I hate to disappoint you gore fans, but Dead Snow — better known as “the Norwegian horror comedy about Nazi zombies” — isn’t much of a movie. Yes, the plot involves Nazi zombies. Yes, the concept of Nazi zombies is indisputably awesome. No, I am not going to get dragged into a South Park “pirate ghosts/ghost pirates” debate about whether they’re Nazi zombies or zombie Nazis. But execution is everything when it comes to horror, and that’s where writer/director Tommy Wirkola falls far, far short.Perversely, Wirkola seems almost proud of the creakiness of his film’s set-up: a gang of interchangeable (but uniformly unlikable) college students decide to spend their Easter break in a remote cabin in the woods, far out of cellphone range, where they get picked off one by one. There’s even a self-described “film nerd” in the group who pipes up with the observation that this is the same way The Evil Dead started — thankfully, he’s one of the first characters to get killed off.
Wirkola pads things out for an unconscionable 50 minutes before giving us our first decent glimpse of the Nazi zombies, whereupon the film finally kicks into high gear with a series of increasingly gruesome showdowns between the humans and the goosestepping ghouls. The zombies aren’t actually the least bit scary, but a few of them do get killed off in pretty colourful ways — in the most spectacular scene, a character winds up dangling from a cliff while holding onto a zombie’s unspooled intestines and trying to fight off another zombie holding onto him around his waist.
What are all those Nazi zombies doing in the snowy forests of Norway anyway, you ask? I wish I could tell you — the movie’s explanation of this obscure chapter of WWII history is a little foggy. And if you’re planning on seeing Dead Snow — for instance, at DEDfest next weekend here in Edmonton — you and your friends will have a lot more fun if you make your brains a little foggy as well first.
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