Dead Snow

Dead Snow... I knew I wanted to see this movie from the first few shots in the trailer. A movie that almost immediately mentions Evil Dead 1 and 2 and has a guy wearing a Brain Dead (Dead Alive) movie T-shirt has my attention immediately. Also... Come on, how can you pass up frozen Nazi zombies!

I thoroughly enjoyed myself with this movie. I will be buying it ASAP (I watched it on Netflix streaming). If you enjoy kind of goofy yet over-top-gory flicks, then this is perfect for you. BTW for you whiners out there about subtitles, it is subtitled when you watch it on Netflix. I prefer that to dubbed any day, but I know some people are sensitive about having to read while watching a movie.

Dead Snow is rather typical in many aspects for this type of homage horror film. A few examples are:
References to other horror movies to establish that the makers of this flick love horror films.
The expositional character that knows the evil history of the area so that viewers can't say the film lacks some sort of a plot.
Visual "reenactments" of scenes of horror films that pushed the filmmakers to make their own horror film.

I think this film did a great job of combining horror, homage and comedy. There were some great scenes that made me cringe then laugh out loud. This type of film walks a fine line. It's kind of like tight rope walking. Think of the comedy and horror as being the tight rope walkers balancing stick. Comedy is on his right and horror is on his left. The farther out you go comedy-wise, the more over the top the horror needs to be. If you don't balance that out, the movie is too lopsided and it falls on it's face. I believe that's why this film works well.

The acting was good enough that I didn't even think once about it until just now while writing this blog entry. Guess that is a good way to judge that. I also loved the crazy gore juxtaposed to the sometimes slapstick comedy. I really love the whole Nazi zombie idea also. They could have easily just made a normal zombie flick, but instead added the Nazi aspect which just made this that much more bizarre.

This is one of those gems that I believe will become a cult classic. It has definitely been added to my list of favorites along side with the likes of the Evil Deads, Re-Animator and Dead Alive. In fact, writing about it a day later makes me want to see it again, right now. Maybe I will.