£3 Film: Dead Snow

Hmm I don’t know, Zombies just seen a bit cliché nowadays. Well How about Nazi Zombies? Well now you’re Talking!

It’s kind of surprising that nobody had thought of combining the two most deadly of history's enemies, the Nazi’s, and Zombies (...wait a minute?) before Dead Snow came along in 2009 - but everything has got to start somewhere right?

The plot is pretty simple, a bunch of Students are on a Easter trip into the Snowy Peaks of Norway to a cabin in the middle of nowhere (where else?), where they discover what amounts to Nazi ‘gold’ – queue Nazi Zombie action. Yeah, you knew it was never going to be Citizen Kane (but what if it was?!), and really, one of the main problems with the film is that there is every attempt to cram in an explanation for the reason there are Nazis (but quickly skirts round the issue of why they are zombies...) and build up the characters during the first quarter of the film, a quarter which I felt was ill spent with only a running time of 91 minutes. In the end, none of the initial context help to propel the plot along; there aren’t any large twists or turns, apart from ‘yo zombies (but this time Nazi ones!)’ and I felt the film would have benefited from getting to the action quicker. Along this same vein, the first half of the film attempts to create some tension in the darkness around the cabin, going for jump scares and other horror clichés. I found most of this tedious rather than anything that would resemble interesting or, heaven forbid, ‘scary’; it is during this part that the weaknesses of the plot, and the distinctly averageness of the actor's performances is most starkly demonstrated – a fact that is only exacerbated by the disconnection created by subtitles.

For me then, most of the initial half of the film was a bit of a wash. Thankfully though, when the punches start flying and the heads start rolling (literally), things improve in a pleasingly stupid, silly and gory way as we watch our survivors being slowly picked apart, a number in a way resembling the deaths in Shaun of the Dead (yeah, you know the scene), and Dead Snow certainly takes some other queues from its brother zombie-comedy, also imitating its snappy camera cuts. The deaths are all in good fun, and the sometimes dodgy physical and CGI blood adds to this rather than detracting from it, culminating in a exciting (yet equally as stupid) final battle between Zombies and Survivors, accompanied with some explosions, chainsaws and gallons of fake blood. Despite the obviously fake blood, the Nazi Zombies themselves, at least for me, were top notch, in costume and makeup (though surely they would be equipped with Nazi Snow-gear rather than generic SS uniforms...but anyway).

In the end, this isn’t a film to think over then, but rather the opposite, a film that requires no thought at all. If you’re looking for something that is mind numbing dumb, yet heart-warmingly fun (in that lovely, gory sort of way), then I’d suggest taking a look at Dead Snow – it isn’t a Oscar winner, but those coming to dead Snow aren’t look for that, and what they are looking for is present in the bucket-load – pure unadulterated dumbness.