Dead Snow: a mishmash of previous zombie movie plot twist and character stereotypes

Tommy Wirkola, “Dead Snow” (2009)

For laughs, gore and stunning mountain scenery you can’t go past zombie comedy flick “Dead Snow” but there isn’t much else to sustain the movie. The plot revolves around a group of university students going to a remote mountain cabin in northern Norway for skiing, snowboarding and sexy-time fun during the Easter holiday break. The place is so remote they have to leave their cars at the bottom of the mountain and walk with their luggage to the cabin while one of their number, Vegard (Lasse Valdal), leads the way on a snowmobile. The cabin happens to belong to his girlfriend Sara (Ane Dahl Torp) who’s making her own way there via cross-country skiing. On their first night in the cabin the kids are visited by a local ranger (Bjørn Sundquist) who lectures them on the area’s recent history: during World War II, a paramilitary death squad of several hundred Nazi German soldiers stationed in the mountains to intercept Russian-British trade and communications treated locals so badly that the Norwegians rose up against the occupiers and massacred as many as they could; the remaining soldiers fled into remote parts and were never seen again. The ranger then goes on his way and the youngsters never see him again. After that night, strange things start happening: Sara never turns up so Vegard goes off to search for her and one of the students, Chris (Jenny Skavlan), disappears after using the out-house the following evening. Next thing you know, the students hear groaning and grunting noises outside the cabin, windows are smashed inwards and the youngsters realise they’re besieged by … undead Nazi German soldiers!

At least the mountain locations and forests are beautiful and the cinematography captures the sharp look of the bright blue skies and jaw-dropping cliffs and rocky outcrops where most of the action occurs in the second half of the film. The actors look the part of a stereotyped cast: blonde bubble-headed babe Liv (Evi Kasseth Røsten), brainy brunette Hanna (Charlotte Frogner) with her hair in dreadlocks, Erlend (Jeppe Laursen) the chubby film buff, nerdy Martin (Vegar Hoel) who wears glasses, the physically attractive and natural leader of the group Vegard and another fellow, Roy (Stig Frode Henriksen); they act like stereotypes as well so Liv plays damsel in distress and Hanna tries to get help for herself and the others. Vegard singlehandedly fights off several zombies with ingenuity and his snowmobile and he even does his own running repairs, Terminator-style, with sewing needle, thread and duct tape – just don’t ask which part of himself he stitches up. Martin and Roy form a comedy duo who accidentally burn down the cabin with Molotov cocktails but then redeem themselves with a chainsaw and hammer against an army of zombies. For their part the zombies act like typical zombies of their post-“28 Days Later” generation: they run fast, they bite hard, they don’t think deeply and they do as they’re ordered by head zombie and former Einsatzgruppen leader Herzog.

The plot falls to pieces even before the zombies gatecrash the kids’ party:  why or how the German soldiers became zombies in the first place and their reverence for the gold and silver treasures the students find hidden in their cabin that they’d chase the youngsters for them, are never explained in the film. You’d think the script-writers might draw on Norwegian lore about the treasures having some kind of evil Lord-of-the-Ring or Nibelungenlied radioactive influence on the soldiers, turning their human cells and metabolism into undead zombie cells and metabolism. There would then be a lesson, however crude it be, we mortals could learn about the dangers of greed and stealing occult jewels of non-human manufacture whose powers are dangerous and not to be underestimated. Perhaps there’d even be a backstory about how Hitler ordered the Nazis to come to this remote mountain territory precisely to find this forbidden treasure that could bestow unbelievable power on the German armed forces and enable them to conquer and control Europe. The power would be real enough but the consequences of messing with it for selfish material interest would be severe. Possibly with the release of the sequel “Dead Snow 2”, we’ll learn more about Standartenführer Herzog and his soldiers and how they were transformed into the undead.

Though this is a low-budget slapstick horror film that milks previous zombie horror films for character and plot twist stereotypes, there are some artistic moments here, the major highlight being a scene in which the zombies are eviscerating one of the students through a blocked and blurred camera lens that takes the victim’s point of view. The special effects look well done and though the body count is high the killing and hacking aren’t exaggerated. The zombies look menacing and horrific with grey corpse faces.

Shame then that such a good-looking film with an interesting premise and stunning mountain landscape backgrounds doesn’t exploit its source material to make the plot more credible and the monsters more fearsome. Local Norwegian legends about dwarves making and hiding hoards of gold and precious jewels in the mountains combined with Nazi Germany’s obsession with the occult and mastering its secrets to obtain power and territory could have provided much creative stimulation for a story in which zombified Nazi soldiers become a strikeforce for unknown malevolent forces to threaten the world. Of course a small budget can cramp the creative ambitions and scope of the script but in the case of “Dead Snow”, all that’s needed is a more credible explanation for how the soldiers came to be what they are. The movie could have broken with the usual horror movie conventions about what zombies can and can’t do and allowed them to speak and remember their history. The significance of the treasure the students find in their cabin becomes an important part of the plot. Now that would be a lecture worth listening to.

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