Ahead of the pack of its supernatural-screamer brethren, Dead Snow is arguably the best-ever subtitled Norwegian-language Arctic Circle “first Nazi-zombie-horror-slasher-feel-good-splatter-comedy film.” The guts and gore get revved up the further filmmaker Tommy Wirkola goes into his ninety-one minutes, though the intestines and blood-red on white-snow are not as graphically stomach churning as in many another recent movie. In contrast, the other recent northern clime zombie attack of note, in Canadian Pontypool, is mostly offscreen. Both films are fun, the latter more intellectually so -- the unseen imagined can make for great fear -- and this generic one more visually so in its takeoff style with a slight variant in character but not template.

In fact, as seven students drive, snow-scooter and hike to the cabin of an eighth who is arriving separately, they kid knowledgeably about those very precedents, Friday the 13th, The Evil Dead I and II, April Fool’s Day. From the first, interest rests, not on what, but on when and how the expected unexpected will be developed.

With its cutout-heart outhouse, Sara’s (Ane Dahl Torp) cabin sits in the wilds above “aptly named Øksfjord (Axefjord),” from which Hitler’s greedy troops once preyed on U.S.-U.S.S.R. shipping as well as on the local population. The film resists temptation to flashback to that period but opts instead for a gratuitous middle-aged loner (Bjørn Sundquist) who asks for hospitality, insults his young hosts, and blatantly retells the wartime events and concludes with a spell-it-out warning (which, to his sorrow, he disregards himself). The end of hostilities in sight and incensed by the three hundred invaders’ lust for cruelty, gold and women, three thousand civilians rose up with farm implements and firearms. Commanded by Colonel Herzog (Ørjan Gamst), those soldiers who escaped Viking vengeance fled into winter mountains and froze to death. Their evil, however, lives on.

In the serious business of blaring Death Metal music, beer, fun and games, and sure or hoped-for sex, the students pooh-pooh the past and the evil presence. And, of course, in the tried-and-true pattern of such stories, they live -- or don’t -- to rue the day, suspense riding only on which ones will be left standing. Coincidence or some sort of global social-malaise commentary, this zombie-vampire genre is back in spades, a post-George Romero formula spliced with Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 mentality.

Salting their chatter with English slang and four-letter words, the group covers the usual frat-house types. Half of them already form couples: spooked by a nightmare (or reality), steely Vegard (Lasse Valdal) goes off in search of his girl Sara, and blood-squeamish Martin Hovden (Vegar Hoel) is Hannah’s (Charlotte Frogner) beau. The other four look to pair off at least for the Easter vacation: movie nerd Erland and randy Chris, quiet Roy and blonde Liv (Jeppe Beck Laursen, and Jenny Skavlan, coscriptwriter Stig Frode Henriksen and Evy Kasseth Røsten).

There are moments of real northland woodsmanship, but center stage are the uniformed Aryan undead, bent on mindless mayhem. Like their movie predecessors, they are ugly but not strong or hard to dispatch with the shotguns, machineguns, axes, knives and sledgehammers of 1945 plus modern hand power saws or snowmobile blades.

The brave beleaguered defenders are outnumbered, out of luck and out of cellphone range, and you can’t keep a bad man down. Beneath Herzog’s death’s-head officer’s cap are the funniest teeth since Alec Guinness’ The Ladykillers set, but the colonel’s “Arise!” command keeps his troops coming. Decapitations, disembowelments and amputations (one of them self-administered) stain the no-longer-virgin snow red.

Far from Scandinavian Lutheran deep seriousness, this is all homage to a generally shallow genre and fun for those who cotton to the sort of thing. For those more upset by subtitles than by blood, the English-dubbed version is available on demand. 

(Released by IFC Films; not rated by MPAA.)