Partying in the mountains of Norway, a group of students find some Nazi booty which has the odd effect of re-animating the corpses of the Nazis that rightfully stole that loot in the first place and they want it all back.

Judging a Book by its Cover

-I’d be mad too if someone cut my zombie head off and did a poor job at it too.  Though maybe he deserved it since it was cut with a chainsaw.

-Hope the dude has enough gas for the other zombies behind him.  I’m assuming it’s a him.

-Honestly, this is an excellent bit of poster art.

Ein! Zwei! Die!

Directed by Tommy Wirkola

Starring Vegar Hoel, Stig Frode Henriksen and Charlotte Frogner

The film opens with a girl getting chased by zombies and sadly she doesn’t even make it past the opening title card.  It urns out she was trekking through the mountains to join up with her friends, a group of med students, looking to get away from it all for a while.  After a bit of fun, they’re visited by a stranger who lets them in on the history of the area from back in WWII; it was a key area for the German forces. Unfortunately, the locals were severely abused by the occupying German infantry, particularly by their leader, Colonel Herzog.  When the German forces were faced with losing the war, they stole any valuables they could find from the people.  The townspeople decided to attack the Germans in their sleep and forced them out into the cold wilderness to inevitably freeze to death.  Or did they?

Ermergerd!

While one of the students is out searching for the missing girl, the rest of the group happens upon a tiny box filled with some of that stolen German gold.  While they think of all the ways they’ll spend it, the gold acts as a beacon for the undead soldiers who quickly descend on the cabin and knowing what zombies usually do, it’s not going to be a good time for these med students.  While they start off fighting just a few zombies, more and more pop up and even Herzog himself shows up to lead them to their gold in a bloody fight to survive.

Somehow these zombies seem to be fans of the Ginyu Force. (Dragon Ball Z joke, sorry.)

Any modern zombie these days needs a serious hook to get people to even look at them since the zombie genre is overwhelmingly oversaturated.  Dead Snow decides to take a not-so-serious tone with a simple story about greedy Nazi zombies and delivers a fun, comically gory film.  The effects are well done, especially the zombie make up but especially the over-the-top death scenes which seem to get more gruesome and elaborate as the film goes on so it’s sure to please those looking for some nasty grue.  Check it out!

TL;DR

Story: 7 – A group of Norwegian med students go to a cabin in the Norwegian mountains to party down and wind up finding stolen Nazi gold…and the Nazis come back from the dead to get it back.

Blood: 8 – The film doesn’t start off gory, but when it decides to shift into gear, that’s when it gets fun.  A head literally torn in half, guts ripped out POV-style and a zombie-killing spree involving a sledgehammer, chainsaw and a snowmobile cap off a bloody good time.

Nudity: 0 – A quick bra shot in an outhouse.  Yay?

Overall: 8 – Dead Snow was a fun watch and easily recommended for your viewing pleasure.

Trivia

-The Nazi zombies in this film are a combination of typical zombies in popular culture and ancient Norse mythical beings known as draug. A draug is a undead being who would inhabit graves, often the graves of important men, as they often had treasures in them. A draug would protect these treasures as if they were their own.

-The film was originally going to be called Red Snow.