Review: ‘Dead Snow’

Right up front I’ll tell you that ‘Dead Snow’ would have been twice as fun if I’d seen it in a crowd full of enthusiastic genre fans. Nonetheless, this Norwegian horror-comedy is one helluva blast. Granted, the zombies don’t fit well into the classic mold of “what a zombie should be” but that rule doesn’t really apply when the movie is played just as much for laughs as it is for scares. Most importantly, ‘Dead Snow’ is a crowd pleas-er and a bloody, corpse-cutting good time.

One thing I noticed very early in the movie is that ‘Dead Snow’ is heavily influenced by the ‘Evil Dead’ movies, both in style and it’s visual style and in it’s writing, but not so much that it overshadows ‘Dead Snow’ as it’s own movie. Of course, I am saying this despite the fact that one character named Erland is “the worlds biggest movie geek” and takes about the ‘Evil Dead’ movies early on and that one of the characters manages to stumble upon a chainsaw in a shed while fighting off zombies. Nah, I was wrong. ‘Dead Snow’ wasn’t influenced by ‘Evil Dead’ at all. In fact, considering the special effects and makeup in ‘Dead Snow’ I can state with 100% certainty that it wasn’t influenced by ‘Dead Alive’ either… but, I am full of sh**, of course.

The scene where one of the skiers first fights back against one of the zombies is hilarious and it leads into some even better and original horror-comedy creativity. So, the lesson I learned at this point was that if I’m ever chased by a zombie off the side of a snow-covered cliff, I can survive by digging in with my knife and holding on for dear life from the zombie’s intestines life a safety rope, rather than plummeting to my death hundreds of feet below. Good to know!

What more can I say about ‘Dead Snow’? This is just one of those movies you have to see and experience for yourself. Sure, there is technically a story and it included the all-important scene where a creepy old man visits the skiers cabin and warns them of an evil presence in these parts, but that’s short lived and the carnage quickly resumes. ‘Dead Snow’ comes to a climatic overture in the end during the all-out war between the skiers and the zombies, who, by the way… the zombies are Nazi soldiers from WWII. Did I mention that already?

[Overall: 4.25 stars out of 5 – Based on a scale equivalent to that used for ‘Evil Dead’ being a 5]