Over Your Dead Body Review: Samara Weaving And Jason Segel Deliver Hilariously Gory Marital Mayhem

After the end of the Hays Production Code in 1968 and against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, independent filmmakers ran headfirst into ultraviolence and exploitation cinema. Home invasion films like "The Last House on the Left," "Straw Dogs," and "The House on the Edge of the Park" explored the extent of human depravity. The cycle was repeated in the aughts amid the Iraq War, with films like "Saw," "Hostel," and "Eden Lake" examining the most wretched displays of inhumanity possible (with some killer gore set pieces to boot). We're due for another resurgence, but the difference between the 1970s and the 2000s is that we're currently living in a timeline beyond satire. The unfathomable callousness is still on display, but in America, at least, it's being enacted by blithering idiots who cannot go a single day without making our country the laughingstock of the entire world.

The Lonely Island co-founder Jorma Taccone's "Over Your Dead Body," like the Norwegian film "The Trip" it's remaking, implicitly understands our current timeline. On paper, this film about a husband and wife traveling to a remote cabin with the intention of killing each other for the insurance money only to be ambushed by a trio of escaped criminals hellbent on torturing them for being in their way, has all of the ingredients to usher in the next cycle of brutality. However, because our current existence is equally unserious as it is absolute hell, that tonal whiplash needs to be commemorated.

"Over Your Dead Body" is a more overtly comedy-forward take on the nastier, over-the-top violence of "The Trip," providing a playground of carnage for the star-studded ensemble cast to have an absolute ball.

Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) are a director/actor couple in a dying marriage at the center of the story, and both commit with every cell in their body. Weaving maintains her place as the Patron Saint of "Good For Her" horror performances and has plenty of moments to showcase why she has the best scream in the business. Segel, meanwhile, is given the space to flip his usual easygoing, comedic charm into something truly noxious. As Dan, he is a hollow, pitiful figure with more bluster than backbone. But because he still has those same soft doe eyes that made a generation fall in love with Nick Andopolis on "Freaks and Geeks" despite also being a mess of a human being, you can't help but root for them to figure it out and survive.

Their dynamic is convincingly volatile, and you truly believe they will tear each other apart if given the opportunity. It's their toxic energy that keeps the movie running. Their mutual contempt for one another is oddly compelling, and it lays a solid foundation for Jorma Taccone's humor to explode. Maybe it's because I've only been married for six years (or that I married someone who doesn't suck), but I've yet to see what people mean when they say "marriage is hard work." My marriage is the easiest part of my life (until the government invalidates it because I'm gay, but whatever), so watching Dan and Lisa's resentment boil over into marital mayhem is an unrecognizable delight. The cat-and-mouse antics of their murder plots could have sustained the entire film on its own, but when the trio of goons (Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, and Keith Jardine) enter the picture, "Over Your Dead Body" pivots slightly from its source material.

The arrival of the murderers and the gullible correctional officer who helped them escape forces Dan and Lisa to work together, and the two bring very different energies to the dilemma at hand. It's a tough balancing act to pull off because these are characters forced to help each other survive, yet moments before wanted the other dead. It isn't until well into the third act that we start to see a glimmer of what their relationship was like before they grew resentful toward one another, which will likely knock some viewers off-kilter and struggle to root for them when they're still in "I Hate You But Not As Much As I Hate These Freaks" mode.

Many of the film's biggest set pieces are pulled directly from "The Trip," sometimes replicating the same camera angles, but the changes made by writers Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney ("BriTANicK") are welcome — especially with regard to an extended scene centered around sexual assault. It remains the most uncomfortable moment of the film and will undoubtedly be a make-or-break moment for a majority of the audience, but without delving into spoiler territory, there's a bleakly transparent acknowledgement of the state of the industrial prison complex on display. It's one of the many Rorschach tests built into the film, where what you laugh at/don't laugh at says more about you than what the script chose to present.

For as Looney Tunes-esque as the violence repeatedly is, "Over Your Dead Body" has a lot to say. Most will be too gleefully preoccupied by faces being literally blown off or a skinhead being turned into a human knife block to hear it, but by god the gore is glorious enough to compensate for anything lost in translation.

With Jorma Taccone at the helm, it's expected that "Over Your Dead Body" would be laugh-out-loud funny, and it is, from tip to tail. As a remake of "The Trip," it's also expected that "Over Your Dead Body" would be ridiculously brutal, and it is, while never pulling its punches. It's a film that can only exist in a constant state of contradiction, and thanks to the beautiful, idyllic greenery surrounding the lakehouse, the larger-than-life bloodbath is contained to this isolated home. Who knows what kind of hell could be unfolding at the other houses across the lake? We'll never know; we can only hope that it isn't as destructive as what we're watching unfold.

When Dan and Lisa stop turning on each other and focus on the people threatening their lives, it's the first time in years that they're reminded of why they fell in love with each other in the first place. It's even more apparent that these two were truly made for each other when the film's epilogue hits, and we're granted access to the understanding that even terrible people you'd never want to have dinner with can find each other and build a life that makes sense for them.

"Over Your Dead Body" pulls off the magic trick of bringing exploitation cinema into a timeline that's a walking parody of itself, delivering one of the bloodiest and most entertaining films of the year. I suspect that 30 years from now, when the ultraviolence cycle repeats itself once again, film scholars will look back at this film and say, "Wow, they really nailed it with that one."

/Film Rating: 7 out of 10

"Over Your Dead Body" arrives in theaters on April 24, 2026.