Stanley Film Festival – Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead (2014) review

The film starts off recapping things from the first film in a pretty brisk but manageable way. If you had any doubts about where the humor-tone would be in the film, Martin (Vegar Hoel) the first film’s lone ‘survivor’ has a voiceover narration that should put that to rest. There is a line describing the plot of the first film that sets the tone and sets it perfectly (I won’t ruin it here – his delivery and the line itself are perfect). We get moving quite literally with the last piece of Nazi gold serving as a bit of a homing beacon for Herzog and the rest of his soldiers and dive right into a car chance-type sequence that renders both Martin and now the zombie leader Herzog down an arm at its conclusion.

This opens things up to Martin being treated in a local hospital and detained by the police after the aftermath of the ill-fated camping trip from the first film is discovered. Martin’s run-in with an over-eager little boy with a keen interest in the successful re-attachment of an arm that is matched up with the wrong owner. It is really funny and gives the movie a nice intro to a team of zombie professionals (Zombie Squad) from the states that the little boy had alerted. The rigmarole of how this all comes together would take a bit much to lay out but sufficed to say, the film keeps its focus on poor Martin but allows a colorful bunch of new characters to make their way into the story.

One could argue that introducing a trio of horror/sci-fi nerds as a fish-out-of-water gag is an easy way of having more English spoken and having slightly more relatable characters but I don’t buy that. However many movies this American zombie trio have seen, they are ultimately and endearingly out of their depth: The geek-smooth Daniel (Martin Starr), the starry-eyed Trek-dork Blake (Ingrid Haas) and the effervescent Monica (the lovely Jocelyn DeBoer milking every bit of awkwardness out of her Star Wars references at all the wrong times) all attempt to look like they know what they are doing. Clearly, amusingly they do not. Throw in a wonderful performance by Stig Frone Henricksen as a Nazi museum curator (played part Charlie Chaplain part Manuel from Fawlty Towers) mixed into this mess and you have a well-balanced, no mugging-type of cast that just allows the absurdity of it all to happen.

And absurd is a bit of an understatement. We learn pretty soon that Herzog’s plan is to raise a big army and takeover a town and (I think) the region – as was their mission before they died. He does this ‘raising’ with a Thor’s-hammer-on-the-ground kind of maneuver with his fist that, if it was a more serious film, would be a bit dumb. But again, it is all goofy so it works fine. Martin learns of this and, yes, you guessed it, that is where the ‘Red vs Dead’ part comes into play. Zombie Russian Army meet Herzog’s Zombie Nazi Army when Martin discovers his adopted arm carries the same power.

Is this all as fantastically-over-the-top as it sounds? Yes, but it handles the batshittedness with flare, with style. It doesn’t ask you to laugh, it just gives you things to laugh about. Watching townsfolk get dispatched by the advancing Nazi army early on is entirely more enjoyable than any right thinking person should ever enjoy as much as I did and once the ‘red vs dead’ part comes into play, it is just 5th-gear-crazy one scene after another. To run through all the uses for heads and toilet lids and intestines and knives and bombs and shovels and every other damned thing you can think of would take an absurd amount of time.

The larger, more sweeping moments of calm and reflection are quickly interrupted by a team of local idiot-cops about as many steps behind the situation as one could possibly be. Their involvement in the story is really the only drawback in the film. Not because they aren’t funny, but their rhythm is often at odds with the manic level at which Martin navigates his new reality. I guess all-madcap all the time would be too tiring, and a change of pace was good, but the cop sequences feel more like bungling cops in a situational comedy than anything else. Again, not bad, but definitely on a different time signature than the rest of the film.

There are scenes with soccer moms getting blown up, there are scenes of intestines being used a fuel lines, there are scenes with a continually resurrected zombie on Martin’s side who is like a puppy with its owner that are, dammit all, sweet. Seriously, one could go on and on.

The fact of the matter is, Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead is exactly the kind of film you want to put on with friends, the kind of film you make a point to go see when it plays at some late hour in some skeezy theatre, the kind of film you laugh with and laugh about well after the fact. It is fun, crazy, splattery and really really funny. Director Tommy Wirkola has done a wonderful job and I just cannot wait for the next thing he’ll do.