SPLATTAHOUSE 6: DEAD SNOW

Your friendly neighbourhood Splattahouser hasn’t been around for a minute due to a lethal combination of swine flu and extreme Blue Balls Syndrome, so he feels like he has to, as Da King & I might say, Flip Da Scrip and bring you something a little interesting.  And a Norwegian Nazi zombie horror film with high production values could certainly be said to be interesting.

Dead Snow is just the latest in a curious horror sub-sub-genre, that of the living dead Nazi, that takes in Zombie Lake (1981), and the genuinely chilling Outpost (2008), but not, as many might think, Michael Mann’s The Keep (1983) or The Bunker (2001) which are probably the only two of an even smaller sub-sub-sub-genre, that of “Nazis unleashing and being killed by supernatural forces.” Unlike Zombie Lake (shite) or Outpost (not especially gory) Dead Snow delivers an almighty payload of claret, some laughs, and at least one bit in which a man hangs off a cliff using only a zombie Nazi’s intestines. Which I think we can assume is a cinematic first.

Basically, a bunch of snowboarders (some of whom are reassuringly old, in a break from “a bunch of teens in a remote location” conventions) head into the mountains to do their thing and find, in their cabin, a box full of gold and money and hella blingage, which they surmise to have been leftover Nazi plunder from the War years. See where this is heading? Soon enough, Nazis galore are rising up from the snow to get their kill on and reclaim what’s theirs. However, Team Human have got shotguns, chainsaws, axes, snowmobiles and a variety of other implements with which to kill. Again.

Now, let me say right off the bat that Dead Snow is, one climactic chase scene aside, about as scary as an episode of Lazy Town. The zombies themselves lack the mindless mass momentum of your Romero zombies: they run, punch, stab, generally hunt in twos and threes, and aren’t much good at any of them. However, what this means is that, when the weaponry comes out, they’re nice and easy to decapitate, eviscerate, disembowel, and generally fuck the hell up. This is not to say that no humans are harmed during the making of this movie: there’s two sets of intestines lovingly removed, one lucky fella has to remove his own arm with a chainsaw, and one character has the fun task of sewing up his own bitten throat with a fish-hook, only to have all his arms and legs and heads pulled off simultaneously. That’s some short-straw isht right there! But for the most part, Dead Snow is a bit like the lawnmower scene in Braindead, only less so: the dead are there to be deaded. And they done get deaded, dun.

For all of the above, don’t think I didn’t notice that the film is effectively John Carpenter’s The Fog, but with snow instead of fog and soldiers instead of ghostly sailors. I’m not fucking thick, you know.

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