The Lonely Island brand of humor might at first seem like an awkward fit for horror, but there’s an art to the timing of a well-done splatter flick that shares filmmaking DNA with comedy. As bones crunch and blood flies, the successful films find a rhythm that keeps them from becoming nauseatingly realistic. We don’t want to think about the actual maiming and dismembering, which makes keeping films that present extreme violence light on their feet a task that perfectly fits comedy directors. It’s no coincidence that two of the most popular horror directors of their era come from sketch comedy: Zach Cregger and Jordan Peele. And there are exposed veins of humor in the beloved films from people like Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, too. And so hearing that “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” co-director Jorma Taccone was helming a remake of Tommy Wirkola’s gruesome “The Trip” (renamed “Over Your Dead Body”) made perfect sense.
“Over Your Dead Body” opens with Dan (Jason Segel), a downtrodden director forced to helm pop-up ads, planning the murder of his wife Lisa (Samara Weaving). They’re going on a getaway to a family house in upstate New York and Dan is loudly talking about how Lisa is planning to go on a hike alone, a nod to the number of times idiots have murdered their spouses in an effort to make it look like a hiking accident. (Trust me, I watch a lot of “Dateline NBC.”) He has a trunk with a bag filled with tape and things to bind Lisa. It doesn’t look good. The problem is that Lisa has a plan of her own.
Just as Dan is about to chloroform the woman he married, she spins around and zaps him with a taser. It turns out that she had a plan for the weekend, too. Why are these betrothed ready to knock each other off? Well, Dan caught Lisa cheating after years of a miserable marriage. As for Lisa? Harder to say but she does loathe how unambitious, pedantic, and controlling that Dan can be. (He kinda sucks.) Of course, there’s life insurance money on both sides, too. These early scenes in which Dan and Lisa are allowed to verbalize that they’ve fallen so far out of love that they want each other dead display a crackling, witty energy that the film too often loses thereafter. They’re Segel and Weaving at their best, trading insults that have as much as impact as a physical blow.
Of course, “Over Your Dead Body” can’t just be a more violent riff on “War of the Roses” for its running time, and so the film (literally) drops in a trio of adversaries to change the temperature of the story, turning it more into a survival story. Nothing brings a couple together like trying to stay alive. A pair of escaped convicts (Timothy Olyphant & Keith Jardine) and the guard who helped them fly the coop (Juliette Lewis) become the true villains of the piece, taking Dan and Lisa hostage, essentially forcing them to work together.
And here’s where “Over Your Dead Body” starts to lose its rhythm. We aren’t given a reason to really root for Dan and Lisa to even make it through the night much less rekindle their partnership through a survival thriller. Segel’s comic timing remains aces and Weaving’s action skills are top-notch but the only reason one of them isn’t drowned in the lake is luck of the draw. And it doesn’t help that Weaving and Segel don’t have much chemistry, both as a couple and as actors. He’s often playing the comedy while she’s playing the horror. It’s not that he’s winking at the camera, but they give performances that don’t fully connect with one another, which fits for the broken couple of the first act but hampers the one forced to unite.
The movie ends up being stolen by Olyphant, who hasn’t been this truly villainous in a long time. He makes so many little smart choices here from an inquisitive head tilt to a sociopathic smirk that he runs away with the entire movie. It’s not that Lewis and Jardine are bad, but they lean into the power dynamic of this trio, getting a bit lost in Olyphant’s shadow.
As for Taccone, he struggles to manage tone a few times, most notably in an extended sexual assault sequence that goes on remarkably long and turns attempted rape into a punchline. It’s here where the movie truly loses its timing, and it only sporadically recovers it after that sequence, all the way through to an epilogue that left a truly bad taste in my mouth.
He does better with the extreme gore of it all. Let’s just say there are a shocking amount of detached body parts in this one and Taccone and his team lean into the fact that this is a remake of a film by the guy who did “Dead Snow.” If the film’s biggest problem is balancing the brutality with the humanity, Taccone at least deserves some credit for how gleefully he stages the former. Those who like wicked make-up effects and impressive fight/horror blocking will be impressed.
I just wish it wasn’t in service of something that ultimately feels hollower than it should. It might have been smarter to keep one half of the couple on the villain side of the ledger—then issues like chemistry and rooting interests might not have been distracting—or to give us more time with Dan and Lisa to care about what’s happening with their relationship. As it is, we’re not given enough reason not to want all of them to become impressively-rendered dead bodies.
This review was filed from the premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. It opens on April 24, 2026.
