I was anticipating Dead Snow. It had built up a reasonable internet buzz, being greeted by phrases like “gore-drenched,” “tongue planted in cheek” and called a witty parody of the zombie movie and its conventions. The Nazi zombie image is always a resonant one – even when it has been conducted badly as in the latter three abovementioned. Certainly, as the film kicks in with Tommy Wirkola’s camera sweeping across vast fjord and mountainous landscapes, Dead Snow has an expansive look that seems to have a better budget than all of the aforementioned Nazi zombie films put together.

In the opening scenes, Tommy Wirkola seems determined to tick off his horror movie credentials – a character wears a T-shirt from Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992), while the situation is compared to horror movies where characters head into the wilderness out of cellphone coverage, which then tracks off into a debate about whether The Evil Dead II (1987) can be seen as a film in its own right or is just a remake of The Evil Dead (1982). (Although what got me about the debate was how all of the films cited – Friday the 13th (1980), The Evil Dead films and April Fool’s Day (1986) – were made well before the widespread usage of cellular networks, which surely negates such a question).

For all its promise and build-up, Dead Snow emerges unevenly. Tommy Wirkola does nothing particularly interesting with the basic premise – all that he gives us is a Nazi zombie film, no more, no less. In that this is a second-generation Nazi zombie film, one expected something more than that. Wirkola does attempt to add a layer of irony and parody in the abovementioned genre in-references. However, this ends almost as soon as the zombies arrive and the horror movie nerd – who initially seems to be being set up akin to Jamie Kennedy’s character in the Scream movies – is one of the first characters to be slaughtered. The film reaches a point near the end where Tommy Wirkola clearly places his tongue in cheek – one kept being reminded of the oddball sense of humour in Severance (2006) – in the scenes where Vegar Hoel has to chop his arm off and then starts a fire to cauterise the wound to avoid zombie infection, only for the zombie to reappear and bite into his legs. However, this is a lurking sense of humour that Tommy Wirkola never seems to push either for biting parody or for belly laughs in the same way that his clear models like Braindead and the Evil Dead films do.

Certainly, Dead Snow is extremely gory and Tommy Wirkola does not fail to live up to expectation in that department. There are numerous scenes of characters having their intestines spilled, even one character hanging from the side of a cliff by her intestines, and a number of entertaining means of despatch. Ultimately, Dead Snow never offers too much that is different to the zombie basics. There seem an ample number of scenes that Tommy Wirkola could have built out into strong and harrowing suspense, but these often seem hurried in an effort to get to the splattery punch line. The characters seem a singularly uninteresting bunch who all fade into a blandly indistinguishable sameness.

Tommy Wirkola had previously appeared with Kill Buljo: The Movie (2007), a low-budget splatter-heavy parody of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films. He subsequently went onto the horror mockumentary comedy Kurt Josef Wagle and the Legend of the Sea Witch (2010) and is next signed up to direct his first Hollywood film Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2012).