Playlist: Dead Snow

The movie that launched the manifesto. You may have heard of this as "the Nazi zombie" movie. So, first things first, are they really zombies? Allow me to answer that: no.

Here's the setup: a group of young adults trek out to a cabin in the middle of nowhere Norway (right, this is a Norwegian Nazi zombie" movie). They find some looted World War II gold which awakens the corpses of the Nazis who stole it because, I don't know, they were saving up for some sort of pre-Fourth Reich sale. It's pointless to dwell on plausibility or character motivation here as it appears that this was made for the sole purpose of the visual of an undead Nazi (which does work, btw. Genocidial fascism aside, those uniforms were sharp.) But here's the thing: the revived SS are fully-functioning ghouls, fast, strong, and smart. And to add injury to insult, they favor beating up their victims like the jack-booted thugs they are rather than performing in even the loosest zombie fashion (they do eat flesh, but almost as an after thought). Basically, this is a slasher film which, while not a bad thing, doesn't make it a zombie film.

There's plenty of gore, however, with some fun and inventive uses for snowmobiles and some wild, over-the-top kill scenes. It's actually billed as a "horror comedy" which is a fine line to walk since you can so easily end up in camp. The language barrier didn't help as it was obvious, based on character reactions and the accompanying subtitles, that a lot of jokes were lost in translation. Or maybe Norwegians aren't funny.

And I guess this was my problem with the film overall. The tone was all over the place--there were too many times when I wasn't sure what director Tommy Wirkola was going for. Okay, that's not entirely true. There were more than enough (really more than enough) Evil Dead references to get that what he was going for. It's just that too often it felt like he went and came back empty.