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Dead Snow - aka “Dod Sno“ (2009)

Dir: Tommy Wirkola

Seven friends (three girls and four guys) drive out for a break into the snowy Norwegian mountains and bed down in a remote lodge to await the arrival of an eighth member of their party, Sara, who is making her way there across country.
With night falling, and still no sign of Sara, the friends have a mysterious visitor (Bjørn Sundquist) who informs them that the entire area has a deadly past;

During the latter days of WWII the locals took revenge on the sadistic Nazi regiment that had made their lives hell for the last three years by attacking them en masse.
The surviving Germans, led by the brutal commander Herzog (Ørjan Gamst), flee into the icy wastes (with whatever treasure they could loot from the town) never to be seen again.
But ever since that day the locals speak of something evil in the mountains…….

Ahhhhh….The Nazi zombie film. An utterly wonderful basic idea that’s surely bulletproof?
Sadly not, as not a single Nazi zombie film produced so far can actually be called good.
Some people laud the cheap and tedious “Shock Waves” but that even forced Peter Cushing to do the unthinkable…give a bad performance (with a comedy German accent no less).
“Zombie Lake” at least gave us a little bit of blood and lots of pubic hair…but had nothing else to offer of any worth at all and featured God-awful looking green-painted zombies.
“Oasis of the Zombies” bored the brain so much it gave up having a reason to exist and proceeded to leak out of the ears of the unfortunate (though thankfully tiny) audience it had managed to attract.
All of these flicks also failed to have any remotely groovy and authentic looking Nazis, or even regular German soldiers, as they were always dressed in dull, cheaply dyed, non-descript uniforms that often made them look more like plumbers with silly hats on.

Recent tries have given us better uniforms (though you hardly ever got to see them due to ‘artistically’ dark cinematography) but nothing else.
We’ve had the plotting chaos, plodding pace and generally wasted undead Nazis of “The Outpost”.
“The Bunker” gave us head scratching pretentiousness and only a few ghostly Nazis to sustain interest.
Only "Hellboy" gave us a grovy looking Nazi zombie type thingy, but he was only a lone support figure.

Dear me…How could an idea so great turn out so much disappointment?
So should we have given up hope? NO!
Because in the end patience will be rewarded to some extent, and sure enough in 2009 we were finally given a damn good Nazi Zombie flick! From Norway of all places!

Director and co-writer (along with Stig Frode Henriksen) Tommy Wirkola has crafted a well played, well scripted movie with a Horror fan’s love for the genre and with an astute knowledge of what his fellow fans want from a movie with such a premise.
We want blood, gore, lots of zombies, solid characters, varied and exciting set-pieces and groovy looking uniforms that we can actually see for once!
And amazingly we get it all.

The cast are all good in their roles and despite the fact that we have to follow seven characters in the chaos they all manage to stay sharply defined.
Vegar Hoel as the initially prickish Martin does a fantastic job during the extended blood drenched finale, as does Stig Frode Henriksen himself as his companion in splatter Roy.
Lasse Valdal as, the most heroic of the bunch, Vegard, handles the action well and is very likeable and even the (so easy to make hateful) film geek Erlend (Jeppe Laursen) succeeds as a genuine character in the time we have to spend with them all.
In fact there are no bad performances to be seen here. And the female characters are thankfully pretty strong and independent too.

The witty screenplay (not an actual comedy, but very comedic in places while still retaining some serious drama) may snow shovel a few cliché verbal genre nods into place (the horror film title dropping, tubby, film geek with “Evil Dead“ and "Braindead" t-shirts) and dump a couple of ‘film lore’ visual/plot jokes upon us, but thanks to the way it’s handled by the cast and the disgustingly great black humour it drapes it self in “Dead Snow” manages to avoid the boredom that’s often a symptom of such fan homage content when it impedes the progress of the actual film it’s in.

