(2009) ***1/2Yes, he's using binoculars. He isn't a zombie -- He happens to be dead, but he's still a soldier, and is tactical like a soldier, and fights like one, except super fast and strong. And angry. Technically, that makes him a monster -- and due respect to zombies, monsters are actually way worse.
Undead soldiers with human intelligence, inhuman strength and endurance, and a curse driven desire to beat you to death with whatever's lying around to attack you with. That's a heck of a lot of ingredients to put into your bad guy. It's the kind of thing a seven year old would come up with. I suppose you could call it cartoonish, but Dead Snow is a shade more mature than that. Maybe "operatic" would be a better word.
Don't be misled by the picture though -- there are definitely moments here and there with a sense of pageantry to them, but most of the action is more traditional hand-to-hand. There's a good sense of balance between the rococo and the straightforward when it comes to the action. And while there isn't much happening in Dead Snow that hasn't appeared in earlier films, there's a lot more of everything here, and the ideas feel reinvigorated somehow, and approached from clever angles.
For instance, know what's happening here?
It's a POV shot from someone who's about to get eaten by a bunch of soldiers. A moment later, we get another POV shot, this time from one of the soldiers. In a matter of seconds, you're a human getting eaten, and then you're a monster doing the eating. Has either of those things happened in a zombie movie before? I couldn't say for certain, but I've never seen it, and there they are in the same movie, along with a snowmobile with a machine gun mounted on it, and a head getting ripped in half, and not one, but two instances in which someone is suspended in some way by the tensile strength of intestines, and also there's maybe the most boneheaded error I've ever seen anyone make in a siege defense movie -- all together in one tidy 90 minute package.
If there's a long list somewhere in the director's handwriting entitled "Things that would be awesome to put in a movie," I'd bet almost all of it made it into Dead Snow.
