DEAD SNOW: RED VS DEAD (Død Snø 2)

Stars: Vegar Hoel, Orjan Gamst, Martin Starr, Jocelyn DeBoer, Ingrid Hass, Stig Frode Henriksen, Hallvard Holmen, Kristoffer Joner, Amrita Acharia and Derek Mears.
Writers: Tommy Wirkola, Stig Frode Henriksen and Vegar Hoel.
Director: Tommy Wirkola.

Rating: 3/5

Though the blood (and intestines and spinal columns) of the innocent and the undead alike flow just as freely as five years ago, returning director Tommy Wirkola favours the jocular over the jugular in the opportunistic follow-up to his surprise 2009 hit, Dead Snow (aka Død Snø).

The fresh plot follows on from the final moments of the first film, as Martin (Vegar Hoel), the only surviving cast member, flees the clutches of the dentally-challenged zom-commandant, Herzog (Orjan Gamst). But Herzog’s singularly-focussed undead mind recalls a mission to seize the small but strategic coastal town in which Martin is recuperating.

In a post-op haze, Martin learns that an arm has been reattached to his bloody elbow stump, albeit the wrong one; he is now the owner of Herzog’s evil limb, which has a bloodthirsty mind of its own (a further callback to Bruce Campbell’s Evil Dead hero Ash, who had to fight off his own possessed hand before upgrading to a chainsaw attachment).

In a flurry of nonsensical narrative developments that highlights the general ‘Looney Tunes’-level of logic to which Wirkola adheres, we meet a trio of US zombie-hunter nerds (Martin Starr, Ingrid Haas, Jocelyn DeBoer); an army of undead Russian soldiers who have their own score to settle with the Nazis; and, buffoonish small-town cops (including the droll and adorable Amrita Acharia) who take far too long to figure out what is going on.  

Returning to his Norwegian homeland after studio struggles on his US debut, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Wirkola takes full advantage of the increased funding afforded his Nazi-zombie sequel. He boldly attempts the same conceptual upsizing that Sam Raimi pulled off when he turned the no-budget cabin-in-the-woods splatter classics Evil Dead 1 & 2 into the time-travel undead-army goof-off, Army of Darkness.

But Raimi carried over the anarchic, inventive essence of the first instalments into his expanded version; Wirkola (co-scripting with his leading man and bit-player Stig Frode Henriksen, who co-wrote Dead Snow) merely applies the bigger-is-funnier approach, the downfall of a great many sequels. There are a lot of disparate elements at play, few of which are maximized; the ‘vengeful arm’ angle peters out and the American trio lack comic focus. Gruesome, mean-spirited gags involving the elderly and babes-in-prams don’t help generate much goodwill, either.

Wirkola is a skillful director; the production values are high and the gore effects good. But unlike the character-based comedy and genuine scares he generated on a miniscule budget first time around, the overall impact of his sequel is less than the sum of its bloody parts.