Dead Snow

I finally had an afternoon where I didn't have any homework to do, so I watched Dead Snow, on Kenton's recommendation. I had a great time with it, and am going to give a few thoughts.

It is a Norwegian film about a bunch of med students going off to a remote cabin (of course) over the Easter break. There, they run into a strange hitchhiker who tells them the history of the mountains, and warns them not to "wake up the evil within". Of course, our drunk med students laugh, and refuse to take the hitchhiker seriously. Then the zombies show up. What makes Dead Snow different from other zombie films is that these are not normal zombies. They're...NAZI ZOMBIES. Much better than the regular kind, I assure you.

The film was billed as a horror/comedy, but for the first hour or so, there was relatively little humour. It was actually quite scary...or I thought so, but I'm kind of a wimp when it comes to movies like this. All the lights were on, and I was watching it on a fairly small screen, but I was still squealing during all the "jump scenes". It is also very gory. It's more cartoon gore, meaning that it is not "realistic" gore, but still disgusting nonetheless. After the first hour, the film seems to switch directions, and it becomes slightly more comical. It actually turns into almost a parody of other zombie/horror movies. Unfortunately, it's a fairly short movie, so this change of tone only lasts for about twenty minutes. I found that a lot of the humour comes from the ridiculousness of the situation these young people were in. They weren't just zombies...but they were zombies in Nazi costumes. Something about that makes it funny. But at the same time, it puts other horror movies into perspective: how likely is it that dead people are going to rise up from the ground? So maybe next time I sit through a horror movie, despite how scary it is, maybe I'll be able to find some humour in it.

I also want to say that I was quite impressed with the make up job on the zombies. It looked very good, and very creepy. The filmmakers must have known that their movie was going to be cliche, but instead of trying to hide that fact, they embraced it. I liked the movie a lot, so anyone who is into horror and can handle really gory stuff should check it out! Though if you're a wimp like I am...you'll probably end up sleeping with the light on. I'm fully expecting nightmares tonight, but that's part of the fun of these movies. I can't watch really scary horror movies very often, but when I do, I generally end up having a good time. And this film was a good time, for sure.

Just a little note: The film is subtitled, as it is in Norwegian. I love watching foreign films so that was not a problem for me at all. I actually really love listening to other languages, especially hearing how similar (or dissimilar) they are to English. Norwegian is actually pretty close to English, because there were several words I was able to pick up, because they sounded just like their English counterpart.