Behind the Couch

2009 Dir. Tommy Wirkola AKA Død Snø A group of medical students on a skiing holiday in deepest, darkest Norway come face to face with marauding zombie Nazis… Yes. Zombie Nazis. Dead Snow is every bit as preposterous as it sounds. In a similar vein to Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland , Wirkola’s striking looking film is an outrageous comedy-horror that deftly mixes chills with chuckles and gore with guffaws. The film sets its tone in the opening scene as a young woman flees in terror across a desolate snowscape accompanied by the strains of Dukas’s mischievous symphony The Sorcerer’s Apprentice . Director Wirkola wisely keeps her pursuers to the shadows and we only catch the briefest glimpses of them before they set upon the unfortunate woman and tear her asunder. The film’s cine-literate characters are an amiable bunch and the script (by Wirkola and Stig Frode Henriksen) takes time to establish group dynamics and ease us into the company of the group before all hell break...

2008 Dir. Steve Barker In a nameless, war-torn eastern European town, mysterious businessman Hunt (Julian Wadham) hires ex-marine DC (Ray Stevenson) to recruit a team of ex-soldiers to protect him on a somewhat risky journey into deepest, darkest, undisclosed ‘eastern Europe.’ His dubious plans are to scope out an old military bunker. The hard-as-nails gang of cynical, battle-worn veterans and mercenaries (including Richard Brake and Michael Smiley) are rather unsavoury to say the least, and assume that their shifty employer is in search of buried Nazi gold. Once at the outpost however, the men make a horrific discovery that turns their entire mission on its head and pits them against a force of unimaginable, and apparently supernatural, evil. Outpost is the latest military themed horror film in a sub-genre that includes The Keep (1983), Deathwatch (2002), The Bunker (2001), Shock Waves (1977) and R-Point (2004). It is a concept that appears to be infinitely more interes...