The best way to sneak a comedy into theaters these days, it seems, is to make it a crime drama. Over Your Dead Body is billed as the latest effort from the director Jorma Taccone'a surprising name to be attached, considering his filmography. His previous features are Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and MacGruber, two of the better comedies released in the 2010s (back when such things still regularly appeared in cinemas). But that resume sits somewhat uncomfortably against a poster with five stone-faced actors wielding guns and knives'announcing a rather grim-looking thriller in which blood will be shed and tough life lessons learned. What a riot. Taccone's film is certainly much more serious than the spoofy, anarchic projects he's made in the past, including his work as a writer on Saturday Night Live. But it's still, at its core, an attempt at a riotous black comedy, one indebted to obvious masters of the form such as the Coen brothers and the more horror-adjacent auteur Sam...
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