Fantasia 2014: Dead Snow: Red Vs. Dead (2014) – Review

It doesn’t get much better than this! Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead made its Canadian Premiere at Fantasia 2014, and let me tell you that this sequel buried its predecessor in terms of over-the-top zombie horror.

First off, if any of you have been to a genre flick with like-minded individuals filling the seats or if you’ve ever been to a midnight screening, then you know that half the fun is in the hootin’ and hollerin’ we all make at the gruesome displays of violence and the corny one liners. Sure enough, all that was there in spades at the Fantasia screening.

I don’t want to give the film away, and I won’t, but it picks up pretty much exactly where the first film left off. And then it’s just hell bent for destruction. The zombies are awesome, the action sequences are amazing, the laughs are gut-busting, and the predicaments are so far out-of-this-world ridiculous that you can’t help but to love this movie.

The plot is cohesive and since it steps outside the boundaries of traditional zombie lore, Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead nods its head toward the audience to let us know that they know what they’re doing. Doing so was definitely funny, but it was a case of CYA (cover your ass) to appease zombie purists. Personally, while I like traditional slow-moving Romero types of zombies, I still think a sprinting creature infected by a virus is still a zombie.

Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead was definitely a comedy, but I wouldn’t venture to say that it’s a Zom-Com in the same vein as Warm Bodies or Life After Beth. It’s more in tune with the likes of Zombieland. I know a lot of you are disagreeing with me here, thinking that if it has zombies and comedy, then it’s a Zom-Com. For me, the term “Zom-Com” is a play off of the term “Rom-Com” (Romantic Comedy), so, from my perspective, a true Zom-Com should have a romantic element to it. Follow?

Getting back on track, Dead Snow 2 is a cult film, flavored with zombies, action, and comedy. But it’s a cult film that can be enjoyed by pretty much anyone with the stomach for horror violence. As long as you have that, it doesn’t matter if you’re a horror fan, a zombie fan, or a comedy fan… you will like this movie.

The Verdict:

Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead kicks ass left, right, up, and down. The movie is an exercise in inventiveness, creating new and exciting ways to kill zombies, badass ways zombies kill, and gruesome ways in which we can use the human anotomy, no matter how impossible. Is this a must-see? Fuck yeah it is! The only fault that bothered me was the prosthetic teeth of the lead Nazi zombie, Herzog, which is unfortunate since we see them often.