Prime Time: Over Your Dead Body (2026)

I was hoping to make time for this after finally watching the film that it was based on (The Trip, directed by Tommy Wirkola), but sometimes things aren't meant to be. Which means I saw this was now on Amazon Prime and it seemed like the best way to spend some of my time this past weekend.

Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) are a married couple who don't love each other any more. Maybe a weekend break will help them. It will certainly help Dan once he's drugged and killed Lisa, then disposed of her body in the nearby lake. Dan isn't too smart though, which allows Lisa to soon cotton on to what he's planning. And she has her own plan. Both of them may try to kill one another, but they might also both be shown exactly how they should do things by three dangerous fugitives (played by Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, and Keith Jardine).

Written by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, working from the screenplay co-written by Wirkola, Nick Ball, and John Niven, Over Your Dead Body is the kind of film best described as a deliciously dark comedy. It's just a shame that all of the real deliciousness and darkness appears in the third act, and doesn't quite do enough to make up for the disappointments elsewhere in the runtime.

Segel and Weaving are both great performers, but neither of them are doing their best work here. It would have been nice to have more scenes letting them be more vicious to each other, but we instead just get standard griping and poor communication underlining where they both are in their marriage (the end, they're both at the end of it). Everything picks up when a strange trio gatecrash the planned violence, thanks mainly to a typically brilliant turn from Olyphant, although he's almost matched by a lovestruck Lewis. Jardine has to play a strong idiot, which he does fine, but his character is the least interesting of the core selection. The other person to mention is Paul Guilfoyle, playing a grumpy and critical father who believes that a war would be the best thing for his son. Guilfoyle is casually dismissive and careless without seeming loathsome, and he gets a couple of great moments when he comes back into the picture after his earliest scenes.

I've enjoyed some other work from director Jorma Taccone (especially the brilliant Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping), but I believe he works better with light and silly fare. Whether it's the source material or the very wobbly tonal tightrope here, he's not able to do as well here. Mind you, I am not sure many people would be able to spin gold from a sequence in which someone is threatened with anal rape if they don't promise to hand over enough money to help some desperate criminals finalise their escape plan.

If you like the stars then you'll get something from this, and there are some fantastic gore gags in the last 15-20 minutes, but it's just a shame that there wasn't more energy running through this. From the dialogue to the score, nothing really works in the first hour that helps it to get anywhere close to being as entertaining as the finale. I'll be interested to see if the original does it any better. 

4/10

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Netflix And Chill: Thrash (2026)

If you saw, and enjoyed, Crawl then you're likely to enjoy Thrash, which is almost the exact same movie, but with sharks in place of alligators. A town is flooded, which is the first big piece of the disaster movie puzzle. Then large predators move into the streets that shouldn't be there. They're bull sharks, for the most part, but there's also something even bigger roaming around.

Written and directed by Tommy Wirkola, Thrash seems to have a sense of fun as it throws together a variety of characters in an increasingly perilous situation. You get the flood. There's a young woman with agoraphobia (Dakota, played by Whitney Peak) who ends up trapped in her house. There's a pregnant woman (Lisa, played by Phoebe Dynevor) who ends up trapped in her car. There are also three foster siblings (played by Alyla Browne, Stacy Clausen, and Dante Ubaldi) who might end up benefiting from the horrible situation. A marine researcher (Djimon Hounsou) is on his way to help, and he happens to be the uncle of Dakota. There are other people onscreen who may as well be labelled "chum". Oh, and there's a huge tanker full of blood and meat that ends up being broken up, releasing the contents into the water. Because of course there is.

While I wouldn't rush to call this a good movie, the acting isn't great and the plotting is frankly ridiculous, this is pretty much exactly what you expect it to be. Once the first fins appear, Wirkola doesn't skimp on the shark action, keeping them close enough to the main characters to be a constant threat, and also delivering the occasional moment of gory fun. The CGI is generally good, certainly more consistent than the acting performances, and a few scenes stand out for highlighting the strangeness of watching a shark move through a flooded house environment.

