Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014) 🧟‍♂️

🧟‍♂️🚑 “New arm, who dis?”

Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers, shall we?

⚠️ Content Warning ⚠️
Both Dead Snow films lean hard into gore, splatter, and over-the-top violence. Think intestines being used as ropes, heads being crushed like melons, and enough blood sprays to make Tarantino blush. On top of that, the villains are Nazi zombies — which means while the premise is played for absurd dark comedy, some folks might find the subject matter offensive or in poor taste. If that combo of over-the-top gore and Nazis pushed to cartoonishly evil extremes isn’t your thing, you might want to steer clear.

Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

It picks up minutes after the first movie’s ending. Martin survives the car attack, but wakes in a hospital to learn that doctors reattached…the wrong arm. He now has Herzog’s zombified arm grafted to his body, and it has a mind—and murderous impulses—of its own. Meanwhile, Herzog is raising a full army to finish a WWII mission. Martin teams up with an American trio of self-styled “Zombie Squad” nerds to stop a Nazi horde, and yes, the sequel goes bigger, bloodier, and way sillier.

Character Rundown

Martin (Vegar Hoel) – Accident magnet with a Nazi zombie arm he can’t control…until he can.

Herzog (Ørjan Gamst) – Upgraded big bad with an actual army this time.

Zombie Squad (Martin Starr, Jocelyn DeBoer, Ingrid Haas) – American true-crime/zombie obsessives who show up to “help” and end up in the thick of it.

Glenn (Stig Frode Henriksen) – Hapless local cop who keeps…showing up in the worst ways.

Soviet Zombies – A rival undead squad Martin raises to even the odds. Yes, it’s exactly as bonkers as it sounds.


Pacing / Episode Flow

Faster, funnier, splashier. Where the first film balances tension and gore, this one leans hard into splatstick escalation: hospital chaos → police station mayhem → assembling armies → small-town war.

Pros

Wild escalation. From cabin carnage to tank battles and undead versus undead.

Great gag engine. The cursed arm set-pieces are hilarious and gross.

Bigger scope, better polish. You can see the budget bump on screen.

Zombie Squad works. The American fans add a meta-comedy layer that (mostly) lands.


Cons

Tone whiplash (by design). If you loved the first movie’s meaner edge, the sequel’s cartoon may be “too goofy.”

Joke density. When every scene goes for a gag, a few splats don’t hit.

Less scary, more romp. It trades dread for delirium.


Final Thoughts

A go-for-broke sequel that stops trying to scare you and focuses on entertaining the hell out of you. It’s messier, but the ambition (and the audacity) is hard not to love.

Rating

8/10

🚨 Spoiler Warning 🚨

Spoilers

We start exactly where we left Martin: trapped in his car with Herzog. He wriggles free but wakes in a hospital accused of killing his friends. Doctors cheerfully inform him they “saved” his severed limb—except they grafted Herzog’s arm onto his body. The arm behaves like a possessed appendage, randomly crushing skulls, hurling people, and generally framing Martin for mass murder. It’s gruesome slapstick, and it works.

Herzog, meanwhile, is more than a cursed commander; he’s building an army to complete a long-abandoned mission: raze a coastal town his unit never managed to destroy before the war ended. He resurrects soldiers from muddy fields, commandeers a tank, and marches. Martin discovers the arm can resurrect the dead too—but under his command. In a great cemetery sequence, he digs up a pit of Soviet corpses and essentially forms a rival undead unit to take on the Nazis. That’s the sequel in a nutshell: ridiculous idea, played with absolute confidence.

The American “Zombie Squad” arrives—breathless, overprepared nerds who’ve flown across the Atlantic to lend expertise gleaned from movies and message boards. They help Martin wrangle his arm and strategize for a showdown, but the body count stays high; this movie kills with gusto (and with a tank tread).

The final act turns into a literal undead war in and around the target town. Herzog’s army plows through civilians and cops; Martin’s Soviet zombies slam in to meet them head-on; a tank fires into storefronts; limbs and heads pinwheel across the square; it’s all choreographed like a gory Looney Tune. Eventually Martin confronts Herzog, and—after a bruising, blood-slick fight—takes him down (Herzog loses his head and his mission with it), breaking the curse.

Because this series can’t resist one last wrong-foot, Martin uses the arm’s power to resurrect his dead girlfriend at her grave. They “reunite” in a car in a scene that’s equal parts sweet, insane, and jet-black comedy. Roll credits, splattered in red, with the sense that Tommy Wirkola pushed the concept as far into crowd-pleasing carnage as it could go.