Over Your Dead Body (now on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) looks amazing on paper: Jorma Taccone, one-third of The Lonely Island collective, directs Samara Weaving and Jason Segel as a married couple plotting to murder each other, and Timothy Olyphant and Juliette Lewis as insane people. An American version of Tommy Wirkola’s insanely violent Norwegian black comedy The Trip, Dead Body went absolutely nowhere theatrically (box office: $2 million), a fact predicted by bits of its sarcastic meta-dialogue about how “Everything on streaming is great!” (Note: The Trip is a Netflix joint.) So in many ways, it seems like it has it all, save for your attention – now let’s see if it’s worthy of that precious resource.
The Gist: Did he really just blow his nose and show it to her? And is it me, or is she open-mouth chomping on a protein bar? These are just the tips of icebergs in terms of how this couple annoys each other. To death. So much to death that early scenes feature Dan (Segel) hiding duct tape, rope, and a hacksaw in the trunk, and loudly telling anyone who’ll listen that he and his wife Lisa (Weaving) are going up to the cabin and she’s planning on taking a very dangerous hike into the mountains by herself. Uh huh. Your premeditation is showing, bro. These people suck: He’s a bottom-of-the-barrel director of pop-up ads who helmed a movie once and only once. She’s a stage actress of questionable talent. They’re still together for reasons we cannot discern but can probably guess are a tangled mess, because marriages are always complicated and not always logical.
Well, guess what? Dan makes Lisa a lovely dinner of what he thought was her favorite food – note: it wasn’t her favorite food – thinking it would be her last meal, then when he sneaks up behind her with a chloroform-soaked rag, she spins and tases the actual literal piss right out of his urethra, the first significant appearance of many bodily fluids in this movie. And at this point we see the first of several goofy-ass flashbacks, in which Lisa loudly tells anyone who’ll listen that they’re going up to the cabin and, for some dumb reason, Dan wants them to go hunting. How ridiculous! It seems this couple has more in common than they think, and not just that they’re premeditating each other’s murder, but that they’re both really f—ing terrible at it.
So Dan and Lisa get to it. There’s a scuffle and some blood and smacking and punching and pointing of shotguns at each other and the accidental shooting death of Dan’s partner, an idiot named Henry (Jake Curran), and some wrestling and kicking when a bullet hits the ceiling and KERSPLAT, it caves in under the weight of three morons: escaped convicts Todd (Keith Jardine) and Pete (Olyphant), and their corrupt cop accomplice Allegra (Lewis). They tie up Dan and Lisa in the basement, and all of a sudden, maybe it’s not such a big deal that he bankrupted them and she cheated. Perhaps the moral of this story is that attempting to cold-bloodedly slay your spouse, then turning heel and fighting for your spouse’s survival against a trio of fried-banana-brained maniacs is a viable alternative to couples therapy.
It’s probably easier on the pocketbook, at least.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Well, this isn’t exactly a Bergman-level exploration of marriage dynamics. It’s The War of the Roses as directed by the Coen Bros, if they didn’t know when to stop.
Performance Worth Watching: Let’s just say Lewis’ forehead veins come out to PLAY as she and Olyphant fully unhinge themselves.
Sex And Skin: A not-too-graphic sex scene featuring Olyphant’s glutes and a close-up of another butt getting buckshot plucked from the meat; otherwise, the word “graphic” is reserved for all the maiming and bloodletting and shooting-in-the-face-ing.
Our Take: Over Your Dead Body is a grocery list of nasty misdeeds and bodily fluids: Mangled limbs, knives in backs, hacked-off fingers, bitten-off noses, an utterly vile prison-sex wrestling match, all resulting in blood, urine, barf, and various glops and liquids painting the scenery. It had me wondering if we’d seen any spinal fluid hit the dirt, and if it had, would we have noticed, because is spinal fluid colorless? The mind wanders.
But it wanders only after the fact, because the film keeps us present with extreme prejudice. It’s hard to look away as it veers from a functional acerbic Bickersons poisoned-relationship comedy into a brutal live-action cartoon that’s essentially a 21st-century sadistic Looney Tunes. As bones snap, pancreases are lacerated by kitchen knives and pitchforks, and faces are shot off with shotguns without a single utterance of “Wabbit season!”, we rollercoaster through crayzee cutaways and twists as Taccone and the cast work to one-up each successive nasty, nasty scene. There are moments here that are so shockingly repugnant, laughter leapt from my esophagus in an act of self-preservation. Is this stuff truly funny? Yeah, kind of, and I’m not particularly proud to admit that. (Note: One thing that remains not particularly funny at all is the ironic needle drop of an upbeat song over a scene of extreme violence. Banish this trope to the moon of Uranus!)
But the heart elucidates what the brain cannot, or something, I guess. The issue some will have with Over Your Dead Body is the gross putrescence of these ucky characters – who gets our emotional investment, the killers over here or the killers over there? Do we root for Dan and Lisa’s happily ever after, or would you rather see all of them end up on the vulture-feeding pile? I have no good answer for that. This is quite the assemblage of assholes, like a parade of donkeys that stopped to lift tail and let rip. You get the sense that Taccone wouldn’t want it any other way.
Our Call: If you made it this far, you already know if this is Your Kind Of Movie or not. For me, it worked more in fits and starts than poops and farts. STREAM IT, but know what you’re getting into first.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.