Nazis and zombies have not always been the most successful combination in cinema history. Early 80's shockers Zombie Lake and Oasis of the Zombies proved that this sub-genre needed a lot of work. Moving on to the present day and we have Norwegian film Dead Snow. The question, therefore, has to be have things improved in the past 30 years? Well, marginally at best.
Maybe Dead Snow could more accurately be described as a Teen-Nazi-Zombie flick, seeing as its protagonists are students on a holiday in a remote cabin. You can probably guess from that last line that this film isn't exactly original. It's not remotely scary either. But at times you aren't really sure if it's being played for laughs or not, although I guess that was most probably part of the intention. Horror-comedy is a hard one to pull of, however, and this film essentially shows why. It's effectively neither one nor the other and you are left thinking 'meh'.
The characters are so negligible that you really can't care about them. And occasionally they do things that are highly irritating, i.e. does anyone really think that there is a chance in hell that a hot girl is going to enter a toilet and willingly have sex with a fat man who is in the process of wiping his butt post-dump? Eh, no? Please. Again it may have been intended as a joke? I dunno, maybe it's those long winter nights in Norway that has led to a somewhat strange and misguided sense of humour. Anyhow the Nazi zombies do eventually turn up in numbers but they seem to be computer generated which takes away some of the threat as it's difficult to create genuinely scary monsters with cheap CGI. They are perfectly serviceable for a low budget horror picture to be fair, but I'm just not much of a fan of CGI and prefer proper make up and physical effects.
This is throwaway stuff but it might entertain fans of modern horror films I guess.
Maybe Dead Snow could more accurately be described as a Teen-Nazi-Zombie flick, seeing as its protagonists are students on a holiday in a remote cabin. You can probably guess from that last line that this film isn't exactly original. It's not remotely scary either. But at times you aren't really sure if it's being played for laughs or not, although I guess that was most probably part of the intention. Horror-comedy is a hard one to pull of, however, and this film essentially shows why. It's effectively neither one nor the other and you are left thinking 'meh'.
The characters are so negligible that you really can't care about them. And occasionally they do things that are highly irritating, i.e. does anyone really think that there is a chance in hell that a hot girl is going to enter a toilet and willingly have sex with a fat man who is in the process of wiping his butt post-dump? Eh, no? Please. Again it may have been intended as a joke? I dunno, maybe it's those long winter nights in Norway that has led to a somewhat strange and misguided sense of humour. Anyhow the Nazi zombies do eventually turn up in numbers but they seem to be computer generated which takes away some of the threat as it's difficult to create genuinely scary monsters with cheap CGI. They are perfectly serviceable for a low budget horror picture to be fair, but I'm just not much of a fan of CGI and prefer proper make up and physical effects.
This is throwaway stuff but it might entertain fans of modern horror films I guess.