“HOW MANY MOVIES start with a group of friends on a trip to a
cabin with no cell phone signal?” one of the interchangeable characters
in Dead Snow asks—shortly before he and his friends hike
to a cabin, and shortly after realize they have no cell reception. An
hour or so later, covered in sticky blood and chunky innards, another
member of the group makes a pretty solid observation: “We should have
gone to the beach.”
The Norwegian comedy splatter flick Dead Snow (the title, by
the way, is way cooler in its original language: Død
Snø!) is half Evil Dead and half Shaun of the
Dead, and it’s about a quarter as much fun as either. Despite a few
wry jokes and a welcome sense of fun (like the recent Drag Me to
Hell, Dead Snow is of the too-rare opinion that the only way
to make a decent horror flick might be to offer the audience a wink or
two), Dead Snow ultimately isn’t willing to do much more than
maim, dismember, and cover Norway’s serene countryside with red stuff.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that—but an hour and a half
of watching brains thunk onto cabin floors and blood splatter across
snowdrifts does prove a bit much.
Here’s the part of the review where I go into the plot and the
characters, but screw it: The characters are indistinguishable (save
the token “Creepy Old Dude Who Warns the Kids to Be Careful”), and
aside from a basic setup (med school students go into the woods…
woods filled with Nazi zombies!), the plot’s just there to
justify scenes like the one in which a victim dangles off a cliff face
while using a surprisingly resilient length of intestine for rope.
(There is also sex in an outhouse. And about 20 seconds after that,
death in an outhouse.) The Nazi zombies (Nazbies?) want their haunted
gold back or something, so just about everybody ends up dead, and yet
again, we learn that occasionally listening to creepy old dudes can be
a good idea.
We also learn that, apparently, Nazbies live in Norway. Who knew?
