An unhappy husband and wife plan to murder one another, but end up battling against real killers. There are some brief encouragements to make positive choices in our marriages—to remember what we once loved about our partners. But the majority of this film is a foul, gruesome and sometimes sadistic drudge.
Dan is roiling in an inner cesspool of angst.
Dan’s work as a director of online pop-up commercials is floundering. His day-to-day is empty. Frankly, he feels small, hopeless, directionless. And it’s all because of that woman, his wife. He doesn’t even want to think of her name and further pollute his inner monologue.
For Lisa’s part—that’s her name, Lisa—she feels almost as angry and frustratingly empty as Dan. She can’t seem to get a decent role in any halfway decent play. And though that man, her husband, could potentially help open a door somewhere, he refuses. Lisa has even slipped into a not-so-secret affair with an actor she knows. Not because of love, mind you, but more as a distraction from feeling lousy about herself.
Together, this couple is a quietly seething trainwreck. Even if one were to say something complimentary, the other would see it as sarcasm. Their nice statements drip with just-shy-of-yelling profanities.
Ah, but Dan has a plan to fix all that.
He’s planning a, uh, getaway of sorts. He has all his supplies: rolls of duct tape, ropes, plastic bags, bottles of chloroform. He and Lisa are heading up to their cabin this weekend.
In fact, Dan has already been sharing details with his coworkers about his plans for a relaxing weekend and Lisa’s (ick) plans for a long hike in the hills. There might even be snow. Or rain. Or at least very windy weather. But, hey, she’s got her mind set on it.
Lisa, on the other hand, has told her bestie about Dan’s crazy desire to go hunting together this weekend. Everybody knows she hates guns. But Dan insists it’ll be fun. She just hopes she doesn’t drop the silly thing and accidentally shoot anything. (Or anyone.)
Yep. Both spouses are secretly miserable. And both have special plans for their getaway weekend.
However, neither Dan nor Lisa knows that a pair of stone-cold baddies just escaped from a prison that’s not too far from their cabin. Just think of what kind of wrinkle that might add to someone’s weekend plans.
Aren’t getaways great?
[The following sections contain spoilers.]
After Dan and Lisa vent at each other about their dissatisfaction with their marriage and each other, they are faced with some dire circumstances. Those terrible things remind them both of loving feelings they once had when they first married. They talk about their early desires to be a team and face the world together. And they both apologize for the choices they made that drove them apart. The couple ends up fighting as a team against their tormentors.
Allegra—one of the people who invade Dan and Lisa’s cabin—has strange ideas about a car’s spirit coming back to haunt someone.
Killers Pete and Todd escape a local prison thanks to the help of a prison guard named Allegra. After breaking into Dan and Lisa’s cabin, Pete and Allegra quickly jump into having sex on the dining room table. We see Pete’s movements and bare backside. Pete and Allegra begin kissing and caressing one another on a second occasion, too. They make out, then she pulls down her pants and lustfully calls for him to engage in sex before they’re interrupted.
In one scene, a ripped, muscular man tears off his shirt. Dan and Lisa kiss. Dan’s dad suggests that he’s going away for the weekend to get some time away from “all your Hollywood pedophiles.” It’s revealed that Lisa had a sexual affair with another man.
Dan and Lisa are physically abusive to each other as they jockey to see who might get the upper hand—alternately tying each other up and threatening to kill each other with guns and knives. Lisa hits Dan in the face with the stock of a rifle, bloodying his nose. She also tazes him. Dan, in turn, hits Lisa in the head with a hammer. They wrestle and slam one another other around a room.
Dan’s friend, Henry, accidentally gets shot in the chest with a shotgun. The blast rips a huge hole in the man’s chest that the camera examines. Thereafter, Allegra, Todd and Pete enter the scene and things quickly become much darker, sadistic and brutally bloody.
For instance, an individual gets shot and the shotgun pellets are dug out of his bare backside. Someone’s foot gets stabbed by a large knife, and he pulls the blade out. Later this same man gets repeatedly battered face-first into the ground, and then he’s pinned to the ground with a wooden stake through his hand. He, again, pulls out the weapon—only this time losing several fingers in the process.
