Part Once Upon a Time, part Grimms’ Fairy Tales, part gore fest, The Death of Snow White

pulls no punches. Sanae Loutsis leads as the charming titular princess in a movie that sticks to the framework of the tale but fills it with death and mayhem. The Death of Snow White is just having fun with a story that has been told one too many times but still offers up some elements that at least make you think about how this narrative could have greater meaning, which is even more pointed in the month of Disney’s live-action Snow White debacle.
The Death Of Snow White Is Actually Hilarious But Punctuated With Moments Of Sincerity

The MVPs Are Definitely Snow White’s Friends

With my recently published Rumpelstiltskin review, this has been the month for quirky, low-budget fairy tale retellings for me. What I have drawn from the inevitable comparison is that while Rumpelstiltskin is trying to be a serious movie in a lot of ways, The Death of Snow White embraces the camp. There is some great comedy in this, and the performances go hand in hand with the script and production. With early conversations leaning into the goofiness, it permits us not to take everything else too seriously, leading to being surprised by some oddly genuine moments and decent dramatic acting.

Meanwhile, the rest of the cast is silly and endearing in a way that bolsters this tone while sort of nodding to other takes.

Snow White and her Prince’s (Tristan Nokes) relationship starts off playing like a meet-cute skit making fun of the source material, but some of their cheesier “falling in love” scenes have a touch of something Shakespearean. I am also going to go out of my way to overpraise the pack of obnoxiously stereotypical high school friends who flank the two: Inga (Hailey Stubblefield), Yvonne (Holland Stull), and Sophia (Lydia Pearl Pentz) with Snow and Jacob (Christopher Burnside) and Wilhelm (Milo Mechem-Miller) with the Prince (Gimm Brothers Easter Egg accounted for).
While the opening action-centric flashback is fine, the medieval Grease sequence of all these teens commenting on Snow and Prince’s feelings for each other and dropping some wacky one-liners takes the prize for the real perfect intro into this movie. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast is silly and endearing in a way that bolsters this tone while sort of nodding to other takes. Snow White wears an outfit that is obviously an allusion to her Disney dress, but is covered in blood for half the movie. I also think she might be petting real baby raccoons at some point.
The Death Of Snow White Being A Horror Movie Is Kind Of Pointless

With Some Of These Deaths, All I Can Say Is: Was That Really Necessary?

With the jokes, the action, the delightfully cheesy special effects, and some gorgeous dark royalty costuming for the Evil Queen (Chelsea Edmundson), The Death of Snow White has a balanced overall tone. The only problem lies in that it is supposedly a horror. There really isn’t anything intelligent about this movie’s “scary” scenes; it’s just really over-the-top gore of the dwarfs slaughtering their enemies and the Queen mutilating herself and others to fuel some kind of blood magic that maintains her youth and beauty. It’s nightmarish to watch, but it ultimately doesn’t add anything.
The Death Of Snow White Puts Some Great Spins On The Known Tale

This Was Actually A Good Vision Of The Seven Dwarfs & The Evil Queen

The Death of Snow White bypasses some of the finer yet famous plot points from the Disney film for its own take. The Queen has to force Snow to eat the apple because she sees that this hag is clearly shifty. This villainess also argues with her magic mirror, which straight-up tells her there is more to it than physical beauty since Snow White is actually a good person, while the Queen keeps insisting she is superior.

The seven dwarfs also have more distinct personalities and professions than just being “happy” or “sleepy,” and a couple of them are women, making for an overall solid set of characters.

The Queen is as melodramatic as everyone else, but her constant bewailing about hating Snow White for no reason at all effectively speaks to what it is like to be obsessively jealous. The other aspect worth mentioning is how this movie realizes the seven dwarfs. They are all portrayed by actors with dwarfism (except for the hulking “Tiny”), and the Queen seemingly banished all dwarfs from the kingdom following her takeover, leading to this group becoming assassins and living together in the forest.

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The seven dwarfs also have more distinct personalities and professions (they all used to work for the good king and queen) than just being “happy” or “sleepy,” and a couple of them are women, making for an overall solid set of characters. Otherwise, there are some moments about the typical “value of kindness” theme of Snow White that are predictably cloying, like Snow buying a peasant child a toy his father can’t afford — but it’s better in The Death of Snow White than in Disney’s new movie.