I gotta say, when I first head about this movie, I think I did a cartwheel sitting down. It’s one thing to have regular zombies, but Nazi zombies? I was sold. Hardcore. Give me two copies, I said. Hell, give me three. I was sure to be blown away.

How wrong was I.

Dead Snow tells the story of a group of medical students who travel to some distant cabin in the woods to drink lots of beer and have lots of sex. During the middle of one late night party, a strange man shows up at the door and tells them an old story about Nazis and curses and how these dang nabbit kids are all idiots for not knowing about a fifty year old piece of local history. He leaves them with ominous music and proceeds to get killed by the very thing he was warning them about.

Yes, the dead Germans have landed. Not these Germans. But the dead Nazi kind.

What do these zombies want? Gold. Yes. The zombies are seeking lost treasure which just happens to be hidden in the cabin. And they won’t stop at anything to get it. Yes this movie takes the plot of Leprechaun and replace Warwick Davis with zombies.

The zombies themselves aren’t your traditional Romero zombies. These creatures are fast. They have reasoning and they are able to use weapons. They can be wounded and even killed from body shots. They fight hard and have incredible strength. They growl and drool a lot, but they really stretch the whole zombie concept to the limit when they use stealth to kill their prey with knives. In short, the zombies could have been anything. Seriously … being zombies had nothing to with film outside of local color. You could have changed their characters to escaped convicts and the story would have acted out the same.

In any case, the characters in this movie are beyond dumb, making choices that will have you screaming at the television. The movie tries to counter this by being self referential, having the characters mention horror movies as if to absolve itself for following every damn horror cliche in the last thirty years. This doesn’t work in the least, and when people start dying, the horror segues to bizarre humor which feels out of place like finding a horse in the middle of the library. For instance, when one of the characters gets his head ripped in half, his friend just shrugs, mentioning they should have gone to the beach instead.

The movie does have a bright spot when the remaining students decide to face the Nazis in a field of open battle. They take to the creatures with a chainsaw and a sledge hammer. It’s an awesome fight put to terrible music. The students fight like barbarians, hacking and slicing. The actors do a great job at channeling the red rage. It was like a modern Conan story at which point, the film pukes all over itself.

I can really write pages on why this movie is terrible. It starts as a horror and segues into a comedy, giving constant props to Evil Dead and Army of Darkness, yet it has nothing new to say. The only cool thing about this picture are the zombies and truthfully, they are flat one dimensional creatures. The college students are stupid, watching each other get torn apart like they would watch a bad episode of Good Times. The movie focuses on a couple of individuals that go nowhere making you wonder the entire god damn point of following them. And in the end, does any one achieve their goal? Has anyone changed? Was there even a point to this movie? No. Not really. It’s all about Nazi zombies killing dumb people. You could get the same effect by looking at the movie still without spending two hours to see them.

The only way I could reccommend this is if you see it with a group of friends, drunk off your ass, and riffing away on it. As is, it can best be summed up from Shakespeare himself … it is ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

Verdict: Skip it!