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.

Book Review: "Shadows in the Mist" by Brian Moreland

Though it has taken me an obscenely long time to get around to reading Shadows in the Mist after being sent a copy by author Brian Moreland himself, I'm so glad that I finally got my lazy butt in gear. Just like his novel Dead of Winter that I reviewed for The Zed Word (clicken ze link HERE to read those fantastic prose), Moreland's Shadows in the Mist was kind of the perfect book for me because it combined my secret passion for history - more specifically the history of Nazi Germany - with the supernatural, my favorite subgenre of horror. There's also some pseudo-zombie action, so seriously, how could I resist? Enough about me though, let's talk about the book. 

Shadows in the Mist is a frame story involving two members of the Chambers family - Sean and his grandfather Jack. During a particularly bloody battle in Germany's Hurtgen Forest in World War II, Lieutenant Chambers and his faithful band of soldiers, who dubbed themselves The Lucky Seven, came face to face with one of the Nazi's most evil and deadly creations that wiped out Jack's entire platoon. As Sean travels to Germany to finally give these men a proper burial, he reads his grandfather's diary, which recounts every detail of a most unbelievable and terrifying story.

Shadows in the Mist is an engaging and at times quite endearing romp that takes readers across the ocean and back in time to tell this very unique tale. Moreland did exceptional research on all things World War II for this novel, going so far as to travel to Germany to actually see the locations that he would be writing about, like the Hurtgen Forest. Moreland's descriptions of each location then became so vivid that I could easily picture the characters in them like I was watching a movie. From the dense, foggy, and hilly atmosphere of the Hurtgen, to an abandoned barn where the platoon holes up, to the final location in a Nazi-occupied church, Moreland expertly builds the story up and keeps the mystery and suspense alive all the way through. All the military mumbo-jumbo that usually goes over my head in books and movies is laid out here so that any reader can follow along and immerse themselves in a story that just gets better and better with each new chapter.

In the story, Jack Chambers and his men have been asked to join a secret mission with Special Unit X-2 commandos to take over a Nazi command post. When they reach the town of Richelskaul, the men encounter the Nazis' secret weapon for winning the war. Nazi soldiers in their gray SS uniforms wielding swords and wearing creepy gas masks (like on the cover up there) soon reveal themselves to be virtually unkillable by the Americans' weapons - round after round of machine gun fire only seems to piss them off. Zombies? Maybe. But these creations have also apparently slaughtered some of their own fellow Nazis, so the question for the rest of the novel is just what are these creatures, who created them, and how? It is quite a while before the answer is finally revealed, but is worth the wait, as it was something that I thought was very unique and unexpected. It jibes well with the Nazis known obsession with the occult and makes you think, "Oh, yeah. The Nazis would have totally done that." The only part of this whole Nazi plan that furrowed my brow a bit is that they had to rely on Jews to accomplish it. 

The kinship and loyalty of the Lucky Seven was one of the best elements of the novel. These guys are a true band of brothers who have been through many battles and missions with Lt. Chambers and have dedicated themselves to each other in order to stick by their motto that "everyone lives." The men all have different backgrounds that readers slowly learn about, and one of my favorite traits that Moreland included was that they each had some kind of good luck charm that they carried with them - a baseball, a deck of cards, a watch. The humanity of these men in turn gives the book the humanity it needs to be more than just an action or history or supernatural novel. Though the reader knows from the beginning of the novel that only Jack survives by the end, it still sucks to read about each character's demise. The differences between the Lucky Seven and the X-2 unit that they go on this mission with is made quite clear from the beginning so you know who the real bad guys and good guys are. Good dialogue to me is always an indication of a good writer, and while some of the characters do get a little wordy here and there, overall the dialogue in Shadows in the Mist felt real and believable, both for the time and because of all the military terminology.

