Review of Dead Snow (2009) by Campbell P — 28 Jul 2015

Dead Snow starts off as the typical horror movie with a group of friends taking a vacation in the mountains. While everything seems like fun and games in the beginning, a strange mountain man warns them that there is evil lurking in the area.

From then on its gory zombie Nazi galore! Dead Snow is exactly what I imagined it to be, it's a zombie movie with a goofy twist. If you aren't on board with the ridiculousness of Nazi zombies, this is gonna be a long movie.

What this film did really well was building up scares and suspense. There's way more intense buildup than I expected, there's so much tension in every scene once the zombies rose. This film also is challenging to watch because of the gory content.

Gore in film could go either way, it can be used for style or real brutal effect or it can be used in the absolute wrong way where directors just wanna show how much blood they can shed before the end of the film.

Dead Snow kinda goes both ways because it's not very stylish and there were some way too over the top scenes which I guess is this kind of movie but other times it's used to show the real trauma and seriousness of the moment.

A good example is when Vegard is hanging from the intestines of the zombie he had previously killed while a zombie is hanging onto his legs. Once he's bitten he tries to stitch the wound together and fails, but it really shows what brutality is happening to these guys and instead of them just getting bitten and getting knocked down it shows a more realistic view of this happening in real life.

The acting by the lead characters weren't bad either, they were a bit cliched at the beginning but I got to the point where I rooted even for the guy that seemed like the wisecrack at the beginning.

The story is really a get from point A to point B kind of story and it just doesn't feel like the writers put as much effort into writing the story as they did with makeup and set pieces. There could've been a bit more character setup because I couldn't really feel super bad when a character died because there really wasn't time for me to get attached to anyone.

Nevertheless Dead Snow was an interesting zombie film that's packed with gore and a lot of high stake scenes but doesn't have a great story to go with it. C+.