Movie Review: Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014)

 

Oh my gosh gory goodness, you guys, I am not even done watching Dead Snow 2 yet and I am already so fucking in love with it, quite possibly even more than the first one. I knew this movie would deliver for me with the red stuff but not quite as high on the awesome scale as this. Okay, pee break is over, I gotta get back to the movie...

Oh, this is amazing. I never thought I would be able to use the "Nazi zombies in the snow" tag again. There's less snow this time around, but there's still the Nazi zombies and they are awesome. Dead Snow 2 picks up exactly where the first film left off. Martin thinks he's escaped the Nazi zombies after giving them the last piece of gold, but apparently this wasn't the army's only mission. Now Martin has recruited the Zombie Squad from America to help him stop Colonel Herzog and his army of dead soldiers.

I was a bit confused when I started the movie and heard English instead of Norwegian. Thinking I had something on the wrong setting, I went into the setup to change the audio, only to find out that there wasn't anything wrong. Apparently, scenes for the film were shot in both Norwegian and English. Though I'm never bothered by subtitles (and in fact use them for pretty much everything I watch) this is a cool option to have. I just wish I had been able to see the Norwegian version first because I like hearing the language.

But of course it wasn't the language I was really looking forward to in Dead Snow 2. The sequel is in the same vein as the first film in that it is an outrageous zom-com that more than delivers in both genres. These kinds of movies always seem to come to me at just the right times, when I really need something good and gory to rediscover my love for these types of movies. I love the way the movie came up with some new stuff for the zombie genre. After being bitten by the zombies in the first film, Martin cuts his own arm off with a chain saw. In the ensuing car chase during Martin's escape, the zombie Herzog loses his arm as well. But the doctors at the hospital and the Nazi zombie doctor switch the two arms and Martin ends up with Herzog's arm, Herzog with Martin's. In addition, Herzog as the leader is able to create new zombies under his control to make his army bigger, and Martin also gains this power when he gets Herzog's arm.

Did they really come up with a whole new genre, as the Zombie Squad leader suggests? Not really. As the character himself says, the idea of a master controlling the zombies he creates is more along the lines of the voodoo version of a zombie, so this is not exactly that original. But this plot point brings about a great turn of events in the story when Martin uses his power to resurrect a buried Russian army to fight the Nazi zombies. I don't think I've ever seen a full-on zombie vs. zombie fight before, has this been done before? Who cares, it was bitchin'.

With Dead Snow 2, the gore and the gags go hand-in-hand in some of the craziest ways possible. I found myself laughing out loud many times at the over-the-top gore, sometimes out of shock of what I was seeing. The wonderful and the horrible thing about the carnage in Dead Snow 2 is that nobody is safe from the zombies. There are many on-screen deaths of not just random innocent people, but several children as well. Babies! Babies are blown up in this movie! In a scene at the hospital, Martin's zombie arm throws a 12-year-old boy out the window and then crushes his chest while trying to resuscitate him. And goshdarnit, it was funny! They got away with it! There are so many amazing gore gags in Dead Snow 2 that I'd be hard-pressed to remember them all - intestine-pulling, head-exploding, random bludgeoning with various instruments... I was almost on gore overload and I loved it.

I'm not sold on the ending, though it was strangely cute and nice. It slogged down the great tone the movie had set up for itself in the beginning. But one bad ending doesn't disparage the rest of a movie. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead is a delightfully gory picture that I have been waiting five years to see. It's always awesome when a sequel more than lives up to the expectations from the original, and this couldn't be more true for this film.