Dead Snow

Brain Rating by Category:

Gore: 5 brain

Acting: 3 brain

Cheese level: 3 brain

Weapons choice: 5 brain

Virus description: 1 brain

Kill methods: 5 brain

Action Scenes: 3.5 brain (A few cheesy automobile action scenes before the zombies were introduced)

Netflix rating: 1 brain

Personal rating: 5 brain.

Summary: A group of friends meet up at a ski cabin for the holidays in the dead of winter. One of their friends decided to ski to to the cabin. That night a creepy man shows up at the cabin and tells them the story of the Nazis and their colonel who tormented a town. The town rose up and stole the gold from the Nazis and chased them into the woods where the Nazis supposedly froze to death. But legend has it, the Zombies come back to get revenge on anyone who tries to take the gold. The friends find a box of gold in the cabin and take from it, waking the Nazi Zombies. Suddenly the friends find themselves surrounded by a Nazi Zombie army. They must fight their way out of the mountains.

The origin of the zombies is not mentioned at all which is unlike what we’ve learned about. The Nazis are just said to have frozen in the mountains and then awoken for their revenge. Another interesting element was that a bite did not turn one into a zombie and in fact I think it was impossible for the zombies to infect anyone. The types of zombies are similar to the ones in the later movies we watched such as 28 Days Later. More like Romero films however, the zombies are able to use tools and comprehend their environment. They can use weapons and communicate with each other. With those similarities aside, this is unlike any Zombie movie I’ve ever seen.

Characters:

Vegard: Vegard is Sara’s boyfriend and is skilled with the snowmobile, so skilled in fact that he mounts a machine gun to it, and runs multiple zombies over with it. Vegard goes into rage mode but tragically dies by multiple stab wounds and the his body is split in half.

Sara: Sara is Vegard’s girlfriend and is the friend that is skiing to the lab. We never meet her, for she is killed by zombies before she reaches the cabin and Vegard finds her head in the lair.

Hannah: Hannah is Martin’s girlfriend and is the strongest of the three girls. As the zombies first start attacking them, she is always chopping off hands and making plans. She makes it very far but while Martin is in rage mode, he accidentally kills Hannah with an ax to the neck.

Martin: Martin is Hannah’s boyfriend and pretty good in the zombie attacks. He has generally good ideas but also has a few mental breaks. He gets bitten and thinks he’ll turn so he chainsaws his arm off and then cauterizes the wound, and then a zombie pops out of the snow and bites his dick. Even with one arm though, Martin survives to the end, but he must live with the fact that he killed his girlfriend.

Roy: Roy is the cocky guy who doesn’t believe in the old man’s story and he is also a bit of a wuss in the beginning. Byt the end of the movie he is chill with going into rage mode and killing a bunch of zombies. Unfortunately the Colonel sledges him with a hammer and his intestines get caught on a tree somehow and pulled out of him.

Erlend: Erlend is the weakest of the four men. He doesn’t make it after the first attack and is very scared during the attack. He is pulled through the window and gets his head torn in half.

Liv: Liv is a classic damsel. She is semi capable but way to afraid which gets her killed in the end. She is running in the woods when a zombie knocks her out. She wakes up to the zombies eating her intestines and she reaches for a bomb the zombies have and blows it up to end the pain.

Chris: Chris dies right away as well, she is the first to go in the first attack. She is in the outhouse when she is attacked, and then when Hannah is looking outside, a zombie holds Chris’s severed head up to the window.

This plot was pretty decent for a film trying to have Nazi Zombies, it has a straightforward reasoning for the Zombie’s revenge, and that the Zombies will not stop killing until they have all the gold back.The plot had a couple of classic zombie film tropes and flaws. First, the old man who tells the friends the story immediately dies in his tent. One would think that the wise old man who tells the kids to take his story seriously would live to the end, but he is the first to go. Some tropes involved the cocky male role, the women in distress, and the men who rescue them. One positive was that the women were still strong in the film, they could take care of themselves for the most part. There was plenty of unneeded gore and death through the fil. A common gore scene through the movie was that the intestines of a zombie or a person would be caught and then pulled out of them like a piece of rope. In one scene, Vegard was about to fall off a cliff when he caught some zombie intestines and was able to hang over the cliff with them. The main fight scene is awesome. There are gory kills, combo kills, and multiple creative snowmobile kills. The music that overlays the battle is an upbeat almost carnival theme that makes the battle hysterical and more about the kills. A lot of the events in the movie are ridiculous which makes the film laughable, but all in good fun.

When you go into a movie like Dead Snow, you go in with very low expectations, which is exactly what I did. This way the movie can only get better and it definitely did. Overall the writing was actually pretty decent, and I was laughing for most of the movie, with a few serious moments. The fight scenes were very enjoyable, the humor was pretty much on point. If I were to compare the style to another movie, I’d probably pick Krampus, another bizarre but enjoyable film. There was some cool cinematography as well which made the movie interesting to watch. I’ll end with this, I found out there was a second Dead Snow and watched it immediately after. It was ten times better in every aspect. If you have the time for it, watch both 1 and 2 for an experience.


IMBD: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1278340/

Movie is available on Netfliz