Dead Snow (2009): B-

Tommy Wirkola does the time warp with Dead Snow, self-consciously shouting out to his favorite ‘80s horror films – Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, April Fool’s Day – while unevenly replicating Sam Raimi’s whirligig blend of terror and comedy. With a set-up so archetypal it has to be overtly noted as such, a group of vacationing Norwegian med students travel to a remote mountainside cabin, where they promptly goof off, get wasted, and flirt, at least until a mysterious stranger appears at their door one night to inform them about the region’s dark WWII history. Turns out, there’s an “evil presence” lurking in these snowbound parts, and it has something to do with the Nazis who, fifty years earlier, fled a local uprising for the hills and– as an intro chase sequence suggests, and the subsequent mayhem confirms – continue to roam as cannibalistic zombies. Writer/director Wirkola’s debut seems constantly in the process of homage, though never so literally that it proves vexing. Nonetheless, his funny-scary intentions are undercut by too little engaging (and competently edited) action, as the combative second-act – in which the shadowy fiends are revealed to be former SS stormtroopers – is long in coming and short on visceral thrills. With its last gasp, however, the film catches a second wind, its home stretch generating eerie claustrophobia via a 360-degree rotation around a buried-alive face, and bleak wit from a superlative final showdown coated in torrential arterial sprays. It’s not enough to wholly redeem the preceding action, but the climax – not unlike Raimi’s own return-to-‘80s-form Drag Me to Hell – dispenses a healthy dose of rowdy, hysterical nastiness.

Comments

[Incrediblebrightness]

If people keep praising movies like this, they're never going to make another horror movie again. This is nothing but action-comedy crap. You cannot add zombies and gore to an action movie and say, "now it's a horror movie." I've seen episodes of Barney & Friends that were scarier than this. This might as well have Michael Bay's name on it. Slam over substance, crude over compelling.