Wirkola and Henrikson in fact manage to take some of these ‘but it happens that way in the movies’ moments and turn them into wonderfully sick and entertaining sequences of their own. The highlight being the ‘do we turn into zombies if we get bitten’ question that is used to deliver a wickedly grotesque, cruelly comic ‘he’s surely not going to do that’ gore scene that Sam Raimi would be proud of .
Of the non-filmic humour a joke about Martin being half Jewish is a little gem and who can resist the line “Fuck Nokia!” when a mobile phone fails in their time of need.

Talking of the gore, I can safely say no one will be disappointed with the outrageously bloody, stringy, chunky, sloppy grue on display here as zombies bite and tear and as would be victims crush, hack and chainsaw their way through the undead ranks.
Highlights are many, including a gloriously messy torn in half head, death by multiple ripped off limbs, flying zombie heads and a lovely scene of twisted comedic mayhem of a zombie’s intestines being used as a rope as their, impaled on a tree, undead owner spurts blood into our faces from a ruptured eye socket.
It’s all good stuff and mostly real, onset, FX with only a few needless (there is enough actual red stuff around anyway) CGI blood spray moments. And all that crimson stuff sure does look good on that huge blanket of bright, white snow!
And of course the scenery is stunning and beautifully photographed.

Zombie Uniforms are nicely presented, generally authentic looking and thankfully emblazoned with decorative details. Details which we can actually see as the last half of the film takes place in bright, crisp sunlight.
Of course the highlights are the full on Nazi ’SS’ uniforms which is an ingredient I for one have waited a long to see in a Nazi Zombie film.
Herzog (who also sports the best make-up job…more later) looks great in his black leather coat with crimson Swastika armband (you have to admit, The Nazis knew a thing about fashion) and he even has a few elite SS guards for company.

The less successful part of the FX work though is sadly a rather prominent one as the actual zombie face make-up (or is it the people they cast?) gives too many of the undead a rather fat and goofy look. All pudgy cheeks and big wide noses.
That aside though (and even saying that, some of the zombies do look very effective) the FX work is excellent.

Not too sure about the film's fast moving zombies though. Their speed is used to good effect in a couple of jump-scare slayings early on and they make for a more formidable foe, but it’s hard enough to run in deep snow anyway even while alive, no one looks good trying to do it (let alone frightening), and you can’t help but wonder if, from a purely aesthetic point of view, that dragging, crawling, shambling zombies would have looked for more creepy and unsettling (damn, we miss you Fulci) than the sometimes unintentionally comedic looking stumbling and snow stampeding, we see here.

And don’t let the briefly glimpsed zombies, taking it’s time to build up the threat, night time portion of the movie (though a couple of deaths keep things moving) fool you, because when that sun comes up “Dead Snow” kicks into full gear and then some for the rest of its running time.
Wirkola packs in gore scene after gore scene, fresh set-up after fresh set-up and utilises his small budget to deliver some wonderful mass rising up scenes and generally large scale undead mayhem and zombie smashdowns with everything from hammers, knives, chainsaws to machine guns.

It is a shame that the 'telling of the legend' portion of the film though could not have had a partial visual representation of events (it would be nice to see the Nazis characters pre-death), but I assume the budget would have been overly stretched. Strangely though stock footage of warships and Hitler at this point does appear in the trailer, but was left out of the finished film.

So it’s not perfect and as you can see the film has a few issues as far as I’m concerned. But damn it, this is the best Nazi Zombie film so far, by a long way, and that’s made me pleasantly surprised and very happy. Can't really ask for more than that.
Next up? How about an actually good completely serious Nazi Zombie film?
That would really make my millennium.

As a side note, it's nice to see that this relatively rare excursion from Norway into full blown gory horror has secured international distribution while keeping it's national identity intact. The film uses the original Norwegian title and credits on screen, utilises various Norwegian (or at least Scandinavian) songs on the soundtrack and has resisted an English language dub over. Well done all involved.