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A number of filmmakers previously known for making comedies have then become great directors of horror. Jordan Peel, David Gordon Green, Zach Cregger and now, with his astonishing first feature film Obsession, Curry Barker are all example of this. I guess there is something about being able to build tension and manage timing that is key to both cracking jokes and scaring people. Often their work actually juggles humour and horror really well without either compromising the other. 

With Over Your Dead Body though we have a clear case where it’s gone a bit wrong. This new movie from Jorma Taccone, who worked on SNL and made 2016’s parody Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, is tonally all over the place and makes some very poor judgments about what is funny and/or scary to a level that capsizes the whole thing. It isn’t really a horror but that’s part of the problem because I think it wants to be. It is certainly very gory.

It is a shame because the film starts off really well with Jason Segal and Samara Weaving playing a married couple who head away to their lakeside cabin with murderous intent toward one another. It is fun seeing the two of them play off against each other, with each getting the upper hand in turn and in these opening scenes the dark comedy is actually very effective. Shortly though some more seasoned killers randomly enter the mix and it starts to take misstep. 

The moment it all goes wrong is when the invaders start toying with our couple by threatening and then attempted to rape one of them. It is key that this takes place between two men and I think the opinion of all involved; the director, the writers and the actors, is that this somehow makes it okay. It isn’t really played for laughs and there is an element of terror but it is not supposed to be very upsetting. This movie is not Deliverance. There is absolutely no way they would play out this scene if it were a man and a woman. To do so would be unthinkable yet this way round it apparently isn’t. Pulp Fiction commits the same crime in the famous Zed sequence. (Can you imagine that with a woman as the captive?) Pulp Fiction was thirty two years ago though when gay panic was rife in films and TV shows. Even though the tone of the scene is uncertain it seems that Taccone and his team still think this is just a little bit funny and that is their justification, consciously or otherwise. 

From this point the story spins off into a weird mix of extreme violence and comedy moments that simply don’t gel. The drama develops but at the same time it is punctuated with moments of broad comedy. The arrival of the father of Segal’s character and everything that follows on from that feels like it comes from an entirely different film and then the denouement just sits there like a red squeaky clown nose on a tiger, it doesn’t fit.

There is quite a lot in the movie that works. The characterisation and performances are cliched but engaging, Timothy Olyphant in particular, but it is clumsy and ultimately mishandled.