'Dead Snow' directed by Tommy Wirkola

Zombies! Nazis! Zombie-Nazis! Did that get your attention?

Well, if it did then Dead Snow is the film for you. It is a claustrophobic Norwegian horror film which does not take itself too seriously, following more in the footsteps of Shaun as opposed to Dawn of The Dead.

At the start, a group of young, beautiful Norwegian students are on their way to an isolated cabin on a hillside which is several miles walk from the nearest road. What could go wrong I hear you cry?!

If you've seen just about any horror film in the last twenty years, you will already know the answer to that and there are absolutely no surprises in this one.

The exposition is mostly covered in five minutes with the inexplicable sudden appearance of a local middle aged man who tells the students about missing Nazi gold. He then somewhat contradicts the wise warnings he delivers about 'the hills being cursed' by electing to camp out on them. Quite what drove him to this bizarre decision is left as a mystery (or crater sized plot hole, take your pick).

This is the only point in the film that vague attention is required to the subtitles so if this is something that usually bothers you then you can rest assured that the rest of the dialogue is fairly redundant.

Nevertheless, there is some terrific slapstick to look out for, including an unfortunate attempt at throwing an improvised petrol bomb and the misuse of an outdoor toilet. There are clear visual nods to The Evil Dead and the aforementioned Shaun of The Dead  that work well.

The students get picked off one by one in increasingly brutal ways. They make the mistake of splitting up to cover more ground despite the dire warnings of movie geek Erlend (Jeppe Laursen) who seems to be the only one in this group who ever engages his critical faculties.

All of the rest of the students seem to merely be wallpaper for the zombies, who steal the show with a contemptuous ease that only Nazis on film are capable of.

And that's about it. A good, fun watch with a wafer thin plot. The rest is as braindead as the zombies themselves.

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