Review: Dead Snow (Død snø) [2009]
Dir. Tommy WirkolaCast: Vegar Hoel, Stig Frode Henrikse, Charlotte Frogner, Lasse Valdal
Dead Snow
is a film that every self-respecting horror fan should yearn desperately to love, with its miniscule budget, genre referencing, Norwegian roots and it's poetic, snow-blasted mountain locations. Oh, and did I forget to mention... Nazi Zombies. That's right, it's been a long time since we had Nazi Zombies on screen with the turgid Zombie Lake, and sadly Dead Snow doesn't really rescue the genre, but it's not for want of trying.
, this is the film that spawned a score of 'trendy psychological thrillers', most unsuccessful but a few going on to comprehensive box office domination like 
. So please, allow me my indulgence, and read on...
. This hypnotic, pitch-black drama gave audiences a protagonist in a jet black suit who conducted all manner of felonious physical barbarity on his adversaries. The fact that 
, what many profess to be the single foremost Bigfoot film of all time, with... this travasty! Disregarding completely 1977’s Return To Boggy Creek, made by another disparate group of low budget psuedo film-makers, which in turn, succeeded in ignoring the first film. This film instead turns out to be a bland assimilation of 
and an erstwhile episode of 
, any concept of mystery and foreboding is dissipated only to be commuted by a sense of utter apathy.
, 
, 
), and now has fancied to take on one of the cornerstones of modern horror history... Jason Vorhees! Bay’s latest production, a quick and dirty remake of 
, is not as excruciating as it could have been, by that rationale it can not be called laudable either. What it does deliver are the staples required to make a Friday 'date-night' horror movie; sex, drugs and buckets o' blood 
(1958) Christopher Lee shattered the anemic, deferential image of Lugosi’s count with a mixture of vehemence and sensuality lacking from any Dracula preceding or, debatably, since and made the role irrevocably his own
lacks on four of the five counts, making it banal by any measure of the genre. Despite having the same title and bearing a passing resemblance to the 1980 Jamie Lee Curtis classic (high school kids getting butchered on prom night), this is not... read that again... NOT a remake. In fact, it bears a greater similarity to 
albeit with a bloodless body count.
follows a group of teenage girls who find themselves trapped in their sorority house on Christmas Eve, while a psychopath takes them out one by one – and not for Christmas dinner…
, released a small, blackly comedic film, which would have a major impact on the horror scene for years to come. Widely regarded as a classic, the original version of 
paved the way for the first generation slasher films such as Halloween and Friday the 13th. 
and its murderous “superghost” cousins. Done well it can show off beautiful camerawork, nuanced emotion and slowly develop unsettling scares that go beyond mere jump moments. Maybe a good parallel could be made with music – a virtuoso musician can take a difficult piece of music and make it come alive. Sadly the film lacks many important elements, the lead actress only registers one emotion for the entire movie, the film thinks that showing random flashes of the lead characters screaming at the camera will be a tension builder for when Christy decides to play 'World’s Most Boring Detective' without a good explanation as to why. 
, 
, and more recently 
series, have seen some global recognition, but before that Norway's genre output was nearly nonexistent. As a matter of fact, a Norwegian Horror keyword search on IMDb results in only three genre titles being made before 1990, 
is a British horror movie from writer and director Christopher Smith, taking place in the network of stations, tunnels and sewers that make up the London underground where Kate (German actress Franka Potente) is trapped after falling asleep on the platform on her way out for further carousing after a booze and drug fuelled party with her pretentious friends. The movie excels at creating a claustrophobic and forlorn atmosphere as the strong-willed yet desperate Kate tries to escape the 400 miles of track whilst the misfits that inhabit the depths of London at night are being slaughtered by an unknown killer. The main cast is minimal and the very Kate-centric movie is fodder-padded with only a couple of bums, station workers and her short-lived chauvinistic man-friend plus, of course, the deranged mutant-gynaecologist that has spent his life underground practising surgery on those who accidentally enter his lair.
