#evy kasseth rosten

[adamwatchesmovies]

Dead Snow (2009)

How much you enjoy Dead Snow depends entirely on whether "Zombie Nazis" sound appealing. Is the idea dumb, but kind of awesome? Then this film is for you. If that sounds dumb and kind of gimmicky, perhaps consider something else to watch. For this viewer, the movie has its moments but is otherwise merely an excuse to have hapless teenagers fight a legion of undead SS soldiers.

Set during the Easter holiday, seven teenagers retreat to a cabin in the mountains for some fun in the snow. In a bit of what they assume to be good luck, they discover a large sum of Nazi gold. Hidden away during the tail end of WWII by a troop of particularly cruel SS officers who escaped through the mountains but were never seen again, the treasure re-awakens its original owners as flesh-eating ghouls.

Dead Snow has the good grace to understand how ridiculous its premise is. It commits to giving the audience what it wants. The best scene is easily one where two of our male heroes arm themselves with an arsenal of weapons: scythes, hammers, knives, axes, guns and even a chainsaw. They go to town and cut through at least a dozen living dead like they were made of butter. Blood flies everywhere, arms are lobbed off, one zombie even gets decapitated and before its head can hit the ground, it’s kicked away like a soccer ball. That’s awesome, hilarious, and worth seeing.

What’s not so good are the attempts at horror. To see those scenes where zombie Nazis are crushed beneath a snowmobile or blown up, you have to sit through the most generic horror movie you’ve ever seen. The synopsis speaks for itself; a cabin in a remote area, no cell phone reception, a creepy guy who informs the teenagers of what’s coming, followed by incredulous feelings that finally evaporate when blood begins to flow. Even then, stupid mistakes follow characters splitting up for no reason, which means most of the teenagers wind up dead. Even as this type of film, Dead Snow is badly written. That old man that shows up to tell our heroes about the Nazi army and their treasure? Apparently, he just wanders around the mountains creepily explaining to whoever he passes what happened in WWII because that’s his only role in the movie. I was convinced he'd tie into the plot in some other way, but no. Instead of this block of bad exposition, how about a flashback?

I've got to talk about another scene that might have been meant to be comical, but I can't be sure. In it, Jock Erlend (Jeppe Laursen) takes a break from his frat-boy drinking to go to the outhouse. While in there, in barges in the obligatory slut found in every horror movie (Jenny Skavlan), who jumps his bones... in the cold while he is on the toilet! That's disgusting! If this is what the Norwegians include in their movies, I'd hate to say what their nasty pornography is like. 

Unless you speak Norwegian you should watch the English dub of Dead Snow. While the lip-synch will be off and you won’t get the same kind of performances from the voice actors as you would from the ones on the sets, the film's subtitles flash by so quickly there's no way to catch all of the dialogue. Ultimately, the film is merely a way to tie together a bunch of gory scenes and show off the idea of Nazi zombies. Every moment that’s worth seeing could be stitched together and quickly edited into a 10 minute short. It’s like once those scenes where shot, the team realized they needed more material to make it to feature-length and looked at any random horror movie from the eighties, did a find-replace, a few quick edits and called it a day. For forgiving horror movie fans, I’ll give it a mild recommendation. For everyone else, Dead Snow is just average, something you can check out if you think it will be fun, but nothing special. (On DVD, August 20, 2014)

[davidosu87]

[johnnymundano]

Dead Snow (2009)

Directed by Tommy Wirkola

Written by Tommy Wirkola, Stig Frode Henriksen 

Music by Christian Wibe

Country: Norway

Language: Norwegian

Running Time: 91 minutes

CAST

Vegar Hoel as Martin Hykkerud

Stig Frode Henriksen as Roy Toivonen

Charlotte Frogner as Hanna Delon

Lasse Valdal as Vegard Rosten

Evy Kasseth Røsten as Liv Beck

Jeppe Laursen as Erlend Johnsen

Jenny Skavlan as Chris Frogner

Ane Dahl Torp as Sara Henriksen

Bjørn Sundquist as The Wanderer

Ørjan Gamst as Standartenführer Herzog 

(Mea Culpa Dept: All images from IMDB as I was unable to screengrab. And words without pictures is just so 19th Century, darling.)

Not, alas, a sequel to First Snow (2009) but instead a Norwegian splatter movie involving resurrected Nazis and, uh, snow. Back when there were only three (good-ish) Star Wars films we oldies used to refer to this type of thing as “spam in a cabin”, and the movie is clearly aware that it is working in that micro-genre; see the Braindead (1992) T-shirt sported by the movie-buff (Erlend), the vocal shout out to Evil Dead 1 (1981) and 2 (1987), and, well, the isolated cabin and the rendering of most of the small cast into a spam like substance over the sprightly 90 minute running time. So, it would be churlish to expect anything other than a goofy gore-athon with the emphasis on carnage rather than character. My 12 year old son thought it was The Shitz, and I think he, rather than the Cannes jury, is the intended audience.

Cold (ho!) opening with a night-time chase scene set to a bit of classy Edvard Grieg, Dead Snow swiftly sets the scene with admirable economy: medical students, remote cabin, something murderous out there. There’s a bit of an attempt to define them (a randy man, a randy woman, a film geek, a sensible one who is scared of blood, a sensible one who is claustrophobic, the athletic one who dies to Pier Gint, the ultra-capable one with the snowmobile), but they remain distinct primarily thanks to their appearance. Particularly the one who looks like the pile of ineptitude and privilege currently staining the UK’s political stage, Alexander “Boris” Johnson (luckily he dies badly early on, so that’s, uh, cathartic). 

After a slow bit where they settle into the cabin, and some not exactly tight character interaction makes you pine for the Nazi zombies, a crusty old man turns up to act gruff and dispense some necessary plot exposition. In the unnecessary American remake which hasn’t happened (yet) this would be a character actor cameo from, say, Christopher Walken; sadly I am unversed in the Norwegian movie industry so I don’t know if  Bjørn Sundquist is the Norwegian Christopher Walken, but he is very good here. Unfortunately his character is very stupid, and after warning the “spoilt brats” of the danger they are in he promptly camps out in the wilderness with entirely predictable results. But that’s okay, it’s that kind of movie. Unless I blacked out for a crucial second (it could happen; misspent youth) crusty exposition guy fails to mention why the Nazis would come back from the dead. I think it’s linked to the gold in the cabin; a curse? I was a little unclear, but plot isn’t really paramount when you have Nazi zombies. The arse end of the movie is basically a lot of shrieking and inventive dismemberment. And the dismemberment is certainly inventive; if there was an award for most inventive use of intestines in a movie Dead Snow would walk it. Ultimately Dead Snow is less a horror movie than a comedic action splatter fest, and while it never reaches the giddy heights of Evil Dead 2 or Braindead, it certainly doesn’t disgrace itself either. Unless you think this kind of inventively gross nonsense is disgraceful to start with, in which case stick to Ron Howard movies. “Spam in a cabin but with Nazi zombies” is conceptual gold shlock horror-wise and Dead Snow doesn’t piss it away; no, that would be Yellow Snow.