Horror hounds expecting a read with lots of bloody battles and body parts need not look any further. As the sorta-zombie SS monsters can't seem to operate firearms, their use of swords (and in one satisfying instance, their bare hands) lets them kill our heroes in very gory ways - right from the moment where a soldier exits a building missing an arm and trying to hold in his intestines with the other. Battle descriptions are just as vivid and real as everything else Moreland writes about, some so much that I found myself making disgusted faces while reading. And that's not a criticism, that's a compliment! When I was reading Dead of Winter, I felt like I was reading a script to a great horror movie and the same can be said for Shadows in the Mist. With the right actors and the right budget, Shadows could be an awesome supernatural horror flick - that image of the Nazi with the gas mask on could be iconic!

Since I've now read two of his books and enjoyed them both immensely, Moreland has proven himself to be a very promising new voice in horror literature, and I'm sure that he has many more thrilling tales to tell us. Coming up later this year are two new books from Moreland - The Witching Hour will be available this August, with The Devil's Woods following in December. Check out his website http://www.brianmoreland.com/ to read more reviews, and if you plan on reading Shadows in the Mist, I would definitely recommend you check out the section on the research he did, if only for the pictures from Germany because they really enhanced the reading experience for me.

Book Review: Zombies vs Nazis: A Lost History of the Walking Dead

Since I thoroughly enjoyed my first foray into the writing genius of Scott Kenemore - Zombie, Ohio - I thought it imperative to read more great stuff from this author who has immersed himself in the world of the undead. Next on the list was Zombies vs Nazis: A Lost History of the Walking Dead, and though I much preferred Kenemore's writing in novelization, this book was no doubt a joy to read as well.

What COULD have happened at the end of the book.

The story is told in a series of letters, or reports, to SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich by three Nazi officers sent to Haiti during WW2 to research the possible existence of zombies and to harness the secret for creating these monsters to make an army of Nazi zombies. These three characters are Gunther Knecht (the leader of the three), Franz Baedecker, and Oswaldt Gehrin.

Though not technically a narrative book, Zombies vs Nazis does read similar to a novel, as each letter from the three Nazi inspectors tells a story of their progressing findings about zombies. They meet a zombie, meet several Bocors and Mambos - priests and priestesses with the power to raise zombies - and eventually learn and participate in the ritual to create a zombie. I don't know how much, if any, of this is part of actual Voodoo mythology, but it makes sense for the story.

I was immensely pleased to find that Zombies vs Nazis contained the same dry/black humor that made Zombie, Ohio such a joy to read. In this book, the humor comes with a bit more subtlety, like the perfect English and big words the inspectors use to describe the ridiculous situations they are in. Personal parenthetical comments given by Knecht were perhaps the best ones. I especially like the part where Father Gill (a clergyman working in Haiti) has introduced Knecht to the Bocor named Grandmarnier, like the "libation," and Knecht says "Though this surprised me at the time, in retrospect, I should have known that a drunkard like Gill would naturally associate with people bearing a relationship to alcohol in one way or another."

Author Scott Kenemore

The entirety of "Communication 10" from Inspector Baedecker to Heydrich, however, is the highlight of the book. Nothing to do with zombies, but it is freaking hilarious when read in the context of previous chapters. Read the book and you'll know! The personalities of each character are cleverly laid out in the missives in the way each person writes and the things that others have to say about them. This chapter in particular is more than an indication of Kenemore's talent for the hilarious and obscure.

The illustrations in the book by Adam Wallenta, albeit a bit sparse, also add to the humor and overall tone of the book. I love the style of the drawings, with the subtle detail and thick black outlines. The zombies look both gross and very, very funny. Page 204 is probably my favorite! In fact the overall look of the book is part of the appeal, because aside from the illustrations, the pages containing Knecht's letters are splattered with blood.

Perhaps it was just an unfortunate consequence of the style the book was written in, but I was a little disappointed at the lack of bloody zombie action! It's the gorehound in me, I apologize. When looking at the story as a whole, though, I can't help but love what Kenemore has presented here. I also can't help but believe that this book would make a fantastic zom-com film. I'm thinking actors like Alan Rickman, Gary Oldman, and/or Harvey Keitel for the main roles. Somebody get on that, right now.