It could all have been much better though. More characters scattered throughout could have allowed for even more blood and guts, some more inventiveness would have been welcome, and the enjoyable ridiculousness of the final act could have somehow been weighted a bit more towards the enjoyable than the ridiculous. 

Hounsou is the best of the onscreen performers, and the film does well to cut back to his story strand often enough as he tries to make his way to Shark City, and Dynevor does her best with a character defined by the looming birth that we all know is now destined to be a water birth. Browne, Clausen, and Ubaldi become easier to tolerate after their first scenes, thanks to the fact that we're shown how mean their foster parents (played by Matt Nable and Amy Matthews) are. It's a real shame that Peak is so bad, considering she feels like a contender for the lead if her performance had been stronger. Everyone plays second fiddle to the sharks, but she's not noticeably worse than everyone else onscreen.

I had fun with this, despite all of the flaws, but it had potential to be much better than it was. Maybe they'll make some smarter choices if they ever decide to make a sequel. 

6/10

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Violent Night (2022)

Take a good handful of Bad Santa, add some Home Alone, and then mix in an overflowing bowl full of Die Hard (as well as Die Hard 2: Die Harder) and you get Violent Night. If that sounds like a great time at the movies for you, and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t, then you are bound to enjoy this. Maybe not from the first scenes though.

David Harbour plays Santa Claus. Not someone who thinks they are Santa Claus. Not a Santa Claus wannabe. He IS the man in the big red suit. He even has the reindeer, the magic to get up and down chimneys, a a sack that magically fills with gifts for children. And, of course, the infamous “naughty or nice” list. He’s grown jaded though, so many kids nowadays just seem to want videogames or cash for Christmas. Young Trudy (Leah Brady) is a rare exception. All she wants for Christmas is for her parents (Jason, played by Alex Hassell, and Linda, played by Alexis Louder) to repair their relationship. Jason is working on that, but it may involve finally standing up to his rich and powerful mother (Gertrude, played by Beverly D’Angelo). Gertrude is so rich and powerful that the planned family Christmas gathering is interrupted by a group of armed robbers (headed up by John Leguizamo’s “Scrooge”) who plan an efficient and ruthless redistribution of her millions. They didn’t account for one thing though. Santa Claus is in the house, and he’s about to go to town on all of them.

Director Tommy Wirkola has been delivering excellent movies now for some time, and many horror fans have been a fan of his work since the wonderfully bonkers Dead Snow movies, so it’s no surprise to find that this is funny and gory throughout. That is what Wirkola does so well. What is a bit of a surprise, although he has some experience in the genre, is just how good the action beats are. This is a film that stays perfectly balanced between the fantastical and bone-breaking reality. The cast all nail the tone of the whole thing, and they’re helped by a script that improves greatly once you realise that it’s not being coy about the central concept.

Writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller previously served up the Sonic movies (as well as sharpening their candy canes with 12 Deadly Days for TV), and they grow in confidence once they have set everyone and everything in place. The first scenes featuring Harbour felt a bit odd to me, as I wasn’t entirely sure how we were meant to view his interpretation of Santa, but things then move along nicely, with sharp dialogue and plot construction, to get us all where we want to be . . . watching a film that is pleasingly unabashed about it being a Santa-centric Die Hard. The references and gags come thick and fast, and the fights are well-staged and impressively creative, but nothing is done in a way that feels too smug or self-indulgent. 

Harbour is a surprisingly brilliant Santa, allowed to be sweet and loving one minute, capable of deadly violence the next. He doesn’t look ripped, but certainly looks capable of handling himself (especially when he has the right weapon to hand). Leguizamo is just as brilliant as the main villain, able to be the standard baddie that we need, but also able to deliver a standard Christmas movie tale of seasonal tragedy with a straight face that stops that moment being as ridiculous as it could be. Brady is a sweet youngster, and gets more involved in the action while the third act plays out, Hassell and Louder are decent, D’Angelo is a canny bit of casting, of course, and the other person I need to mention is Cam Gigandet, comfortably giving me the best Mark Wahlberg parody since Andy Samberg (no accent, but it’s obvious from his very first line that he’s definitely written as “a Mark Wahlberg” type). Edi Patterson is also fun, playing the scheming sister of Hassell’s character, and there is fun to be had with the variety of evil henchmen, including a sociopath played by Brendan Fletcher and the oblivous-of-the-pain-they-have-coming characters played by André Eriksen and Mitra Suri.

