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Horror comedy enthusiasts, behold!

First your patron saint Raimi returns with Drag Me to Hell, and now Norwegian Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow comes shambling onto DVD to revive the slap-stick scare routine of the incomparable Evil Dead 2.

And for anyone with a zombie fetish or just a plain weird sense of humor (or both), the film’s ’big idea’ is that its vacationing med students are set upon by legions of the Nazi undead. In a year when the Nazi has resurfaced as a go-to symbol of evil and moral compromise, Snow goes hog wild with the concept; the zombies are rotting, ferocious cadavers in full battle attire, led by a menacing officer in SS uniform.

Dead Snow has a lot of fun with its basic premise and its ambitions are very simple: deliver a goofy good time that pays tribute to the endless parade of genre titles that have come before it. It works because of skillful production and a Puckish attitude that freely pokes and prods the audience as often as it jolts and shocks them. There is ZERO subtlety used and absolutely no substance to the overall story. But unlike other horror-comedy misfires like Jennifer’s Body, Dead Snow understands that humor and zany contrivance require a certain finesse and patience.

Ultimately, it’s a little too patient for its own good, never really taking off into the stratosphere of insanity until its final twenty minutes. But fans of horror and schlock will get exactly what they are looking for from Dead Snow; well-timed thrills, visually inventive action sequences and a gore and dismemberment factor that leaves biological accuracy behind for Looney Tunes town. I was resisting the movie for its first half hour, but when I saw one of the heroes dangling Cliffhanger style over a dangerous precipice, clutching onto nothing more than miles and miles of a zombie’s intestines, I just gave up and went with it. And in the end, I was glad I did.

The plot is by the numbers horror fodder. Four guys and four girls are scheduled to meet up at a cabin in ski country. One them arrives early to prepare the place for the others. When the rest arrive, she’s nowhere to be found and inside the cabin the group discovers a box of old coins. Later, a grizzled old vagabond shows up (as they often do in this type of film) and tells them the story of a Nazi unit who terrorized the nearby town and were driven off and trapped in a cave by the angry citizens. The creepy passerby rolls up, issues the odd warning, lights a joint and puts it out in a cup of coffee, snags a beer and then heads on his way. Shortly thereafter, the last remnants of the Third Reich drop by the cabin and before you can say “Great Gallons of Gore, Batman!” legs are being gnawed, zombie torsos mashed and heads removed for a bracing game of hot potato.

The first hour or so of Dead Snow progresses exactly like a typical slasher film with the usual stock characters; sensitive guy, fat movie geek(complete with a Brain Deadt-shirt), jock girl who has one crippling weakness (claustrophobia) waiting to be exploited. The zombies get a slow reveal and a scene involving the drifter’s campsite and an ominous shape in a parka is one of the creepier moments in recent horror pictures. The film’s ickiest sequence doesn’t even involve guts but a rendezvous between the movie geek and his prospective gal in an outhouse; zombies are roaming the woods around them, but I could only cringe and think “he hasn’t washed his hands!”

Lots of Dead Snow is like that; disarming. Whether it’s an out of the blue, spoken in English, reference to Indiana Jones or an extension of scenes we think are finished (at one point we assume one of the students and a zombie have fallen to their deaths only to realize they are both buried under the snow, alive and in biting proximity of each other) Snow keeps pulling old but reliable rabbits out of its hat. There is absolutely nothing here I haven’t seen before, including the Nazi zombies, but the style with which it is assembled makes all the difference.

The weakest aspect of Dead Snow is its characters. They are developed in all of the usual ways, but for the first half of the film we barely know anything about them or their personalities. We don’t care at all, and some of them are dead before we do. By the middle and definitely by the finale, we are invested in them and cheer on two of the bolder guys who make a desperate charge on the entire zombie army while a Norwegian pop song blares in the background. But because of this hesitation to invest, the film feels relatively flat, only springing to life in time for it all to end. It’s competent and entertaining throughout, but the second half is so good that I wish it had found its legs and its tone earlier.

If you enjoy crazy B-movies or thrillers that aren’t afraid to laugh at and with themselves then you might want to consider Dead Snow. It’s hardly original in content, but it is inspired in the execution ( pun fully intended). Wirkola and company accomplish exactly the kind of thing Eli Roth tries and fails at; this is drive-in silliness at its most entertaining.  It doesn’t do a whole lot with the concept of the zombies being Nazis, but their dark grey outfits contrasting against the chilly winter scenery is truly striking and evokes the sensibility of a graphic novel. It also provides the basis for one of the funniest bits in the film. When one of the med students is bitten, and acting on advice from the film geek decides to conduct emergency surgery on his arm, his friend intervenes. “Wait, is that necessary?” he asks. “Isn’t your mother’s father Jewish? I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want to recruit someone like you!”

Dead Snow is now available on DVD and Bluray.

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