Dead Snow ★★★★

The plot of the film is completely familiar to fans of the slasher genre – a group of horny teens head out to a cabin miles from nowhere, with no cell phone reception and no car. Whilst Hollywood would usually put the cabin in the woods, this being Norway it’s actually high up in the snowy Norwegian mountains. Being typical movie teens the gang induldge in all the usual slasher movie teenage behaviour: sex, booze and partying. However their partying is interrupted by a craggy old drifter who tells them a tale of Nazi occupied Norway, in particular the story of the Einsatzgruppen who murdered and robbed the local townsfolk during World War 2 beforing mysteriously disappearing in the very hills where the teens are holidaying. No sooner has the drifter left when the nazi’s return, zombie style, from their icy graves to ruin the teens vacation and reek bloody havoc once more.

Director Tommy Wirkola sets out his stall early on in Dead Snow when he has one of his characters be a movie buff who immediately points out the stupidity of what they’re doing – pointing out how much like Friday the 13th, Evil Dead and even April Fools Day their situation is, and by doing so Wirkola immediately sets the tone for the rest of the movie, which turns out to be a love letter to the films of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, and in particular Braindead and Evil Dead 2, featuring the OTT humour and Three Stooges style slapstick that made that film so enjoyable, combined with the outrageous gore of Jackson’s film. The rest of the characters in the film are mere one-dimensional horror tropes and for so-called med-students they are all pretty idiotic, but Wirkola does have fun with them along the way – the wannabe hero manages to throw a molatov cocktail into the corner of the cabin setting fire to the one place he’s safe rather than the zombies outside the window and the stereotypical slut of the group is even more sluttier than usual, partaking in a gross scatalogical sex scene in an outside toilet!

Whilst Dead Snow offers nothing new in terms of story or characterisation, Wirkola does fill the film with some extreme gore, including some effects never seen before such as heads torn open and brains falling out, zombies biting penis’ off, and in zombie movie first, a gross scene with a zombies intestines being used as a climbing rope! If you thought you’d seen everything when the zombie fought the shark in Fulci’s Zombie, think again. Along with the gore, Wirkola even throws in references to the shed scene from Evil Dead 2 and homages Peter Jackson’s OTT “death by lawnmower” ending to Braindead, replacing that films lawnmower with a snowmobile (which in a hilarious scene is also equipped with an ex-nazi gattling gun). The film takes a while to get to the gore, but once it does it never lets up, throwing buckets of blood at the screen and on the crisp white snow – which is a particularly striking image.