As far as I'm concerned, the self-proclaimed zombie expert Scott Kenemore has done it again and delivered a comical zombie tale that shows the disastrous side of people's attempts to control zombies or otherwise mess around with the walking dead (Day of the Dead, anyone?). Zombies vs Nazis: A Lost History of the Walking Dead is a fun, fast, and immensely entertaining read for anybody who loves zombies and the hijinks they can create.

Movie Review: Dead Snow

Nazi zombies. In the snow. I feel like I should have been more weary of a film with this premise, but strangely, I was not. I had faith. I heard about it a long time ago, and thanks to my new membership with Netflix (I know, right? How much of a procrastinator am I?), I was able to finally see it. Who doesn't want to see some Nazi zombies in the snow?

See, I should have learned this by now. Most of the movies that I get really excited about and think are just going to be awesome, are in fact, usually NOT. The ones that I often pick up on a whim end up being totally great. Like Dead Snow. Loooooved it.

The plot sounds familiar - group of pretty people go to a remote cabin in the mountains to have fun and are instead attacked by Nazi zombies from WWII. How they became zombies is never explained, but honestly, do you really care? I'm more curious now about the life expectancy of a zombie. I mean, these dudes looked pretty good for zombies, and even better for 70 year old zombies. I wonder what their secret is...

Back to the show. So the group starts to split up one by one, as they so often do in these movies, and are therefore one by one attacked by the zombies. It's a likable group of characters who all actually seem like they are friends. I hate those movies where there are all these different types of people that are always mean to each other, and we're supposed to believe that they are friends? No wonder they usually turn on each other when things get rough. But the group in Dead Snow is believable, with no cliche characters or over-sexed couples hooking up every five minutes. Although there is one hook up in an outhouse. An outhouse? Really? In the snow? Mmmm, sure sounds sexy to me.

Question: Why do they always have to make fun of the movie nerd for being a movie nerd? I'm slightly offended.

The weird thing about this movie is that there is no real main character to follow. It jumps all over the place, which is sort of a good thing because it makes the film more unpredictable. I thought Vegard, the one most knowledgeable about the area would be the sole survivor, then oops! Not so much. The chick with the dreds? She seems tough. Oh, wait. I guess not. But as likable as the characters are, that doesn't mean I don't want to see them chopped into tiny pieces by Nazi zombies. In the snow. I'm sorry! I can't get over that! They should have just called the movie Nazi Zombies in the Snow. Hey, it worked for Snakes on a Plane.

There are some good kills in this flick - a lot of them intestine-related, too. At one point, one of the men is hanging off a mountain using one zombie's intestines as rope while another zombie clings to him. That's the kind of ingenuity I like to see in these indy films.

More gore highlights:
1) the always wonderful "all appendages getting ripped off at the same time" gag
2) fingers in the eyes and then head ripped apart
3) various decapitations and amputations of zombies
4) self-mutilation via chainsaw
5) a rather strange death where a dude turns around and sees his intestine attached to a tree

My vote for favorite kill goes to number 2.

So first impression is that Dead Snow is a nicely paced and well-shot take on the zombie movie. It uses a different setting and quite odd foes (NAZI ZOMBIES IN THE SNOW!) to create a deliciously gory and at times very funny flick. As a warning for those who need it, the film is in Norwegian and there are subtitles. If you feel like you can't watch a movie with subtitles, then you can just go fuck yourself because you're an idiot.

One other thing: Not that I have any trips to Norway planned in the near future, but where exactly is this mountain filled with NAZI ZOMBIES IN THE SNOW? Because I really want to go there.



NAZI ZOMBIES IN THE SNOW. NAZI ZOMBIES IN THE SNOW. NAZI ZOMBIES IN THE SNOW.

There. It's out of my system.