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I'm the kind of Lonely Island fan that will watch anything Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, or Jorma Taccone are cooking up (and while wearing my bootleg Awesometown shirt that I got off RedBubble in 2009, mind you). So when I learned that Taccone was directing an English-language remake of The Trip, a Norwegian action-horror comedy about a couple who plan on murdering each other during a relaxing stay at their cottage, I was sold.
Since his last solo directorial venture was 2010's MacGruber, which gave us 91 minutes of Will Forte ripping out tracheas with his bare hands, I had a feeling we were in for a funny, moderately violent ride. In reality, however, Over Your Dead Body is a nearly two-hour-long gorefest with kills that would make Michael Myers jealous – and no, we never cut away from a severed finger or stab to the head. Beneath all the blood, however, is a surprisingly sweet love story that will have you clapping in the theater at the end (and calling your significant other to suggest some good old-fashioned couples therapy).
Dearly Departed
The film stars Jason Segel and Samara Weaving as Dan and Lisa, an unhappily married couple living in Hollywood. Dan is a director who managed to make one feature-length film before being resigned to doing cell phone advertisements, and Lisa is an aspiring actor (with an accent described as "British mixed with the Devil"). When the two decide to go up to the cabin for the weekend, we quickly learn that Dan (who is not a killer by nature) is planning to kill Lisa for her insurance money… and that, surprise, surprise, Lisa is planning on doing the same. Their plans get interrupted, however, when a group of escaped convicts (Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, Keith Jardine) taking refuge in the cabin decide to hold them hostage.
It starts out as your typical action comedy (though Taccone is careful to let the camera linger on a missing knife or cereal on the floor for some Knives Out-style foreshadowing), with Dan and Lisa bonking each other over the head and in the face with various blunt objects, and then things get real. It starts with hitting Jardine's beefy bald prisoner Todd over the head with a pool table ball, and escalates to a spine snapped via kitchen knife, a face pushed into a lawn mower, bitten off cartilage (and I'll be thinking about, 'Your nose tastes like sh*t,' for the rest of my life, probably), and blown-off faces.
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"I sort of pride myself on that," Taccone tells GamesRadar+ when asked about blending comedy and hyper-violence. "And to me, because this movie has so many different tones sort of etched into one, you know, it's like it's kind of a suspense thriller, then it becomes this other thing, and then it's almost like an action movie, and it's ramping [up] the whole time."
Two of Hearts
Over Your Dead Body wouldn't succeed (especially not the ending) without the surprisingly wild chemistry between Weaving and Segel. Weaving is a scream queen, perhaps best known as the ultimate final girl in Ready or Not, and Segel is a comedy king who got his start in the short-lived cult classic comedy series Freaks and Geeks. Though Weaving is no stranger to wielding a knife and spitting out someone else's blood, this was something brand new for Segal.
"There was a bunch of stuff in this movie that I had no idea how to do, and Sam did know how to do," Segel tells GamesRadar+. "So I really got to learn from her expertise, which was really exciting for me. 20 years into a profession where there's very little that comes [to me] where I'm like, 'I have no idea how to do this.' But some of the stuff, I had no idea how to do, literally no idea. What am I supposed to do when that thing goes through my hand? And she taught me."
Though the first half of the film is driven by Dan and Lisa's hatred for each other, their struggle for survival in the second half is driven purely by the love that they still have for each other. And if that wasn't there, I'm not sure how else the movie would succeed. But it makes you wonder: if they had just talked about their feelings over the years instead of letting resentment build… maybe it wouldn't have led to two different murder plots (one more convoluted than the other)?
It's in the most high-tension, high-stakes parts of the film that Dan and Lisa finally tell each other what they've been holding back throughout the back half of their marriage. And while I won't spoil the ending for you, I will say that the message here is more or less that love really and really truly prevails… and that cartilage tastes really, really bad. Even Pete (Olyphant) and Allegra (Lewis), classic tale of a convict and the prison guard who helped him escape, have relationship problems throughout the film, and their unwillingness to work it out parallels Dan and Lisa's all-out fight for survival in an impossibly clever way (thanks to the brilliant writing of Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher).
True love will find you in the end
Over Your Dead Body is far from your typical action-comedy, and that's what makes it so damn good. It's even better watched in a crowded theater, with everyone around you squirming, screening, and aw-ing in unison like we're watching a popcorn slasher or another installment of Scream. When I asked Taccone if this signaled his foray into horror, he simply said that he'd "really like to do a version of Goonies." Segel, on the other hand, said he has always "walked the line between charming and creepy," and that he absolutely wouldn't mind (citing Forgetting Sarah Marshall and I Love You, Man as comedies that could've gone horror in just a couple of script changes).
Love prevails, though it's often goopy, bloody, and fleshy… it's worth sticking it out for.
Over Your Dead Body is in theaters now. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
