Dead Snow

• Director: Tommy Wirkola
• Writer: Stig Frode Henriksen, Tommy Wirkola
• Cast: Charlotte Frogner, Orjan Gamst
• Theatrical Release Date: June 20, 2009
• Distributor: IFC Films
• On The Web Film WebsiteIMDB Entry

Synopsis: For eight medical students, Easter vacation begins innocently enough. They pack their cars full of ski equipment and enough beer to fuel their escape from everyday life to the snowy, isolated hills outside of Øksfjord, Norway. Once there, they receive a late-night visit from a shady hiker, who tells them a story about Nazi occupation of the area during World War II. After doing their fair share of raping and pillaging, the dreaded battalion faced a brutal and vengeful uprising by the citizens of the town. The soldiers who managed to survive the onslaught, including their dreaded leader Colonel Herzog, were driven into the hills by the angry mob, where they supposedly froze to death, never to be seen again. [Synopsis courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival]

Round-up: "As a director, Tommy Wirkola, who wrote the irrelevant screenplay with Stig Frode Henriksen, doesn’t just hit every horror beat; he pounds it to an indistinguishable pulp," notes Manohla Dargis i... n her review for the New York Times. "An adherent of the relatively new fast-zombie trend, he makes his undead work, or at least run hard, for their supper... As is often the case with movies of this type, the real stars are the special-effects team, which does some admirably disgusting work with ribbons of intestines and a brain that plops out of a ripped-open skull with surprising delicacy." Indeed, most reviewers have noted that "Dead Snow" is at its best when it's at it's most gruesome. "For more than half of this 90-minute film, director Tommy Wirkola plays things pretty straight—a mistake, perhaps, since the first half is pretty boring," writes Chuck Wilson for the Village Voice. "But once the Nazi zombies start arriving en masse, he abruptly shifts to an 'Evil Dead'–style zaniness, including the sight of a potential victim hanging off the side of a mountain while using a zombie's entrails as rope. Let's call this the gooiest movie of the year (so far)." The "Evil Dead" comparisons are inevitable, it seems. "Nazi zombies. As ideas for pulp horror movies go, it certainly doesn’t get much pulpier than that," writes Scott Tobias in the A.V. Club. "But a hook that good requires some follow-through, too, and the Norwegian splatter comedy Dead Snow takes far too much time to get the wheels in motion. Not until the film’s halfway point is it even revealed that the creatures marauding in a remote mountain pass are, in fact, Nazis on an eternal quest for filthy lucre. Even then, the concept doesn’t go much further than the wardrobe department—that is, until a deliriously over-the-top climax finally rouses the film from its Evil Dead-mimicking stupor." All in all it seems that while "Dead Snow" doesn't quite live up to Raimi's legendary cult classic, it should deliver for those looking for a lot of splatter.