I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

MOVIES YOU LOOK FOR EVERYWHERE 'CAUSE YOU CAN'T WAIT TO SEE THEM AND WHEN YOU FINALLY DO AND WATCH IT, YOU KIND OF THINK, 'MEH'...








Dod Sno aka Dead Snow or Zombie Nazis (2009) Norway


I thought since Dead Snow (or Dod Sno if you're Norwegian) is soon coming out with a sequel, I'd watch the first one again <streaming now on Netflix as of 9/14/14> and see if this review gets all the good stuff as well as the bad stuff right...) 

You've got to have a lot of chuztpah to claim that a new movie is 'one of the 25 best zombie movies of all time'. Can we put our egos away please?

When I first heard of this movie I was really excited to see it 'cause it sounded perfect: zombies, Nazis, beautiful scenery, gore and carnage - you know, all the things that make me laugh.

It took a couple of years before I could actually find it. Ever get so excited about something and it turns out to be... not good? Yeah, that's what you'll get with Dead Snow. And be prepared to read the whole bloody thing, since they never bothered to dub it into English. 'The Cabin In The Woods' this movie is NOT.

The Norwegians must have studied American horror because they put together the basic premise of most horror/zombie movies: Get a bunch of young people you don't really like together, isolate them from any help (and of course anywhere you can't get a signal for your cell phone), then slaughter them one by one.


The Nazi zombie idea was appealing to me - in both the zombie lover sense and the funny sense. Frozen Nazis? Hilarious, right?

Unfortunately, any enjoyment you may get is sucked right out of you trying to get through this movie. Starting with a woman running in the dark away from a zombie to the tune of The Sugar Plum Fairy, we get only a hint of her death - not that I really wanted to see it (Okay, so I did.) 

Then at the beginning (where only one gets to ride a Lynx "snow scooter" that he starts like a lawn mower and we see in this pristine snow (pfft...) a ton of footprints as well as other 'scooter' tracks... whoops.

After the aforementioned young people are in their cabin way up a mountainside they are conveniently visited the first night by some guy who gives a long and complicated backstory of Nazis hanging around the area in WWII. Okay, true, they were in a lot of countries out there. But these Nazis stayed, he claims. Right.

You're quite a way into the movie before you get a zombie sighting - they move like they're on speed which is dumb since not only are they zombies, they're running through snow on a mountainside. Nothing about that scenario suggests any kind of ability for fast sprinting.

These Nazi zombies, for being 'frozen' on the mountain are in incredibly good shape. Other than some obvious zombie features, their uniforms actually look like they've been cleaned and pressed. Oh, and you can see their breath. That kind of kills any suspension of disbelief you can muster for the movie. That and the fact they move faster than snowmobiles makes it just - dumb.


There's some creative uses of gore, particularly the scene with intestines being used as rope (although after that I saw another movie that was older use that trick too, I realized they weren't being that original). For zombies, they're awful bloody considering they haven't eaten anyone since.... ???? 

Blood is constantly dripping from their mouths and dismembering them makes a real mess. Right. Of course as these types of movies go, lots of zombies get ripped up, but still the young people die off one by one. 

Note: As I watched it again having seen scores of zombie movies since then both terrible and even more terrible, I was actually able to appreciate this time the bits of humor, the large bits of gore (having brains flop onto a wooden floor gave me the giggles for some reason), and the fact that any blood and guts looks pretty rad against a field of white (but being wet with anything in that environment had to be pure torture for all the actors). I was going to pass on the sequel but now...

The last survivor actually makes it as far as his car - until he looks out the driver side window, where the leader, Standartenführer Herzog (have absolutely no idea what that means, don't care) proceeds to dispatch him so the film can end. Woof. This film could have been a lot of fun, but no. Nazis were never fun while they were alive, and being dead didn't liven them up any (sorry, couldn't resist).