Monday, August 3, 2009

Dead Snow (2009)


In general, zombies are unpleasant neighbors.  Nazi zombies however, are worse.  Not only do they combine the inherent undeadliness of zombies with the inherent evil of nazis, they do it with military precision.  

Enter Dead Snow, a Norwegian love letter to all horror movies that involve a cabin in the woods.  The premise is a bunch of med students who don't need any real names are spending a weekend in a cabin in the middle of Norwegian nowhere during winter.  Like all college kids who do this in movies, their cars are parked far far away at the base of the mountain, there's no cell phone reception, and of course there's that mysterious something that they should've never fucked with, even if told they should never fuck with it.  

Undeterred, the kids do what anyone in their early 20's do during winter time, they drink, they play in the snow, they jostle and tussle like people do in Fox banner ads during their programming, it's a fun old time.  There's film geek guy, slutty girl, dorky guy, heroic nerdy guy, military trained guy, claustrophobia girl, and sisterly girl to the claustrophobia girl.  Suddenly our care free kids meet random old guy.  Random old guy, like all random old guys in horror films tell them a story that should've convinced them all to go wtf, lets get the hell out of here, but of course they ignore him.  Random old guy tells them that nazis use to steal gold from the people of the land and then dissappeared into the mountains and that the land is full of evil.  Naturally the kids find nazi gold shortly after, because apparently Norway is littered with nazi gold hidden in the ground.  What happens next is nothing short of brutal nazi zombie battling fun.  

Make no mistake, this movie is everything fun about zombie films combined with everything fun about movies where nazis are the main villains mixed with a heaping dose of Evil Dead homages.  One on one fisticuffs with zombies, explosions, chainsawing, instestinal rappeling (I'm not shitting you!), etc. etc.  It's a cornacopia of B movie cheesiness and grit.  And at it's heart there's a morality story, a leprechaun er nazichaun and their gold cannot stand to be parted from each other.  

Dead Snow gets five zombie Gomorrahs, one for each scene of instestinal fortitude.  

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