Død Snø: Ein! Zwei! Die!

CDH (cantankerous drummer husband) got this gem from a friend of his at work. CDH’s Scottish friend and his Norwegian missus hadn’t seen Black Sheep, so we leant them our copy, and they loved it. They traded us Død Snø, which is basically the Norwegian version of Black Sheep, only better.

We held a bogan pizza party at our place a few weekends ago and watched this movie. It was a huge hit. Our version had no english dub or subtitles, but it didn’t matter once the intestines started unravelling.

Port O’ Call: Norway

Mateys: Directed by Tommy Wirkola (Kill Buljo – a satire of Tarantino’s Kill Bill), written by Stig Frode Henriksen. Død Snø premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Premise: Eight medical students holiday in a remote log cabin in the Norwegian mountains. Unbeknownst to them, they call forth a horde of frozen Nazi zombies who subsequently kill them all in interesting and hilarious ways.

Why it’s Kreig: Wirkola has gone for comedic horror and succeeded in a way I haven’t seen since films like “Braindead” and “Evil Dead”. The atmospheric lighting, jarring music and slightly unsettling cinematography prevent the comedy being over-the-top, so you’re left with this disturbing feeling that Norwegians have a macabre sense of humor.

Gore, gore and more gore used for giggles. The horror aspects of the film fell flat in the face of the pure awesomeness of the intestines flying everywhere, faces being ripped apart, brain’s falling on the floor, and people having sex on the toilet.

Two scenes made us laugh so hard we couldn’t breathe. One, when the character Martin (Vegar Hoel) is bitten by a Nazi zombie and must chop his own arm off with his chainsaw and cauterize the wound. In a truly Norwegian show of dignity and restraint, he stands triumphant with his bloody stump at his feet, only to have another zombie rise from the snow and bite his testicles.

In the other, two characters are trapped inside the cabin with zombies flailing about outside. The boys make Molotov cocktails, but accidentally throw them against the wall and engulf the entire cabin. Fun times in Norway.

Why it’s emo: IMDB informs me that you can see plastic bits on one of the white snow-suit worn by one of the zombies, meaning it couldn’t have been made in WWII. He could have stolen it off a previous victim, though.

Also, many German grammar Nazis (bad choice of words, perhaps?) point out the tagline should read ‘Eins, Zwei, Die!’. As a burgeoning grammar Nazi myself, I think ‘Ein, Zwei, Die!’ is correct if you look at it in the context of ‘One Zombie, Two Zombies, Die!’

Apart from that, I can’t fault this movie. It’s now one of my favorite zombie films of all time.

Rating: five horns for maximum metal \m/ \m/ \m/ \m/ \m/

Super Snuggles and Shoggoth Kisses
Steff