Freddy's 31 Days of Horror Day 17: Tommy Wirkola's Dead Snow 2: Red Vs Dead
My very first list had the first Dead Snow on it as to me it was such a love letter to the insanity of Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi with self aware tones of fanboyishness, I couldn't help but love it. I know a lot of people had a hard time with this and it was an either you hate it or love it kind of movie. It's not the most original thing ever and it pretty much went beat for beat with Evil Dead but it was so much fun and gory I didn't care. From that point I loved anything and everything Wirkola. It took him a while to gather the funds and get the sequel going but, regardless of whether you've seen the first one or not you can easily enjoy this film which is leaps and bounds crazier and more original than the first. Nazi zombies is really all I ask for in the world. 
Recapping the events of the first film just like in Evil Dead 2, our surviving hero, Martin, tells us about the weekend trip to a snowy cabin in the woods where he and his friends discovered buried nazi gold. Unbeknownst to them the gold carried a curse that would resurrect Colonel Herzogg and his battalion of Nazis to reclaim their gold. It is a slaughter that causes the death of Martin's girlfriend and the loss of his arm until he gives back the box of stolen Nazi gold. They let him go until Martin discovers that he had forgotten he had hidden a piece of gold in his pocket which Herzogg hunts him down for! Now we are up to date into the second film where a horde of Nazi zombies chase Martin down hanging onto his getaway car, trailing blood and guys down the highway! Escaping them and accidentally cutting off Herzogg's arm, he has lead them down the mountain where Herzogg sees the town of Tolvic, a town of which Hitler himself ordered Herzogg to go kill all it's inhabitants, now Herzogg can finally accomplish his final task. Martin is blamed for the death's of his friends and much to his dismay, while he was unconscious in the hospital, the doctors have connected Herzogg's severed arm to his body thinking it was his. It doesn't help his case when he has a nazi arm killing everyone that comes near him. Monitoring him is the American zombie squad which Martin gets in contact with and has them come to America to help him stop Herzogg! Together they learn that there was a Russian army that was captured and killed by Herzogg, with the powers of Martin's new arm, they decide to resurrect the Russian army to fight and kill Herzogg once and for all!
Now that premise I gave seems fun but I cannot do justice to how each moment within this film connects to the next because chances are you will not expect any of them and you will laugh yourself into peeing your pants! First off the zombie squad from America consists of Daniel (Martin Starr from Freaks and Geeks) Monica (Jocelyn DeBoer from College Humor) and Blake (Ingrid Haas also of College Humor). Daniel is constantly making jokes at Norway's expense, when Martin first contacts the zombie squad, he is babbling and Daniel replies with, "I don't speak the language of Thor." Daniel is the leader of the zombie squad and thanks to Martin Starr we constantly get really dry nerdy humor out of him, as he tries to spew one liners at zombies as he kills them and deal with the fact that he calls his parents his landlords. Blake and Monica might be my favorite though as they are the perfect comedy duo. Blake is the more serious factual type who awkwardly calls people on their BS and is constantly making jabs at Monica because throughout the entire movie Monica is making Star Wars references. There is a point where they are spying on Nazi zombies and Monica pulls out a replica of the binoculars Han Solo uses in Empire Strikes Back which she loves to tell you the fact was filmed in Norway. Together they are a fun pair that in the end when the proverbial kitchen sink is thrown at them they go ballistic on some nazis with nothing but shovels! This is one of the many reasons I love Tommy Wirkola, he always makes characters that are against the norm. We have badass nerd girls that quote Star Wars, kick zombie ass and are founders of the zombie squad. Greatness. 
I've stated before what really makes a zombie movie stand out is how they enhance the zombie mythos. In this one they go almost voodoo style with the zombies, fueled by revenge and bound by masters. What makes it different is both Martin and Herzogg's ability to raise the dead and master them for their armies, which even Daniel points out that he's seen hundreds of zombie movies but he's never seen this before almost as if they're making a new genre! I have no idea who did the zombie makeup but it is epically grotesque. The gore factor in this movie is beyond ludicrous as each kill is a ten to twenty second brutal bloody beating, laceration, decapitation, squashing, exploding, guts galore jamboree! Nothing is safe or sacred in this movie as we see Herzogg's men go through a town and kill everyone, women, children, the elderly, babies, the disabled and I'm not going to lie the way it was presented to me I laughed my ass off at every second of it. It is just goofy beyond belief. I watched a man get his head beaten in by a sink while he was on the toilet, three kids in a sandbox get run over by a tank staring at it like idiots, a daughter leave her wheelchair bound mother to roll her own chair which falls over and she gets her head squashed and a tank blow up a baby that was flung at the screen into the audience with the sound of laughter. Where did the tank come from? The zombies literally tore a dude open at a WWII history museum and took his guts out and used them to siphon gas from a tour bus into a tank they found. Beautiful. Freddy, what is wrong with you? I'm sorry but this was hilariously done and must be viewed in person to truly understand the insanity. Funnily enough, no animals were harmed in the film and in fact a lot of seagulls ate very well on all the dead bodies. 
The ending battle where we finally see the subtitled Red Vs Dead. It's the Ruskies vs Jerrys. They charge at each other in the most beautifully bloody battle you will ever see between a bunch of zombies! We even have a nazi doctor on the sidelines taking mangled soldiers and fixing them. How does he fix them? Well one guys missing a foot, so he takes a plunger and sticks it in his stump of a leg and sends him back into battle! Another guy is missing a ton of his guts and he simply sticks a bunch of hay into his stomach and zips him back up. Classic nazi doctor zombie. The Russian zombies are big bear looking dudes that tear through the nazis hardcore and we see a ton of limbs being torn off! If all this isn't enough for you, Tommy Wirkola gives us a wonderfully sensitive ending as we see a zombie sex scene, sorry making sweet sweet zombie love, to the tune of Cindy Lauper's Total Eclipse of the Heart. You are truly doing God's work Tommy Wirkola. I cannot stress how fun this movie is, go get a six pack right now and enjoy greatness on the level of an acid trip cranked to eleven! 14 Days til' Halloween Halloween! 14 Days til' Halloween Silver Shamrock!
