Dead Snow

Director: Tommy Wirkola

Writers: Tommy Wirkola, Stig Frode Henriksen

Starring: Charlotte Frogner, Stig Frode Henriksen, Bjørn Sundquist, Ane Dahl Torp

Released: 2009

Continuing my recent Norwegian horrorfest is Dead Snow, a film about Nazi zombies. Yes, really.

The film opens with a woman being chased through snow, and eventually captured and eaten by zombies in Nazi uniforms. Now that's what I call an opening.

We then meet a group of friends arriving at a nearby cabin on a short holiday. After some frivolity, they are joined by an older, weird man, who proceeds to tell them about World War 2, where locals turned on their Nazi oppressors and savagely killed them. It is said that their spirits still haunt the area etc.

This is where the fun really begins as the Nazi zombies begin hunting the friends, who find often ingenius methods to try and survive (turning a snowmobile into a machine-gun-mobile, for example).

This film owes a lot to the Evil Dead series. This is definitely meant to be tongue-in-cheek, and even features a character having to cut off his own hand after being bitten there (and later on, when bitten in more sensitive body parts, he also ponders having to cut 'it' off). Although a horror-comedy, there is lots of gore and blood and almost relentless action in the second half of the film.

This is a very entertaining film, which gets the balance between horror and comedy just right. Call me unnecessarily controversial, but I found this to be much better than the overrated Shaun of the Dead, a film which is neither as funny, gory or as action-packed as this. Yes, I wrote that, and yes, I really mean it.

Rating: 4/5