Worst Frostbite Ever: Dead Snow

How do you react to the phrase "nazi Zombies?" If you're indifferent, go home and get your pulse checked. You might just be one of the undead. But if you're a God-fearin', SS-hatin' man or woman (and the God-fearin' is entirely optional) read on.

Here's a prediction: Tommy Wirkola's Dead Snow will be the best nazi zombie movie you'll see all year. Okay, so it's not like competition's tight in that category. For a genre so potentially rife with social critique, or at least exploitative gore, there really hasn't been anything of note since 1978's Shock Waves. But it's still a fun bit of campy fluff with some delightfully gruesome kills.

The film starts off strong with a moonlit chase that comes with a squelching finale. Unfortunately, the movie gets bogged down for about twenty minutes so we can meet our meat, a group of videogenic Norwegians who've made the classic mistake of heading to a secluded, wintry cabin for fun. The med students drink, fuck, drink some more, discuss pop culture and go snow tubing in a few interminable scenes that might have you digging around in the snow to sic the zombies on them.

But soon enough, a creepy old man is on the scene to insult their domestic skills and hint that the snowy hills might be holding some frozen Germans. Then the friends realize the girl who was supposed to meet them there still hasn't come and get their first hint that, as one of them ends up yelling later on, they should have gone to the beach instead.

Soon enough, the undead are marching with revolting rotting flesh but surprisingly natty uniforms. Don't get too attached to any of the students, because pretty much everything the creepy old man warned them about in the beginning from holding your guts in your hands to getting a limb torn off, happens to one or more of them. As the kills become more baroque and entertaining (particular favorite: zombie meets snowmobile engine) the film gives up any actual creepiness for hard gore laughs.

It's the kind of zombie comedy that's more like the bloody slapstick of Brain Dead than the verbal play of Shaun of the Dead. Or maybe it was like Shaun, and the verbal jokes just didn't translate from the Norwegian. A horny med student deciding there are just some body parts he can't amputate does work though, and a Nazi ghoul getting clotheslined by a tree is just plain classic.

Wirkola doesn't care about making a Romero-like statement. No connections are made between the Nazi invasion of Norway, facism and general and the zombie attacks. The only thing I could salvage was something along the lines that all the enlightened institutions the West clings to as markers of civilization (mandatory non-combat military service, higher education) are actually frigging useless when it comes down to survival. And a guy's lack of Molotov cocktail throwing skills. But then again, the reason why these Germans turned into zombies is never explained either, so maybe ideological coherence isn't Wirkola's biggest concern.

It's the splatter that counts and Dead Snow delivers, particularly on the intestinal trauma front. Zombie purists might not like how speedy these ghouls are, but any true gorehound won't care. It just means they'll meet the chainsaws that much faster.