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How entertaining? ★★★★★
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 30 August 2014
This article is a review of DEAD SNOW 2: RED VS DEAD. |
“They’re coming. They’re going to kill us all,” Martin (Vegar Hoel)
Was anyone expecting this sequel, to its fun 2009 predecessor, to be anything but embarrassingly undignified (especially after director Tommy Wirkola’s Hollywood misadventure, HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS)? DEAD SNOW 2 is of course undignified (what do you expect when average joes are facing defrosted Nazi zombies in the modern world?), however, it is a movie undignified in the best possible way – joyously, unashamedly tasteless.
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Northern Norway hasn’t faced a murder since 1974. That’s about to change. Try keeping track of the mounting body count. As QUANTUM OF SOLACE immediately followed CASINO ROYALE, RED VS DEAD, post-recap, gets going as only survivor Martin Hykkerund fends off the zombies led by Herzog (Ørjan Gamst). Already upping the ante from secluded cabin siege, speeding car attack has the pulse quickening. One-armed, having chainsawed it off in part one, Martin barely manages to escape, after an inadvertent quid pro quo has Herzog lose his own exact limb.
Waking up handcuffed to a hospital gurney, rubbing salt in his raw psyche, the authorities charge him with the massacre of his friends. To literally add insult to injury, the surgeons have mistakenly attached Herzog’s severed appendage, found in Martin’s vehicle, to the battered accused. (Ripley’s wakening from cryo-sleep in ALIENS was arguably less traumatic.) No prize for predicting the arm is not a benign addition. Avoiding time wasting, a random American kid, Bobby, frees Martin, but not before alerting American nerd group, the “Zombie Squad”, membership consisting of Daniel (Martin Starr), Monica (Jocelyn DeBoer) and Blake (Ingrid Haas), to the brewing Scandinavian plight. (Inserting in such protagonists may seem cynical box office beseeching, until we witness their effectiveness.)
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Bobby and a police guard are ignominiously killed by Martin’s zombie arm, and the hilariously incompetent cops marshal their scant countryside resources to tracking him down. Meanwhile Herzog and his zombie horde swell their numbers cutting a murderous swathe. Not scrimping on the crude, deaths include:
- A guy on the toilet beaten by a sink ripped from the wall,
- A pensioner getting turned on reading a smutty newspaper shouts to his wife to put her dentures in, only for head to land in his lap,
- A zombie lady’s head popping against the side of a coach, and
- Young mothers and their offspring blown up by a tank.
Told you: Brazen tackiness.
By the climax, forget WORLD WAR Z for undead combat, DEAD SNOW 2 even has zombie battlefield triage. Fisticuffs are choreographed with over the top glee: Martin, never not covered in blood/gore, is hurled into a ceiling, entering the first floor, rolling back down the stairs, landing in front of the hurler and then being lobbed through an adjacent wall. Nuance, it seems, refused to enter the metaphorical movie building.
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