DEAD SNOW

A small group of friends, all medical students, head to a cabin in the snowy mountains of Norway for a weekend of fun and relaxation. While one of them goes looking for his girlfriend, who was supposed to arrive before them but is nowhere to be found, the others encounter a platoon of Nazi zombie soldiers returned from the afterlife to retrieve a chest full of gold coins, a loot they had amassed during their acts of looting during wartime and which is now in the hands of the young vacationers. The first minutes of "Dead Snow" do not inspire much hope, in fact, we can say that they do not encourage continuing with the viewing: a brief introduction with a blonde woman fleeing, threatened in the forest by something unknown, followed by a rapid overview of the adventure's protagonists, twenty-five-year-olds pretending to be little more than teenagers preparing to "cause trouble" and all the premises of a slasher seen and reviewed thousands of times. The viewer with a minimum of genre literacy can make the sign of the cross and note that even the Norwegians have strangely gotten stuck in the clichés of typically American teen-horror. But this is all appearance, a voluntary imitation/citation of certain cinema to end up in distant territories, of amused and amusing parody that manages to live by its own means and ideas and that, for once, does not have to resort to the demoralizing to get a few splatter laughs. Despite the blatant derivative vein, Tommy Wirkola manages to lead a show that walks very well on its own feet, a pseudo-slasher that, when it has to put the characters face to face with the threat, turns into a zombie movie that effectively mixes George Romero, Jean Rollin, and Peter Jackson. The irony, as mentioned, is never crude and does not take over the story and action; some gags are certainly easy, sometimes cartoonish (the zombie's intestines used as a rope), others are more refined and intelligent (the clash between Nazis and heroes with the sickle and hammer). In general, "Dead Snow" does not make you laugh but rather smile, aware of the fact that, although grotesque, excessive, and contaminated by comedy, it is still a horror movie, hence with the primary intent to scare and— in this specific case— disgust. The splatter scenes are probably the true highlight of this film: excessive, funny, and well-made. Wirkola really goes heavy with blood and guts and reduces his protagonists and their respective nemeses into bloody puddings that are mashed in the most varied ways, from the classic chainsaw to the snowmobile. And it is no coincidence, therefore, if one of the film's main characters wears a t-shirt with an image of the movie "Splatters – Gli schizza cervelli." Another merit of "Dead Snow" is the unpredictability of the events. If the story's mechanics follow the classic pattern that shows a faceless threat and then a situation of quiet joy predictably destined to shatter with a descent into horror and a face-to-face with death, it is the fate of the characters, in particular, that has been designed by mixing the cards on the table. The characters introduced, all more or less built by taking examples from the classic stereotypes of the genre (the handsome and heroic guy, the fat and vulgar one who wants to be funny, the sensitive and intelligent one, the beautiful airhead, the one with her head on her shoulders, and so on), this time do not correspond to what the viewer would expect from them. Not everyone behaves as one would expect them to behave, and if it is the fat one who gets the sex scene with the beauty of the group, we challenge you to guess who will make it alive to the end of the movie. All in all, it is still a small film, one of those that are best enjoyed during a rowdy evening with friends, but "Dead Snow" still manages to have that "quid" that allows it to stand out from the crowd and be remembered even after the rowdy evening is over.