Paint-by-numbers pieces can be beautiful, in their own way. And
there’s nothing inherently wrong with making a formulaic movie.
So if you’re willing to tolerate a completely by-the-book horror
movie—one that knows itself to be utterly derivative—and
you like the genre, and you’re between the ages of 14 and 36, and are
male, and know the names of the gaffers and best boys of every 1980s
slasher movie, you’ll probably enjoy Dead Snow. It’s got decent,
Evil Dead-inspired action, and the bad guys combine Nazism with
zombism, which is kind of like putting a flower on a unicorn.
The film starts with seven young people hiking to a cabin in the
woods. They have no phone, good skin and an active interest in having
sexual relations on camera before being dismembered by the living dead.
As they trudge toward their doom, they discuss the fact that they’re
re-enacting the opening to a lot of young-people-dying-in-the-woods
movies, but then they go ahead and do it anyway, because that’s what
stock characters do.
One of them is a movie nerd who provides helpful expository dialogue
on the film’s plot; another is a bad-ass who apparently was in the
Norwegian army’s zombie-fighting division; one’s a doctor who’s afraid
of blood; and, of course, there’s the charmingly slutty girl who gives
her life for our entertainment. Good people.
Also, since they’re Norwegians, they’re taller and have better
health care than we do, though that won’t matter much once the zombies
attack. But it’s good to know.
Once they arrive at their snowy cabin, a mysterious older man shows
up to narrate the film’s backstory, as mysterious older men are wont to
do. It seems that during World War II (the last really decent war with
Roman numerals), a squad of Nazis occupied a nearby village. As the
Russians advanced, the Nazis stole all the local gold, and then, I
don’t know, turned into zombies or something. So watch out: Nazi
zombies.
Of course, forewarned about the presence of flesh-eating,
gold-mongering, anti-Semitic undead, the characters nonetheless do the
sorts of things that young people do, like play Twister and experience
underpants-feelings of lust. Then they give out plot points in
dialogue, which is helpful of them. Like, one of them says he’s going
to tell a joke featuring poop, semen and urine. And then the camera
cuts away to the outhouse, where the movie nerd is pooping and
urinating, and before he can rise from the toilet, the slutty girl
mounts him, leading, one assumes, to the expulsion of semen. Although,
later, heads will be split open, and eyes will be gouged out, this
toilet-sex scene is the only really offensive part of the film. Not
because two people are expressing their human sexuality in the most
beautiful way possible (boinking on a toilet seat), but because the
young lady, not realizing that the young man has just wiped his ass and
has not yet washed his hands, puts his finger in her mouth. That’s
supposed to be funny, but there’s nothing funny about poor hygiene. Of
course, since both characters in that scene broke the cardinal rule of
post-Halloween horror movies and had sex on camera, they’re sure
to be punished for their lack of attention to safe finger-licking
practices.
After that, the movie is all about the violence and the
head-splitting and the removing, unspooling and creative use of
intestines. But the violence is played for laughs, with plenty of
references to Evil Dead. This is the biggest Evil Dead rip-off since Evil Dead 2. They even cop the scene in which Ash
cuts his own hand off, and there is a lot of chainsaw-chopping of dead
people who are, in fact evil, thus: evil dead.
It’s in the violence that the film becomes somewhat entertaining.
The buildup, even though it’s self-consciously derivative, isn’t
interestingly derivative. But once you’ve got a bunch of skiers, a
snowmobile and dead Nazis all going at it in a winter wonderland,
things are almost guaranteed to go well. Just think of how many ways
you can kill someone with a snowmobile, and then put a swastika on it,
and you have the formula for an amusing half-hour or so. Of course,
Dead Snow is 91 minutes long, so that’s not quite enough to
redeem it. But if you want to listen to a Norwegian-metal soundtrack
while looking at gorgeously photographed, snow-capped, blood-spattered
mountains, Dead Snow is your only option this time of year,
unless you want to travel to the Andes and kill goats while accompanied
by the members of Borknagar and Darkthrone, which, trust me, you
don’t.
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2009.