Dead Snow = Dead Loss!

Who would have thought it was possible to make an uninteresting film about zombie Nazis dismembering college students?

Well, Norway's Tommy Wirkola managed quite easily with Dead Snow.

If you believe the quotes on the DVD packaging this is a great "black comedy" - and yes, there are a few funny moments (e.g. when Martin tries to throw the Molotov cocktail) - but this is no Shaun Of The Dead.

For the most part Dead Snow is a very, by-the-numbers, spam-in-a-cabin zombie flick, which, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing.

However, it tries a bit too hard to be post-modern, by having film nerd Erland (Jeppe Laursen) draw attention to the fact that a bunch of college kids staying in a cabin in the middle of nowhere is always a recipe for disaster in the movies.

It tries to be ironic by having a random bloke - called "The Wanderer" (Bjørn Sundquist) turn up at the cabin out of nowhere, invite himself in, sit down and rattle off a massive chunk of exposition (laying out the film's backstory and the Nazi zombies' raison d'etre) then disappearing off again into the darkness.

He pops up again a couple of scenes later sleeping in a tent - having just been telling the kids how dangerous this area was(!) - and is attacked by a passing zombie!!!

If this was supposed to be some clever subversion of zombie movie tropes it didn't work - it was just plain dumb (and slightly annoying, as all the people needed to know about the zombies could, probably, have been pieced together by discoveries later on).

Then, there's the hidden gold in the food store under the floorboards, which they stumble upon with no effort, but had supposedly been there, undisturbed, since 1942.

Given that the cabin belonged to the family of one of the medical students (although she never actually makes it to the cabin), who had presumably used it at least a couple of times since the 1940s, it all seems a bit far fetched.

Now I'm pretty sure that this gold was key to the actual plot behind the story, but it barely gets a mention until the final scenes by which time it's almost a 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card (although that, in itself, does have a nice twist right at the end).

In fact, there is very little in Dead Snow (or Død Snø) that you won't have seen in countless other zombie films (buckets of blood, severed limbs, interesting uses for intestines, eyes being poked out etc).

It's almost as if Wirkola and his scriptwriters actually set out to make a bad film because they thought that, in itself, would be funny - little realising that people laugh at bad films, not with them.

This is all a shame because there are some nuggets of greatness in Dead Snow, such as a the magnificent moment when the final two survivors are facing off against the last zombie, the Nazi commander Herzog (Ørjan Gamst) and he does his Black Lantern bit and suddenly the odds are no longer two-to-one in the students' favour.

Ultimately Dead Snow is one just for zombie completists.