For decades, many movies have warned that marriage isn’t easy. It requires work, communication, and commitment from both parties – and hopefully love is somewhere in that equation. But in the case that a marriage sours, as it does in Jorma Taccone’s mayhem-ridden horror comedy Over Your Dead Body, you might not want to follow this couple’s example on how to work out differences.
After seven years of marriage, Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) are at breaking point in their relationship. The he passion has dried up, and financial troubles have taken over. The pair take a weekend break at their lakeside cabin only to discover they each had plans to kill one another.
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Taccone, a member of The Lonely Island who directed the comedy group’s cult classic Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, knows a thing or two about delivering a devastatingly good retort and upping the ante to an absurd degree. In a number of scenes, Taccone cleverly foreshadows objects and details without always necessarily drawing attention to it at the moment – like a knife missing in the kitchen – that later satisfyingly pays off. Adapting the original Norwegian film I Onde Dager, screenwriters Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney delight in subverting audience expectations. The story jumps back and forth in time building parallel timelines into one chaotic showdown at the cabin. Each new reveal raises questions about the character’s intentions. Aside from one sour moment when the movie pauses for a brutal game threatening sexual violence that feels out of place, the film keeps an overall lighthearted tone despite the characters’ copious blood and body parts loss.
While resident scream queen Weaving makes perfect sense for a horror movie, she’s just as good delivering pithy one-liners and playing up Lisa’s pouty, disaffected actress persona. Segal’s character is her perfectly mismatched partner: fussy and means well until it’s time to do harm. Though it seems a little questionable as to how their characters got together in the first place, they’re quite believable as the unhappily married type. Later, two escaped convicts, Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), and a corrections officer named Allegra (Juliette Lewis) join the mêlée, bringing their own toxic dynamic and penchant for violence and Harry Potter references. As the trio’s ringleader, Olyphant puts on an impish grin and a barely restrained maniacal presence to the film while his co-star Jardine brings a muscle-bound physical threat but without the mental acuity to match and Lewis’ firestarter of an officer turned fugitive is perhaps the most combative personality of them all.
While not entirely flawless in its execution, Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body is a thrilling and hilarious horror movie that delivers plenty of plot twists and gruesome wounds. It’s sharply comedic and bloody, with a cast that’s all on board to enact the script’s called-for chaos. Despite all the violence, the film doesn’t lose sight of the flawed couple at the heart of the film as they fight against and then for each other.
