Summary
What begins as a funny and quite novel dark comedy gradually morphs into a fairly tawdry splatter flick, unable to be rescued even by its excellent cast.
On paper, there’s nothing especially funny about a husband and wife plotting to kill one another. Similarly, there’s nothing all that amusing about heads and feet being blown off, a face being mulched by a lawn mower, or any of a number of messy indignities visited upon the characters in Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body (a remake of Tommy Wirkola’s 2021 movie The Trip). And yet the primary way in which this movie works is as a comedy.
Perhaps we should have known. Taccone was behind one of my favourite comedies ever, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and you don’t cast Shrinking’s Jason Segel in a serious part. Even Lisa, the wife of his character, Dan, is played by Samara Weaving (Ready or Not), the contemporary subversive scream queen who is known for turning the tables more than hiding under them. This isn’t a horror movie; it’s a shlock-comedy that softens its darker qualities by being so over-the-top that you’re never tempted to take any of it seriously.
Dan is a filmmaker, formerly of some renown, who has been reduced to helming pop-up ads and getting deeper into debt. Lisa is an aspiring actress who cheated on him years ago, dissatisfied by his controlling pedantry. Both hate each other, and are plotting to kill one another at a secluded family cabin in upstate New York. Here, in its earliest stages, the movie is at its strongest and most barbed, introducing first Dan and his plan, and then, unexpectedly, Lisa’s counter-play. Segel and Weaving both sell their mutual disgust, and you firmly believe that these two are so sick of each other that they’re capable of murder.
But they have other things to worry about. Out of nowhere – well, the local penitentiary – escaped convicts Pete (Timothy Olyphant, Lucky) and Todd (Keith “The Dean of Mean” Jardine) arrive, along with Allegra (Juliette Lewis, Cape Fear), the lunatic prison guard who helped them escape. These three become adamant on killing Dan and Lisa both, so they have no choice but to work together to survive, and in the meantime perhaps repair their marriage under highly unconventional circumstances.
Here’s the problem: Since the opening of Over Your Dead Body is so good at making us understand how much Dan and Lisa hate each other, you never end up rooting for them to get back together and survive the night. They are, in many ways, more similar to the nutcase bad guys than they are to typical heroes, so everything gets lost in the same messy, off-kilter tone. I also, if I’m being totally frank, don’t see Jason Segel and Samara Weaving as a romantic pairing at all, which is perhaps why they completely lack chemistry and feel almost like they’re performing in two different movies, even when they’re supposedly getting on the same page.
The upside is some of the more gleeful and inventive practical gore I’ve seen in quite some time, which is great fun throughout. There are a number of properly nasty kills in this that put even stuff like Mortal Kombat II, which is literally built on messy fatalities, to shame. Perhaps the movie’s secret weapon is that you’re rooting for everyone to get offed in imaginatively icky circumstances, including the leads, but that’s a bit more credit than I’m willing to give it. Instead, I think it’s just a fun flick with its priorities in only one place. But at least that place is a good time.