You also get a score and soundtrack that works perfectly alongside the blood-spattered snowy visuals, and some super-cheesy one-liners that work because, well, you just have to admire the commitment to the concept. I am not sure if people will view this as a new holiday classic, but I know some might. I will certainly be aiming to add it to the roster of other films I like to watch during this time of year.

8/10

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Dead Snow 2: Red Vs. Dead (2014)

I quite enjoyed Dead Snow. There were many who liked it even more than I did, but what was there to dislike about a horror comedy featuring Nazi zombies out to reclaim their treasure stash? Dead Snow 2: Red Vs. Dead actually manages to top the first film. It's brisker, it's gorier, and it's a damn sight funnier.

Following immediately on from the events of the first movie, Martin (Vegar Hoel) continues to fight off Nazi zombies until a serious car crash lands him in hospital. The police have questions for him, of course, but the doctor at least gives him some good news. They've managed to reattach the arm that they assume he lost in the car crash. Unfortunately, he didn't lose his arm in the car crash. Evil Nazi zombie Herzog (Orjan Gamst) did. Martin now has a super-strong, evil, right arm. If he can get it under his control then it may prove useful in his attempts to stop whatever the undead soldiers have planned. He might also be able to enlist the help of the Zombie Squad. Will it be enough?

Full marks go to Tommy Wirkola here (who also helped to write the script again, this time with Stig Frode Henriksen and their leading man, Hoel). Everyone was obviously on the same page, and every scene feels as if there have been as many gore gags as possible slotted in. You're unlikely to see more intestines pulled out, heads smashed and limbs ripped off in any other major 2014 release. And the running gag with a zombie who keeps being killed and resurrected again and again creates some big laughs and also, amazingly enough, affection for the poor thing being used in such a disposable way.

Barring one or two scenes, this is a movie equivalent of a juggernaut heading down a steep hill with no brakes. It doesn't let up, and once plot details are revealed you know just where it's heading, making the anticipation of the climax almost as much fun as the actual playing out of the thing itself.

The only thing that doesn't really sit right is the Zombie Squad, made up of one guy (Martin Starr) and two girls (Jocelyn DeBoer and Ingrid Haas). As happened with the first movie, this film stumbles when making use of characters that are best labelled as nerds. Hey, I'm a nerd. I'm not using it as a negative label, but I also don't think the stereotypes used here (youngsters who use Star Wars quotes and spend a lot of their time online) would necessarily be the most heroic when thrown in to a situation involving real zombies. I know that I've always told my wife that in the event of a zombie outbreak, despite my love for her, I would be trying to race ahead of her, simply to guarantee my own life for a bit longer.

Hoel has a lot of fun in the lead role, especially in the early scenes that show him struggling with a new arm acting out of his control, and Gamst is once again great at simply glowering and emanating evil. Starr, DeBoer (who looks a LOT like Rashida Jones here . . . . . or maybe that's just me) and Haas do okay, considering that they're stuck with the poorest characters, and writer Henriksen also joins in with the onscreen fun, doing well enough in the role of Glenn Kenneth, an innocent bystander who ends up helping to defeat the zombie menace. Hallvard Holmen and Amrita Acharia play a couple of police officers who can't believe what they end up seeing, and Derek Mears is once again under heavy make-up, playing a Russian zombie named Stavarin (hence the title of the movie).

If you liked the first movie then you'll love this sequel. If you didn't like the first movie then there's still a chance that you could like this. It's splatstick comedy at its best.

8/10

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Snow-Red-Vs-Blu-ray/dp/B00OBDKO1W/ref=sr_1_3_twi_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1420143375&sr=1-3&keywords=dead+snow

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