Allegra sets up a game that she says the prison guards created. She describes how they’d form a large circle and then toss two prisoners into it to see who would dominate and rape the other first. Allegra puts Dan and Todd in a similar circle. Todd removes his shirt and begins massaging his genitals. Then he hits and shoves a panicked Dan, eventually pushing Dan over a table and pulling Dan’s pants down. Allegra comments lustfully about the upcoming sexual assault. But after further stimulation (just out of the camera’s view) Todd is unable to arouse himself for completion of the game. He later grabs Dan’s clothed crotch forcefully.
A woman’s foot gets ripped open by a shotgun blast. She writhes in pain before exposing the wound to the camera, toes barely connected by shreds of tissue and muscle. Her leg then gets snapped in two by a forceful blow.
A large man gets stabbed in the back over and over by all of the various blades in a butcher’s block. He stands and pulls out one blade to use as a weapon of his own before getting stabbed in the neck by a large, sharp object. Someone’s head gets obliterated by a shotgun blast.
Another person gets shot in the face by a rifle, leaving a massive hole where her face once was. An individual gets pushed face-first into the whirling blades of a lawnmower; his entire upper body gets shredded. A man gets thumped by a speeding car. Another vehicle smashes into a tree at speed. Its occupants are left slashed and bleeding heavily.
A man’s ear gets shot off, another guy’s nose gets bitten off. Legs and chests get impaled. People get choked and beaten in the face. Someone gets battered by a billiard ball in a sock. And in all of these battering, thumpings, impalements and flesh-rending attacks, the living recipients limp away with open wounds and badly swollen and blood-coated features.
The film’s dialogue is riddled with profanity in the form of nearly 100 f-words and 16 s-words along with multiple uses each of the words “h—,” “a–hole,” “d–mit” and “b–ch.” There are a handful of crude references to male and female genitalia and two exclamations of the c-word.
God’s and Jesus’ names are abused a total of seven times (blending God with “d–n” on three occasions and joining Jesus’ name with the f-word once).
When Lisa walks into the cabin she yells out “It’s wine-o’clock!” Thereafter we see her drink several large glasses of wine. Dan drinks wine and several glasses of vodka. Later, Pete, Todd and Allegra all drink glasses of vodka and Allegra pours some on a wound.
Dan pours chloroform on a rag and moves to use it on someone, but he is stopped.
Dan’s father is portrayed as a grumpy conservative who hates everything and everyone and wishes that he had died while fighting in war as a young man. In fact, he declares that war “shapes a man” and wishes a war upon his son. Both Dan and Lisa were at one point hoping to claim life insurance money after killing their spouse. Dan’s dad hits a guy in the throat and steals his car.
Dan wakes from being tazed and realizes he urinated on himself. Someone else is splashed with a soup can full of urine. While trying to be heroic at one point, Dan leans over and vomits repeatedly.
The idea for Over Your Dead Body must have made for a doozy of a studio pitch:
There’s a husband and wife who hate each other enough that they plot to kill one another. Only, they then have to fight off some real killers. Oh, and it’s a comedy. Yeah, with lots of blood and guts and blown-off body parts and stuff.
It’s odd. Filmmakers used to employ horrific gore and sadistic torment onscreen to unsettle an audience. Now they use that same wince-worthy muck in hopes of making viewers laugh. I’m not sure what to say about that.
I do, however, know what to say about this film. It starts with an interesting commentary about marriage in our modern world. It’s the sort of over-the-top scenario that could have been comedically thought-provoking in a stage play. (The film’s best parts are all spilled in the movie trailer.) But then Over Your Dead Body turns sadistically dark and tiptoes right up to the edge of abusive porn.
This film isn’t very funny. It doesn’t have anything really constructive to say. It’s gory and foul. And it simply leaves you wondering where all the comedy writers have gone. What island are they holed up on?
Maybe they’ll make a comeback someday.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
