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, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.
Ten years ago, Dr. Girlfriend and I kicked off the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon (because, you know, the resurrection!) and for the tenth anniversary marathon, we’ve decided to go back and rewatch some of the best films from (nearly) every year. We had to make a few cuts here and there to have time to end the week with a tribute to the late, great George A. Romero on the 50th anniversary of the release of Night of the Living Dead.
Since both Dead Snow and Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead ended up in our previous Easter Zombie Movie Marathons, we decided to go ahead and do a double-feature, and oh what a difference five years makes.
The first time I saw Dead Snow was during our 2010 EZMM and I was quite impressed. It was a bit of a slow starter, but once the zombies arrived, it was clear that this Tommy Wirkola guy had some chops and the potential to be another Peter Jackson. You know, back before Jackson only made films about little people with hairy feet.
It may also be the only film in any of the Easter Zombie Movie Marathons that was actually set during Easter as a group of twenty-something medical students decide to spend their Easter Break at a cabin in the woods near Øksfjord. According to interviews, when brainstorming the film, Wirkola tried to figure out what would be more evil than zombies and the obvious answer is… Nazis! So Nazi Zombies inspired by actual Norwegian history formed the hook for Dead Snow, but then a script had to be written.
I’m gonna be honest. The script is kind of blah. The characters are thinly drawn and mostly interchangeable, while the overt horror film references were a bit too on-the-nose. And I’d like to forget about the whole “playing in the snow” montage that takes up a little too much time. I honestly didn’t care about the characters and watching them frolic didn’t help.
Luckily, once the Nazi Zombies arrive the gore is fast and furious (and only occasionally CG augmented), culminating in some over-the-top splatterstick that made me shed a tear laughing.
The effects look good for their budget and Wirkola does a good job swapping out actors and angles to make the zombie army seem much larger than it actually is, so if you’re looking for a quality low-budget zombie comedy, Dead Snow is a solid, if decidedly lowbrow, entry.
Like having sex in an outhouse, lowbrow.
Five years later, after breaking into the American market with Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (which was surprisingly fun for what it was), Wirkola returned to his roots with a bigger budget, better effects, and returning cinematographer Matthew Weston whose skills had made a quantum leap forward.
Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead is a gorgeous movie that hits the ground running, taking place immediately following the final moments of the first film. The only returning human cast member (sort of) is Vegar Hoel as Martin and I have to admit that with his head shaved I wouldn’t have recognized him as the same actor. Hoel ups his game here to near Bruce Campbell levels of energy and commitment – that’s not surprising, given that he ended the first film blue-shirted and one-armed – and the script takes no prisoners.
It’s just as transgressive and potentially offensive as the first film, thank goodness.
While the first film centered on the Nazis trying to retrieve their gold (making them a distinctly Scandinavian version of the walking dead, the draugr), this time around, they have remembered their original mission before dying at the end of the war: being tasked by Hitler himself to wipe out the Norwegian town of Talvik. To do that, however, they need to recruit more soldiers, which means a very entertaining killing spree followed by magical resurrections for everyone by their leader Oberst Herzog (Ørjan Gamst reprising the role)!
One of the best decisions Wirkola made this time around was to replace Martin’s severed arm with the coincidentally also-severed arm of Herzog in a medical mix-up. Both the gore and comedy potential is fully mined as Martin tries, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep his Nazi Zombie Arm in check. Plus, it gives Martin access to Herzog’s magical reanimation powers. Wirkola draws on local history again and Martin resurrects a group of Russian POWs who had been murdered and buried by Herzog.
Oh, and did I mention that Martin has new allies aside from undead Russian soldiers? The Zombie Squad makes a fictionalized, officially licensed appearance! Martin Starr, Jocelyn DeBoer, and Ingrid Haas are the Zombie Squad, flying to Norway to do battle with actual zombies for the very first time, along with a closeted WWII museum clerk named Glenn (Stig Frode Henriksen). Not only does the film include Americans as part of a way to broaden its appeal, it’s also in English – apparently, they shot in both English and Norwegian at the same time.
Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead doesn’t disappoint in any way. It’s funnier, it’s gorier, there’s never a dull moment, and just when you thought you wouldn’t get a really uncomfortably weird sex scene… um… you do. Then a post-credit scene opens up the opportunity for a third installment, and from what I’ve read, Wirkola already has some ideas on where to take Martin and Herzog next.