It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, and 2014.
Resurrection Sunday
Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead (2014)
Director: Tommy Wirkola
Writers: Tommy Wirkola, Vegar Hoel, and Stig Frode Henriksen
Back in 2009, Tommy Wirkola co-wrote and directed one of the most entertaining zombie action-comedies in years, Dead Snow. In the years since he was responsible for the extremely entertaining fairy-tale-action-comedy Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and with the higher profile he achieved with that film, was able to return to the world of zombie Nazis with a larger budget and bigger ambitions.
But fear not!
The gross-out humor and over-the-top action remains intact.
Dead Snow 2 picks up exactly where Dead Snow left off, as sole survivor Martin (Vegar Hoel) ends up in a hospital after having chainsawed his own arm off, seen all of his friends brutally murdered by zombie Nazis, and then accidentally killed his girlfriend with an errant axe blow to the neck. During his escape, though, the leader of the zombie Nazis, Colonel Herzog (Ørjan Gamst) also lost his arm, and to Martin’s horror, the doctors have surgically reattached the zombie arm where his should have been.
Although the zombies retrieved all of their cursed gold, which should have sent them all back to the grave, Colonel Herzog is reminded of their original mission — the destruction of an entire Norwegian village — and begins recruiting new zombies to his cause. But since the dead are already too decomposed to be any use, that means slaughtering as many people on their way to the village and reanimating them with Herzog’s zombie necromancy.
Luckily for Martin, he has help from a trio of American zombie enthusiasts (Martin Starr, Jocelyn DeBoer, and Ingrid Haas) along with a closeted WWII museum clerk named Glenn (Stig Frode Henriksen) to stop the Nazi onslaught. And he’s inherited the zombie-raising necromancy, which leads to various acts of splatterstick zombie hilarity as well as the raising of an army of Russian zombies to battle the Nazis.
Again.
As with the first film, Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead is a gore-filled masterpiece with low-brow humor practically dripping off the screen. It’s a film that would make a young Peter Jackson proud, with an ending that will have you shuddering while you laugh.
Seriously.
I’m never going to hear “Total Eclipse of the Heart” the same way again.
I’m not going to pretend that there’s a lot going on here intellectually or symbolically, or wax poetic about the cinematography (although it is a great looking film). This is just an extremely fun film that had me laughing out loud over and over again. There are films we’ve watched during this marathon that I think are better films overall, but there’s not a one that is as entertaining from start to finish.
I honestly can’t wait to see what Wirkola does next!