3 out of 5

Directed by: Tommy Wirkola

Might I… have very little to say about this film? It’s possible!

The first Dead Snow took some Evil Dead / Dead Alive love and made us wait through some rather boring buildup for its unleashing of good gore gags. The characters were a few notches below interesting, and the humor – in an attempt to be sort of widely genre-pleasing – never quite landed, but the flick eventually finds its way to good energy, and it has the undeniably charming shtick of Nazi zombies. (Charming?)

Dead Snow 2 is pretty much the same list of pluses and minuses, even if its tonally shifted more towards zaniness and attempts at offense, and even though it starts very much in the midst of things – picking up pretty directly after film one. So we’re minus our grating cabin-in-the-woods couples and singles, and given instead a roster of chuckle-worthy archetypes – bumbling cops, zombie nerds, a continually put-upon character – but this only ups the frequency of humdrum one-liners. The gore is amped up, as is the budget, and the screen is rather continually slathered in red, but this also means we repeat the gag of fists bursting through bodies and intestines ripped out and used for non-intenstiny purposes. The inclusion of quite a bit of English – via the ‘zombie squad,’ featuring Martin Starr, traveling from America to save the day – is a bit odd, as it was openly included to give the film wider appeal and that _shows_ in the way the script sort of stutters to keep transitioning us from Swedish speakers back to our US young adults, but overall, director Tommy Wirkola and co-screenwriters Stig Frode Henriksen and Vegar Hoel do make the wise decision to not try to go deep with any kind of mythology or commentary, and lean into the ridiculousness: the Nazi zombies realize they have Hitler missions yet to complete and so they start to attack the town. Survivor Martin (co-writer Hoel) uses his newly-attached zombie arm – and some undead Communists, and his magic zombie powers – to stop them.

The flick is as passable as any also-rans Evil Dead flick, with some inspired, over-the-top ideas peppered in at various point to keep it from being completely background. That doesn’t make it especially notable, but it again earns some okay-way-to-pass-the-time good will by being a good sport and fueling its antics with zeal, even if it misses beats in the process.