Sometimes, there’s nothing just quite like a comedy/horror sequel. Not just any comedy/horror sequel mind you, but one made in a particular set of circumstances that means all bets are off and anything goes.
The circumstances I’m referring to are pretty simple. The first one is that the first film had to be a low budget treasure that took a simple concept and ran with it in such a way that it managed to transcend its meager backing to show off the raw talent of the director involved. The second is that when they eventually come back to make the sequel, they have more money and more experience to really go to town with making something absurdly awesome (a frustrating brush with studio filmmaking between sequels also helps, but isn’t exactly a must).
Such circumstances have bred such ridiculous magnificence as Evil Dead II, Phantasm II, Basket Case 2 and Terrifier 2; but thanks to following the above rules to the letter, in 2014 it also gifted us Dead Snow 2: Red Vs Dead; Tommy Wirkola’s barnstoming nazi zombie sequel that proved that you just can’t keep a bad Standartenführer down.
Set immediately after the events of the first movie, we catch up with Martin, the last survivor of an attack by reanimated zombie Nazi soldiers, as their nefarious leader, Herzog attacks him after he accidently managed to retain a single coin of the undead’s stolen gold. This proves to be the last straw for Martin who not only has witnessed all his friends being torn to pieces and has lost an arm himself (chainsawed off, if you must ask), but who had accidentally killed his girlfriend, Hannah, with an axe, but somehow the medical student manages to escape while relieving Herzog of an arm of his own. He wakes up later in hospital with yet more bad news awaiting him – but while the realisation that he’s going to be charged for the murders of his friends is bad enough, then news that Herzog’s severed arm has been mistakenly sewn back onto his stump by over eager surgeons really takes the cake.
After discovering that his new arm contains inhuman strength after he accidently hurls a young boy out of a window, Martin escapes under the fear that Herzog will continue his rampage and contacts an American group of geeky professional zombie hunters who hop on a plane to Norway to help.
They’d better hurry, because Herzog has decided against going back into hibernation with his troops and instead chooses to finish his original mission from the war and wipe out the village of Talvik, murderers and resurrecting people as he goes to swell his army. However, Martin discovers that super strength isn’t the only benefit of having the arm of a cursed, Nazi zombie and finds that the leperous limb has the ability to also bring the dead back to life to be under his thrall.
Thus the battle lines are drawn as Martin, the Zombie Squad and a random shop clerk from the local World War II museum band together to slow the Nazi zombie horde enough to build an undead army of their own.
Essentially a response to the poor reception of Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Dead Snow 2 sees Tommy Wirkola throw practically everything he has at a sequel that betters the original in practically every way. It’s gorier, it’s funnier and it moves the entire plot away from its simple, cabin in the snow origins into so something far more vast and fun that veers more into cartoonish action territory as it pitches any last lingering traces of good taste and subtlety off the nearest cliff. You can tell that Wirkola was desperate to retreat back into this world and expand on it because right from the word go, there’s a sense that he has no time for anything a banal as set ups or long winded explanations and much like the moment when Bruce Campbell is hurled through the forest by a possessing demon in Evil Dead 2, the director just wants to get to the good stuff as soon as inhumanly possible.
Hence, within it’s first ten minutes or so, Wirkola nails us right between the eyes with the goofiest, most cartoonishly ridiculous plot twist you could possibly imagine when doctors graft Herzog’s severed arm onto our hero’s stump by accident, which gives him superpowers. However, while it’s utterly nonsense of the most childish kind, it also proves to be a tremendous litmus test yo whether or not you’re going to be on Dead Snow 2’s wavelength. If you think that it’s the dumbest shit that you’ve ever heard of, then the rest of Red Vs Dead won’t be for you, but of you think that the fateful operation is the dumbest and awesomest shit you’ve ever heard of then my friend, you’re in for a fucking treat – because what follows is essentially one long string of gore gags and crazed splatstick that proves to be hugely endearing.
Wirkola’s worship of the works of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson is well documented thanks to the sheer amount of references the first film hurled at us (one guy was wearing a Braindead t-shirt for crying out loud), bit here he manages to hit out on his own, freed of a budget that demanded that he keep his cast in a cabin for most of the running time and while he gives Vegar Hoel’s long suffering Martin supernatural abilities (which he immediately uses to accidently kill a bunch of police) and introduces a painfully geeky group of American zombie hunters (led by Spider-Man: Homecoming’s Martin Starr), the real progession is left to the Nazis.
Mirroring the joy I originally felt when Maniac Cop 2 gave it’s titular zombie officer a police car, Dead Snow 2 gives the villainous Commander Hezog a fucking tank which not only looks agonisingly cool, but allows him to do horrendously funny shit like run over heads with the tank tracks or obliterate some pram pushing mothers with a well aimed shell. From there, Herzog now also has more zombified divisions (tank crew, special forces) and even an undead nazi doctor who comes complete with a thinning comb-over and some innotive ideas when it comes to wartime triage (can we say plunger leg?) and a good portion of the jokes come from how far Wirkola has been allowed to stretch his lore.
Of course, the rest come from the gut busting (literally) jokes concerning gratuitous gore and crazed blood letting and this may actually be the first film I’ve ever seen that has a man’s intestines pulled out to make a makeshift hose in order siphon gas. But then, horror/comedy sequels like this always go above and beyond to give their fans the fucked up goods – which is chiefly why we love them so much. With that being said the movie doles out an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade style fight on a runaway tank, countless PC-free deaths (the child being crushed during chest compression and the wheelchair bound old lady being abandoned by her carer score insanely high on the cackle-meter) and a final scene that can only be described as “uplifting necrophilia” that plays out while Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse Of The Heart”, means that fans of magnificent trash certainly won’t go hungry.
Superlative silliness turbo powered by an energetic sense of fun, it’s nothing short of a war crime that we’ve never had a third instalment pop up, but until that day finally arrives (if it ever does), Dead Snow 2 goes all out to answer the question: “Heil low can you go?”.
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