"Dead Snow"

Movie Watched Today: Dead Snow

Genre: Independent Horror / Comedy?

Starring: A bunch of Norwegians

Director: Tommy Wirkola

A group of medical students head to a cabin in the middle of some snowy mountains for a drunken sex-filled holiday from school. Little did they know, the mountain range was where a Nazi company escaped to and vanished at the end of WWII. Now they will face....Nazi Zombies!!!

*Disclaimer: The movie is in Norwegian with English Subtitles. I don't know if they dubbed it or not, but I don't really care. I like dubbed anime, but I HATE dubbed live-action.*

The premise of the movie actually makes it sound quite comedic. I mean, how serious can Nazi Zombies be? Even people on the imdb forums claim this is on-par with Shaun of the Dead in terms of Zombie Comedy. However, I definitely did not see it that way. Other than a few choice fight scenes, the movie had a quite serious tone.

The story is slightly above-average for a zombie movie. At it's heart, it is a "watch these kids get terrorized by the undead" movie, but there are a few nice bits that set it apart. The back story of why the zombies are there is way more in-depth than the normal "here are zombeeees, they wanna eat you!!!" cliche. In other words, it isn't a cliched zombie movie...I feel like I'm being redundant now.

The zombies themselves are not as dumb as normal ones, but not too bright either. They can run and use weapons such as knives and clubs, but that's about as far as their intelligence goes. Their makeup is really good, and they didn't just smear some blood over a normal guy: they actually gave them all rotting parts and so forth.

The special effects are quite good. I'm not sure if they used any CG gore or not, because it all looked pretty "real" (as real as movie gore can look). There are some really sick scenes also, so hopefully hardcore film violence doesn't gross you out. The director must have some intestines fetish or something because everyone and their mom gets their guts ripped out in some odd way. There are disembowelings, decapitations, stabbings, eye-gougings, shootings, etc. It really is a horror-violence hat trick.

I'm horrible at judging acting by people speaking a foreign language, but I was pretty convinced of the cast's ability. There was some English spoken, usually by the nerdy fat movie buff in the movie (who had a really good Scwarzenegger impression, by the way) but other than that it was pure Norwegian, which sounded quite cool

I definitely enjoyed Dead Snow, but then again I'm a sucker for zombie movies, and independent horror in general.

If you like zombie movies, you will love this. Subtract 2 or 3 from the score if you don't.

Final Score - 8.5/10