The Norwegian Nazi-zombie movie "Dead Snow" is quite the jolly mountain holiday, pitting a group of medical students against a battalion of undead, unpleasant and unstoppable German soldiers hell-bent on ruining a perfectly good Easter vacation.
Director Tommy Wirkola plants one foot, or one bloody stump where the foot used to be, in the realm of camp, and the other in horror. The results deliver splendiferous gore, highlighted by many yards of entrails.
At one point one of the students finds himself dangling off the edge of a cliff from a long, long Nazi-zombie intestinal strand. I tell you this so you can make an informed moviegoing choice.
"Dead Snow" may have a dull title, but it's lively, idiotic fun, at least until it goes too far past "too far" into the realm of "far too far."
Seven of the young Norwegians convening for a weekend of snowmobiling, schussing and beer-drinking arrive by car. The eighth, Sara (Ane Dahl Torp), is seen in the prologue taking the long way, by foot. To the impishly manic strains of Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King," she encounters trouble. Wirkola, shooting in scenic high country, proves deft at playing the comic-splatter game while winking at its conventions.
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Once the group (minus one) settles into the cabin, a scary local (Bjorn Sundquist) arrives to deliver the back story, the one about the Nazis back in '45 who escaped an occupied Norwegian village rebellion and were presumed dead. But they were not dead; they were simply resting.
"We're all medical students, actually, so I think we'll manage quite well," says one of the young doctors in training, smugly, ignoring the stranger's warnings. The jokes about the horror genre will be familiar to most audiences. "How many movies start with a group of friends on a trip to a cabin with no cell-phone signal?" asks one of the characters, prior to the bloodletting.
The film answers a key question posed by the zombie subgenre — how fast can they run? — with a simple "about as fast as the live humans can, but with the benefit of a few shock cuts and leaps out of nowhere."
Like the 2006 British-German film "Severance," "Dead Snow" gleefully exploits real-life World War II horrors for energetic schlock entertainment. I share the director's sentiments (if that's the word) included in the film's press materials, regarding the contemporary horror trend exemplified by the "Saw" and "Hostel" franchises, designed, as he says, to "make the audience feel sick, depraved and depressed."
Wirkola works in the wild-eyed spirit of Peter Jackson's "Dead Alive" and Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead 2." Vivisect it with someone you love.
Dead Snow
***
• Rated: No MPAA rating (violence, language and some sexuality). In Norwegian with English subtitles.
• Director: Tommy Wirkola.
• Cast: Vegar Hoel, Stig Frode Henriksen, Charlotte Frogner, Lasse Valdal, Evy Kasseth Rosten, Orjan Gamst, and Ane Dahl Torp.
• Running time: 91 minutes.
