Review of Dead Snow (2009) by Moochie/Smiles D — 08 Sep 2010

Zombie Nazi's. It's hard to beat a great concept like that. Typical horror movie fodder (ie: teens) hole themselves up in a snowy mountain cabin that comes under seige from a platoon of undead Nazi troops on the hunt for the stolen gold they lifted from victims of their occupation during the war.

Dead Snow starts of very strong, with decent character work and a well paced set up, in which the director makes good use of the unique setting to build a sense of dread and work some decent scares. Scenes in which the screen is totally blackout with only a thin torch beam filled with snowflakes scanning the landscape may have looked gimmicky in another film, but here they work. The director has drawn heavily on genre defining films such as Evil Dead and the early Peter Jackson films to good effect.

Ultimately, this films goes beyond simply paying homage to the classics and starts kissing their arses. A character who wears a 'Braindead' shirt hosts a conversation about horror movies set in cabins, a very Raimi-esque montage of gearing up with makeshift weapons, complete with quick zooms, makes an appearance and an entrail spilling trip of a cliff start to dominate the film. By the time a character lops off his own hand with a chainsaw, the 'references' are starting to grate and the movie has lost all the spark and uniqueness it spent the first half developing.