Over Your Dead Body ★★★

The Burton’s were once a happy couple. Now, they are anything but. Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) are unfulfilled artists. Dan is a one-time feature film director who is now left to direct pop-up ads. Lisa is an aspiring actress whose work is mostly in off-off-Broadway productions. They are drowning in debt and living in an unhappy marriage with somebody they feel wholly unsupported by. This weekend, they are headed out to the family cabin for a getaway. Dan is telling everybody about Lisa’s plan to go on a hike, despite Dan’s pleas that it is dangerous. Lisa is telling everybody about Dan’s plan to go hunting, despite Lisa’s pleas that it is dangerous. What is, they claim, supposed to be a romantic getaway for the couple is actually a planned murder. Dan plans to kill Lisa. Lisa plans to kill Dan. Neither has any idea that the other is plotting the same thing they are until they get to the cabin.

Director Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body is a remake of the Norwegian film The Trip directed by Tommy Wirkola. It is wild and gory, packed full of quirky humor, dry wit, and goofy gags. As one might expect, Dan and Lisa’s trip to kill one another is as much about their shared attempts at dispatching with their spouse as it is about these two finding some of what they lost as a couple, albeit doing it while drenched in blood and after having to fight for their lives. You see, they accounted for everything. Dan planned around his squeamishness by hiring his ex-convict buddy Henry (Jake Curran) to handle some of the gorier details of dispatching Lisa’s dead body. They both had planned out their excuses and intended to lean on their limited acting abilities to sell their spouse’s death as some impossible and tragic accident. They had all the tools and gadgets they would need. Except, they had no way to plan for the one wrench in both of their plots: the appearance of two escaped convicts, Todd (Keith Jardine) and Pete (Timothy Olyphant), and a prison guard, Allegra (Juliette Lewis), who is having an affair with Pete, who have been hiding out in the cabin and were unhappily forced into the attic by Dan and Lisa’s unexpected arrival.

Over Your Dead Body is a case of body horror bombast with plenty of goofy maiming, slicing, stabbing, chewing (yes, chewing), crunching, and splattering, which will gross-out anybody squeamish in the audience and delight any sickos who appreciate such chaos. It rarely rewrites the tropes of the genre, leaning on these gory bits and the characters’ often quirky and deadpan reactions to the chaos befalling them as the main source of entertainment. It is very rewarding and enjoyable in this, making good use of Segel and Weaving’s comedic strengths and Weaving’s comfort being coated in blood in a horror movie. Segel’s performance is very much in line with his work in the television show Shrinking, albeit instead of mourning his wife’s death in that show, he is trying to bring it about in Over Your Dead Body. Possessed with sadness that is written all over his face and a placid and checked out demeanor that infuses his every action, Segel’s Dan is equally contemptible for what he is plotting and just enough of a screw-up to make it all funny. Weaving’s Lisa is a bit more cunning, albeit her own plan has some undoings that she never accounted for, while Weaving plays Lisa with a chilly edge she shows to Dan initially and a barely contained contempt for him that radiates out before their mutual murder plots come out into the open. 

By the time everything is out there and the pair are fighting for their lives with these sociopathic convicts trying to kill them, Weaving and Segel’s performances shift. Moving from playing spouses trying to kill one another to actually trying to fight for one another, Weaving’s chilliness and Segel’s dourness blend into a rather touching portrayal of marriage, of how they lost one another, and a reveal of some vulnerability that they had long ago boxed away, hidden by their contempt for how their spouse and dynamic had changed over the years. Weaving and Segel are both very talented actors, well utilized in both the dramatic and the comedic demands of Over Your Dead Body.

Olyphant and Lewis often steal the show with their more chaotic dynamic. Olyphant plays a true sociopathic who revels in causing pain. Lewis’s deluded Allegra really thinks Pete loves her and did not just use her to escape prison, while also having a manic sexual energy that often interrupts Pete’s more serious planning about how to keep their escape going and how to kill Dan and Lisa. There is a scene in the cabin’s basement that does feel as though it trivializes a serious subject and pushes the envelope a bit too much, making for more of an uncomfortable and unnecessary scene of almost-violence. A bit in that scene about Pete’s admiration for Dan’s one feature film and his glib nature about Dan’s bleak immediate future does make for good comedic relief, however. Paul Guilfoyle appears as Dan’s father Michael and his initial appearance is pretty typical generational nonsense with Michael lamenting about how Dan’s generation is terrible and pampered. However, by the time Michael pops back up, Guilfoyle turns the character into some seriously good fun. Guilfoyle chews every bit of scenery available to him and Michael’s role as a narrative wild card is a good one that Taccone keeps up his sleeve, waiting for the perfect time to deploy him.

Over Your Dead Body can be a bit more tedious in its plotting and in its reliance on convention, but in the dynamic of its characters and the chaos that befalls them, it has a bloody Home Alone type quality to it with everyday household items turned into weapons of destruction and bloody carnage that gives it a fun and contagiously enjoyable energy. Taccone knows his way around comedy as shown in his work with The Lonely Island and in past directorial efforts like Popstar: Never Stop Popping with a sharp satirical edge to Over Your Dead Body – especially when it comes to the state of the film industry and the filmmaking process – as well as a heartwarming nearly romantic comedy vibe to its relationship dynamics. Over Your Dead Body is nothing special, but it is a good time and with a good cast, a fast pace, and enough meat on its bones to offer a rather thoughtful look at relationships, all more than enough to make Over Your Dead Body into a rewarding experience.