Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Nice effects though.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Martin Hykkerud is the last survivor of his group of friends. He forgets to return one last Nazi gold coin and the Nazi zombies are still after it. He throws it away and commander Herzog retrieves it. Herzog moves on the neighboring town. Martin crashes the car and is hospitalized. Nobody believes his story and the police suspects him to be the killer. He is horrified to see Herzog's arm attached to him. He escapes from the hospital and contacts the American Zombie Squad leader Daniel (Martin Starr). Daniel, Monica and Blake arrive in Norway to take on Herzog and his band of Nazi zombies.This is a bloody and violent sequel to the bloody violent original. I don't think Martin needs to survive to start the movie. I would rather have this movie start off fresh. I like Martin Starr. I would have liked the Zombie Squad come to Norway to investigate rumors of Nazi zombies. That would be more fun. There are many avenues of comedy. It's also a mistake to separate the group. There are some hilarious zombie fun to be had. The zombie vomit is great. This has some fun elements but the story could be better.

The original Dead Snow movie was actually not that bad. It was quite okay within its somewhat confined genre. Dead Snow 2 however is a major disappointment. It abandoned all pretense of actually being a real horror movie and wandered into the land of pure comedy…and failed miserably. This movie is like Bad Taste but on a higher budget (and regardless of what the fans want to pretend Bad Taste is a piece of s..t movie).The movie does have a plot that makes sense, again for this kind of movie, that has to be said but that lone does not make a good movie. There are literally NO really scary moments at all in this movie.The movie has plenty of gory stuff. Actually the gore is pretty much thrown at the viewer from the first scene to the last. Unfortunately much of it is so ludicrous that it is embarrassing. To add to the embarrassment a bunch of absolutely nonsensical characters are thrown into the mix. The so called Zombie Squad is just pathetic. The Norwegian police office makes me squirm in my seat. The puking pet zombie makes me want to throw up my supper.This movie is nothing but brain-dead people (and I am not talking only about the zombies here) and tasteless effects stacked onto each other. The only reason it does not get a single star is that there was one or two laughs in there and because some of the ludicrously overdone gory effects was not too bad from a technical point of view.As I wrote it was a major disappointment. This movie can only appeal to the die hard fans of the genre or, with its frequent puking scenes, bad jokes and senseless gore to people who … well I will not go there actually.

Starting right at the end of the first Dead Snow, Martin does not even have time to recover, as he must gather an army to stop the undead Nazis from completing the mission they were on before they died.It's a movie that pokes fun at the zombie genre while adding to it at the same time. Parodying itself makes for a great safety net for adding your own spin to the genre, but they did not need it. The more extreme the movie seems to get the better. I loved how outrageous the movie gets.My personal favorite was Martian Star as the leader of a group of geeks who claim to be Zombie hunters, only this is the first set of Zombies they ever go up against. It had a Lost boys type thing going on.It's rare that I've seen a bad Zombie movie, but it's even rarer that you see one that takes the genre up a notch, and that's Red vs. Dead.

Despite being a zombie fan, it took me a couple of viewings to appreciate the original 'Dead Snow.' But it grew on me (and now I own it on DVD). I was delighted when I heard a sequel was out and watched it straight away. I have to say I didn't like this one either at first, but, whereas the original took a couple of viewings to 'get,' I started to like its sequel at around the half hour mark.The original Dead Snow was a 'condensed little number.' It was about a group of friends who took a skiing holiday to a remote cabin (hardly original, eh?) where they interrupt a load of Nazi zombies. Naturally, blood and guts follow. So, instead of retreading the original, the film-makers choose to expand the whole story on a bigger picture. We're given more information on the Nazis zombies. Who'd have thought evil undead killers have such a rich and diverse back-story?! But they do! Plus we have a whole new cast of characters on hand to help out the lone survivor of the initial encounter.And the characters are fun. The police on the trail of the undead carnage is pretty inept and quite amusing. Our leftover hero is nicely psychotic and damaged after his previous ordeal, but what makes the film is how the writers have added all sorts of nice new aspects to what could just be another zombie movie. There are so many movies out there like this these days that anything that wants to stand out has to cover new ground. And I'm glad to say this one does. I won't list too many of its original nice touches, but my favourite aspect was how the hero's arm god severed and the hospital had to reattach it. Only they messed up and accidentally stitched on the main zombie's arm, hence unwittingly giving our hero a few new powers of his own.You will need to have a pretty dark sense of humour to watch this. There are so many politically incorrect moments that break conventions. A black sense of humour is a must here. Plus there's a fair bit of action towards the end. Off the top of my head I'd have to say that 'Dead Snow2' contains the longest ongoing climactic battle I've seen in a zombie film.You should be aware that the film is shot in both Norwegian and English, so you'll find you're reading the subtitles one minute, only to realise you're listening to English the next.The only criticisms I have would be that it does feel a little 'all over the place' at times. Sometimes there are so many ideas and characters that things get a little messy and you end up pining for the 'condensed-ness' of the original. Also, the leader of the 'zombie squad' annoyed me a little bit. He seemed to start off as an uber-geek and ended up being tougher than Rambo. But those are just minor gripes. I think Part 2 is a great little number that doesn't detract from the original and has enough things in it that are new to warrant it standing out above many of the B-movie zombie films cluttering up bargain bins full of cheap DVDs you've never heard of.