proves that for all his eager fan worship (the final twist feels highly reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Fog) he’s still realises that his has to take the act of chainsawing zombies and make it undoubtedly his.
While the movie is peppered with endless love letters to the genres greatest hits, it’s often in danger of horror-fluent audiences playing spot-the-reference (thankfully the horror fan buys it reasonably early to minimise any smug, meta references), but the director makes sure the whole thing is such fun, you’ll hardly have a chance to care. But anyroad, the message is clear: while killing zombies is fun – killing Nazi zombies is the absolute Reich thing to do.
Sieg bile!
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 