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While surfing the boards over at All Things Zombie I happened across a link this two year old little Finnish zombie flick aptly called Winter of the Dead:

An epic story about a battle between three survivors and the living dead altered by nuclear radiation. In the ravaged landscape of Eastern Finland, Toni, Marika and Risto are getting prepared for the last attack of the mutants. The fate of the survivors is uncertain.

Well that sounds like some ultra-chilly zombie goodness. Let’s have a look at the trailer:

Yikes! Although the zombies are fast it looks well done. I wonder if the soundtrack is any good. Here’s the opening theme, Kuolleiden Talvi (Winter of the Dead for those who don’t read Finnish):

If you like that the entire soundtrack, composed and produced by Matias Puumala, is available for free download. Get it now!

The soundtrack is not the only thing that’s free. You can download the entire movie right from the Winter of the Dead website free of charge… for nothing… gratis. I did. With FlashGet it only took 12 minutes.

The movie comes as a 342mb WMV file and doesn’t look too bad from a quality standpoint. I watched it at fullscreen on my monitor at a resolution of 1280×1024. I don’t think it would make the jump to my widescreen HD TV as there were compression related artifacts on the screen throughout. However it was more than watchable. There were a few glitches in the file toward the end but it really didn’t take away from the overall experience.

I’m lazy and don’t always enjoy reading movie subtitles. These were necessary as I don’t understand Finnish, even though Sami Salo is one of my favourite hockey players. At times the translation was obviously slightly off but that added to the entertainment.

Inexpensively made, but well shot, this movie entertained me. I was impressed. The story, acting and effects are all pretty decent as far a no-budget film goes. A great back story with a mix of humour and buckets of gore kept me watching. Sadly the film only last for a bit over 35 minutes and I wanted to see more. As like with most good shorts I’ve seen they leave you wondering why it couldn’t have been stretched out to feature length. This one definitely could. Perhaps the right folks will see Winter of the Dead and the filmmakers can have enough cash to see the story through some more.

I give Winter of the Dead a 7.5 out of 10.

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