Medical Review: Dead Snow

Dead Snow, the Norwegian zom-com from 2009 caught my eye this weekend so I popped it in for a watch last night. This was a fun Sam Rami influenced tale of a group of medical students trapped in a mountain cabin with zombies.

First off, Medical students? Yes. Medical students hanging out together on vacation. This I identify with because I still get together with my old med-school buddies every fall to go camping. This is how med-students spend their free time. We don't play games plotting perfect murders or shoot each other up with drugs to try and achieve near death experiences or hang out in the morgue experimenting on dead bodies. After all, If we hung out in the morgue the door might shut and we'd all suffocate...

There must be something about European socialized medicine that attracts a different caliber of student than I am used to, however. I mean, these kids are DUMB. Watching them hang out in the first act of the movie left me eager for the zombies to show up and take them out. Luckily the wait isn't very long.

Now, this film has some good zombie medical tips on display. For example, One character field- dresses a nasty neck wound. Now, first off, he should have irrigated this wound before closing it. Bite wounds harbor some serious bacteria, especially human bite wounds. I shudder to imagine what must be in a zombie's mouth. You don't want to seal those bacteria inside a closed wound. Still, I applaud his choice of fishing line for suture. The fish hook as needle is OK, but I suspect he had great difficulty passing the eye of the needle as he threw his stitches. Neck skin is tough. Also that sucker must have been pretty slippery with all that blood. He's have been better off using something to hold it as a needle driver. He does finish up with a nice duct tape pressure bandage in the end. As a wise man once said, "If you can't fix it, Duck it."

Now his fellow student, however must have been much lower in the class rankings. He displayed surgical skills in his self amputation that proved he'd be much better off in a specialty like Psychiatry where he was never allowed near a scalpel. A chainsaw is the proper tool for lopping tree limbs, not human limbs. The wound was left like hamburger. He did not leave tapered muscle flaps to close over the stump. Worse, he cut the arm off above the elbow. Later when fit with a prosthesis I'm sure he would regret no longer having a working elbow because he got carried away and cut too high. And a brief cautery in a gasoline fire is not going to provide adequate hemostasis.

If I learned one thing from this movie, however, it is the incredible tensile strength of the human intestine. Who would have thought that even when dead and rotting in a zombie corpse, intestines are as strong as nylon rope. There might be a good "green" industry here to exploit. Outdoors men tend to be eco friendly. What could be more environmentally conscious than replacing mountaineers synthetic ropes with human guts? They'd keep your tent up in a strong wind as well.

Overall I had a lot of fun with this movie. My rating for MOZ would be four head shots. But maybe Brother D doesn't want me to use head shots for my medical reviews. I'll have to get with him on that. I could use something like four lethal injections I guess. I'll have to think on it.