Dead Snow

A recent German release, which has had pretty good coverage, considering its small budget, and has been riding the current wave of zombie-mania, Dead Snow seems to have all the right ingredients for a rollicking bad-taste gore flick. Low-budget, good old fashioned splatter (no CGI), undead SS troops and hidden Nazi gold, an isolated cabin amidst windswept snowy peaks and a bunch of hapless, horny teenagers: these are the sort of things which characterise the films we all know and love, right? Even the posters for the film, with its 'Ein! Zwei! Die!' tag line and crusty Third Reich ghoul, brought promise of a return to the putrid, poor taste exploitation trash so beloved of the video-nasty era. Aficiendos of such gutter-swill as SS Experiment Camp, Zombie Lake and the Ilsa She-wolf movies, will no doubt have been salivating at the mere concept of Dead Snow, a film which so clearly hopes to draw lineage with the warped sensibility of the late seventies Italian zombie/cannibal/nazi cycle. And in a sense the film delivers. A bunch of annoying students go on a skiing holiday in the middle of nowhere, a crazy man warns them of past nastiness and a war time curse, the naive fools carry on regardless, and before you know it the place is overrun by zombies. There is quite a bit of gore, particularly in the second half of the movie, and it's pretty decently executed. Stand out scenes include a head ripped in half, with the brain slopping onto the floor; a p.o.v. shot of someone having their innards ripped out and eaten, as she passes in and out of consciousness; and a fleeing victim turning round to find his intestine caught on a tree and unfurled along the snow in his wake like a snagged jumper. The effects team obviously have a sense of humor and an eye for detail, as well as a respect for the splatter genre.
There are however, problems. A lot of problems. and far too many to allow Dead Snow to be anything but a disappointment. Firstly the characters are painfully two dimensional and unforgivably annoying. The introduction scenes, in which two car loads of teens drive to their destination, are enough to let you 'get' the characters immediately. They have all the emotional depth and personality of a puddle of piss. They're what Hollywood thinks young people are like, which usually falls into one of the following categories. Self-centered idiot jocks, with a revoltingly misogynist sense of humor and no other interests beyond partying and getting laid. Token geek-boys, who typically lay down the rules of horror movies (a la Scream's Randy, the only slightly likeable one of his kind), and who then fail to follow said rules because they finally get the girl and then get slaughtered. Sensitive souls who don't fit in, and who usually have some sort of obstacle to overcome: a fear of the dark, say, or a nauseous reaction at the sight of blood. And so it goes with Dead Snow, with all its infuriating characters (of which there are too many anyway) typified by such tired and predictable traits. For, while it tries to shock you by randomly killing off potential heroes, most of the time it only goes to highlight the sheer lack of likeable or interesting characters, leaving you wishing a quick death on all of them and a speedy conclusion to the film. So it would seem the only advantage of filling your film with so many annoying arseholes is that you can have fun killing them off, which just doesn't happen fast enough. No, we have to sit through awkward scenes of 'getting to know the characters' in which they drink and tell jokes, and unconvincingly muck about in the snow. Also there's a horribly misjudged scene in which fatty goes to the outhouse, and no sooner has he 'wiped himself' than one of the nymph bimbos joins him and starts sucking on his unwashed hands. For a moment there, what with it being a German film, I did wonder if I'd accidentally rented one of *those* types of films.
The direction is relatively standard too, and the whole thing has the air of a student production about it, with its occasionally clunky editing and tedious soundtrack. But surely such things are expected in trash cinema, indeed isn't this part of its charm? well, yes and no. When looking at trash there's usually two types of movie: The so-bad-its-good movie, of which there are thousands; and the surprisingly good movie, of which their are precious few.
The joys of these films are as follows:
*The so-bad-it's-good movie*. Well, the attraction is obvious. these are the types of movie that are so remarkably dreadful that they're almost charming. Plan Nine From Out of Space is the classic example. Often such movies have some redeeming feature, be it some shocking splatter sequences, hilariously awful acting and/or dubbing (Zombie Creeping Flesh, anyone), or quite simply, sheer moral bankruptcy, which heightens the vile piece of celluloid to a film that just needs to be seen.
*The surprisingly good trash*, of which Evil Dead is a prime example, is exactly that, and all the more lovable because of the cult statuses such films inevitably enjoy. The Evil Dead is a brilliantly made, massively influential and innovative little horror movie which stands as a cornerstone of amateur film making, and continues to inspire the genre. Watching it, you know its creators have a passion for what they're doing; it oozes from the screen. This is a film which epitomizes the punk rock spirit to do the best you can with the available resources. The Evil Dead is genuinely frightening and suspenseful, as Sam Raimi and co. successfully crank up the tension and sense of claustrophobia, while brilliantly blending elements of comedy and tipping their hat to comic book violence. The joy of watching Evil Dead for the first time is realizing that it's a fantastic horror film, which actually makes good on its grimy poster's promise, mixed with the feeling that you've discovered something secret, something certain people didn't want you to see.

But Dead Snow... well, it's neither of these, and this is part of the reason it ultimately falls flat. It's not so bad that it's worth sitting through to gawp at it's utter incompetency. But it's certainly not good enough to be one of the precious few. It's just... kind of so-so; stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's a schizophrenic piece of film making; it just can't decide what it wants to be. Sometimes it tries to be a slick Hollywood style multiplex type shocker, complete with aforementioned stereotype characters and some standard issue suspense-jump sequences, which don't really work. At others it just wants to let loose and be the sort of gore-drenched slapstick horror trash it keeps referencing. The fatty geek-boy character, who thankfully doesn't last too long, sports a Braindead tshirt and rarely opens his mouth without laboriously informing us of the horror movie conventions. But just mentioning classics of the genre is not enough to raise your film to their level. Few films have referenced previous movies in this post-modern way, and then gone on to be good films in themselves. Those that have been successful, like Scream, have always been clever with their references and brought some new or interesting twist to the mix which subverts the convention, and exceeds expectation. Sam Raimi famously had a Hill's Have Eyes poster appear in the background of The Evil Dead. By bringing a real-world film reference into his movie he was effectively saying "You think that was horror? That was just fiction, this is the real horror!", in the same way Wes Craven had done in The Hill's Have Eyes with a Jaws poster. This is subtle, but effective referencing, unlike Dead Snow, which is undone by its over-referencing. It sets up a standard only to fail to achieve it and delivers only a few fun scenes before getting lost in convention.