“There are no good jokes that don’t involve poop, pee or semen,” someone says in DEAD SNOW, but Norwegian director/co-writer Tommy Wirkola would clearly disagree with his character. Where bodily fluids and parts are concerned, blood and guts are the humorous props of choice in his movie, and its best moment is a literal cliffhanger with a human and a zombie clinging to another ghoul’s unfurled intestines.
Which is not to say that DEAD SNOW goes completely over the top in either its comedy or its filmmaking. (The movie opens this week in New York and next week in LA theatrically, and is also available via video-on-demand from IFC Films; this review is based on the subtitled version playing the big screens, not the dubbed edition being presented on small ones.) The obvious models are EVIL DEAD II and DEAD ALIVE, yet Wirkola eschews the aggressive camerawork of Sam Raimi and, for all the extreme bloodshed on view, doesn’t attempt the stratospheric splatstick of Peter Jackson. The problem is that, a few quirks of setting and backstory aside, Wirkola doesn’t provide a whole lot that’s distinctive in their place. DEAD SNOW is well-made, and has a number of good individual moments, but is suffused overall with a sense of coming a bit late to the crowded zombie-movie party.
The setup is one that has served countless filmmakers since they first noticed that George A. Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD provided an easily adapted template. We’re introduced to two carloads of students headed up to a cabin in the mountains for Easter vacation: three girls and four boys, with one guy’s girlfriend due to ski her way to the meeting place. (We know, thanks to a prologue, that she’ll never make it, due to a rude interruption of her travel.) In a more modern but equally familiar twist, one of the group, Erlend (Jeppe Beck Laursen), is a horror-movie expert who recognizes that trips like theirs have provided the setup for any number of onscreen youth slaughters.
Still, everything seems hunky-dory as they break out the beer and the public displays of affection, while two of them engage in a sex scene that takes place in an outhouse. Despite the aforequoted line of dialogue, Wirkola resists the urge to give this scene its inevitable scatological punchline—which comes as something of a relief, as does the fact that the characters are not as obnoxious as their counterparts in any number of American pictures. But they’re not all that interesting, either, which means it’s also a relief when they’re paid a late-night visit by a middle-aged hiker (Bjorn Sundquist), who spins a story of how, back during WWII, the Nazis pillaged and enslaved a town right in the area where they’re staying. The villagers eventually revolted, driving their oppressors into the mountains, where they froze to death—but supposedly still await the moment when they can revive and reclaim their plundered booty. And what do you know—the friends soon find a box of gold beneath the floorboards, and some of them start thinking they see shadowy figures peering at them from the night outside…
“Nazi zombies” is the two-line high concept and key selling point of DEAD SNOW, and the image of the uniformed ghouls charging through the snow is indeed an occasionally striking one. Yes, these are “fast zombies” that are more human than the usual shamblers in other ways too; they use binoculars and bayonets, and their leader, the undead Colonel Herzog (Orjan Gamst), even proves capable of barking an order or two. Beyond their appearance, however, their SS status doesn’t distinguish them in any meaningful way; as far as the story is concerned, they could just as easily be undead pirates seeking their lost treasure. While Wirkola toys with subverting narrative expectations here and there (a character who seems set up to achieve savior status winds up being one of the first to go), most of the script he wrote with Stig Frode Henriksen (who also co-stars) sticks to a comfortably familiar playbook as well.
The point of it all is to get to the splatter, which Wirkola does dish out vigorously. The snow is sprayed, spattered and eventually drenched with the red stuff (some of which is computer-generated, a necessity given that the fake blood reportedly kept freezing on location), with these ghouls vulnerable to bodily damage in addition to the traditional head shots. Everything from conventional weapons to trees and a snowmobile is pressed into service to dispatch the fiends, though even this kind of improvisational inventiveness, by now, has the feeling of the rule rather than the exception when it comes to this subgenre. There’s no doubt that Wirkola is enthusiastic about what he’s doing, and that, combined with a fine level of technical prowess on a limited budget (cinematographer Matt Weston captures both the expansive landscapes and the claustrophobic cabin confines quite well), makes DEAD SNOW a more than watchable and often amusing homage. But it leaves the feeling of having more worth as a tribute—and a calling card—than as a film with its own identity.
See FANGORIA #285, on sale this month, for an interview with Wirkola on DEAD SNOW.For a different opinion on DEAD SNOW, also check out our other review on our 18+ GOREZONE website.