‘Over Your Dead Body’ SXSW Review – A Raucously Entertaining Splatstick Comedy

The spouses in Over Your Dead Body take the “Till death do us part” part of their wedding vows to savage, ultra-gory new heights. Director Jorma Taccone (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) and screenwriters Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney dial up the splatstick insanity of Tommy Wirkola’s The Trip in their raucously entertaining remake.

At the center of the comedic carnage are Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving), a miserable couple as unhappy with each other as their stagnant careers. Dan is a director trapped in commercials when he’d rather make movies, while Lisa is a struggling actress still seeking her big break. He whisks Lisa away under the guise of a romantic weekend excursion and recharge at his dad’s cabin, with the ultimate goal to kill her. He’s unaware that she, too, intends to use their trip as a cover for murder. But their murderous intent gets derailed when they discover a trio of violent fugitives hiding out in the attic, throwing the lethal dissolution of their marriage into mayhem.

It’s not just the comedic talents of Segel and Weaving that get Over Your Dead Body off to a deeply funny start, but a script that positions them as, despite their best plans and research, woefully inept and ill-equipped to execute. Their early bickering and venomous jabs set the stage for a brutal yet hilarious reckoning, yet their explosive confrontation is only the appetizer for the satisfying comedy of errors that ensues when the fugitives enter the fray.

Jorma Taccone and editor Jeremy Cohen earn additional laughs for the nonlinear structure that frequently rewinds the clock to reveal new wrinkles, like introducing Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), and Allegra (Juliette Lewis) with a crash before cutting to days prior to reveal how they arrived at the cabin. And their arrival marks the turning point where Over Your Dead Body unleashes the comedically gory floodgates that push the splatsick brutality to extremes. The fugitives, a twisted version of the Three Stooges, are as dysfunctional as Dan and Lisa, though much, much more vicious in their bloodlust.

Everyone takes a nasty pummeling here, and the gruesome deaths are as wonderfully executed with an emphasis on practical effects. Even the film’s characters are genuinely surprised by the amount of pain they can inflict or receive, which in itself elicits laughs. To that end, Jardine stands out as the hulking brawn of the villains, one so daft that it’s almost disarming right until he switches into terrifying executioner. And Todd is a tank when it comes to extreme bodily damage.

Timothy Olyphant and Juliette Lewis excel at villain roles, but the layering of comedy lets them really cut loose with Pete and Allegra’s killer quirks. Paul Guilfoyle threatens to steal the film in his brief but unforgettable turn as Dan’s ornery, no-nonsense father, Michael, whose arrival into the fray earned deserved vocal cheers from a rowdy SXSW audience, one that made dialogue occasionally tricky to hear through the roaring laughter. That is to say that the jokes and physical antics land here. 

Where Taccone’s update of Wirkola’s film flounders a bit is in its uneven handling of the spouses. Once motives for murder are laid bare, it leaves the neurotic Dan with the much meatier arc of self-reflection and accountability. It can leave Samara Weaving sidelined by the film’s focus on having Dan correct past mistakes by putting himself much more firmly in harm’s way. 

The closing coda, while intentionally over the top with a cameo, strives more for laughs with its hyperbolic style than for an organic extension of Dan and Lisa’s journey. It’s a minor quibble considering the rip-roaring comedy that preceded it.

Jorma Taccone captures the look of The Trip and its lakeside setting, but dials up the gory chaos while spending more emphasis on the dysfunctional relationships to inject stakes and suspense. It works, especially with a cast game to come unhinged.

Over Your Dead Body is one of the funniest films of the year; it happens to be one of its bloodiest, too.

Over Your Dead Body premiered at SXSW and releases in theaters on April 24.