Samara Weaving is quickly becoming a genuine scream queen, and Over Your Dead Body is her latest outing as a final girl. She’s paired with Jason Segel in Jorma Taccone’s most recent comedy flick, also starring Timothy Olyphant. Is it worth your time?

Over Your Dead Body Review

Over Your Dead Body movie follows a clever premise, as Dan and his wife Lisa are having some marital troubles. They plan a weekend getaway to spend some time together. Dan is, however, planning to kill Lisa. She snuffs this out, but she also had a plan to kill Dan, and chaos ensues when nearby inmates break out and hide in their house.

It’s fairly predictable as you could imagine from that setup, with a struggling married couple going through trauma to discover that they do still love each other and they want to solve their problems. That has been done a million times before, and while there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, Over Your Dead Body isn’t bringing much new to the table.

The only thing it does with regard to that is provide plenty of late breaks against our main characters that make us wonder briefly if they’ll survive and if they’ll reconcile. But ultimately, because they do, that brief moment of intrigue goes by the wayside, and it creates another of the film’s biggest issues.

The movie just drags on at the end. It seemed to be wrapping up and then just never ended. It kept going on and on just to provide more cuts and bruises to the cast of characters and kill more of them, which is another issue. Over Your Dead Body is kind of mean, and it does not care about any of the characters at all. They’re all totally expendable, and it tosses them away without a second thought.

Thematically, there is one thing I found interesting and potentially worrisome. Dan’s father insists he needs to become a man by going through a war, because otherwise, Dan is just a major disappointment from a soft, weak generation. It’s played for laughs, but then the movie does give Dan a war, and he more or less becomes a man in his marriage after the “war” he experiences.

So the moral of the story is that the younger generation needs war to make them manly? It’s a ridiculous boomer-esque take, which is strange from director Jorma Taccone. It’s satirized, but that is how the movie turns out, and it’s a weird message to put underneath the movie.

This is, at its core, a comedy, and it does mostly deliver on that front. If you’re looking for laughs, you’ll find a few of them here. You just won’t find as many as you hope or as many as there could be. Some of the gags go on too long and overstay their welcome, making them not as funny as they were a minute before.

It’s also an action movie of sorts, and it is often brutally gory. Some of the kills are unbelievably gnarly, and the other bumps and bruises everyone gets are pretty nasty, too. By the end, everyone’s been put through the wringer.

Unfortunately, they come in bursts of outrageous violence that sort of shock you as a viewer. Over Your Dead Body will be rolling along and then show you the goriest thing you’ve seen all year. If you’re expecting a gore-fest, you can be prepared for it, but when it’s random and only frequent enough to keep you on your toes, it can be challenging to sit through. It is also challenging to sit through because it’s that bloody and painful.

It probably sounds like I hated this movie, but that’s not the case. There were enough laughs and an engaging enough plot to keep me interested all the way until the end (or at least when I thought it was ending, which is when it began to really drag and take me out of it).

The cast is pretty good. Jason Segel and Samara Weaving have strong chemistry, although neither is putting out their best work here. It’s fairly blasé, but they are fully committed to the incredible physicality that these roles demand of them. Timothy Olyphant is the standout as a deranged murderer, harkening back to his Scream 2 days.

The direction is usually solid, although there were a few shots that I felt would’ve been so much better if a different or perhaps more inventive director had been behind the camera than Taccone. The cinematography is decent as well. It’s far from a bad time at the movie theater, but expectations should be kept low.

Conclusion

Over Your Dead Body sets out to make you queasy and make you laugh with an enjoyable, violent romp through a struggling relationship. To that end, it technically works. Just don’t go in expecting much more than the bare minimum there, and you’ll still come out having had a pretty good time.

Score: 2.75/5