Vacations can be hard. Anticipation and expectations run headlong into unfortunate reality. The planning. The uncomfortable sleeping arrangements. The hours of travel. Your spouse throwing a wrench in your plan to murder them. That last one is, perhaps (hopefully!), fairly rare. Nonetheless, that’s what has Dan (Jason Segel) resenting his long weekend away with wife Lisa (Samara Weaving) in Over Your Dead Body.

They’ve driven up to his father Michael’s (Paul Guilfoyle) woodsy cabin for some rest and rejuvenation, but Dan would like Lisa’s rest to be of the eternal variety. Sadly, for his dark designs, she’s smarter and more observant than he expected. It doesn’t take her long to turn the tables. Whose blood will spill on this brief getaway is now up in the air. The only guarantee is that the red stuff will flow.

Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney (the writer-directors also behind this month’s Pizza Movie), adapting the script from Norwegian feature I Onde Dager, give the film a barbed “everyone behaving badly” quality. It recalls the stylings of an era of dark and violent comedies that began in the 80s and crashed out sometime in the naughty aughties. For connoisseurs of the niche genre, it’s a stronger work than I Love You to Death or Very Bad Things, but inferior to heavyweights like War of the Roses or the Coen Brothers crime comedies. Think Ordinary People, and you have the general neighborhood.

The first half hour or so, where we meet the unhappy couple, is well done. Paced to build dread and ring out awkward laughs, Over Your Dead Body immediately asserts what kind of film it’s aiming to be. However, ever-increasing plot chaos challenges this initial plot discipline. In particular, two escaped convicts, Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), and their corrections officer accomplice, Allegra (Juliette Lewis), bring their own sort of gravity to the film. That threatens Lisa and Dan’s domestic skirmish and regrettably screws with Over Your Dead Body’s tonal balance.

Director Jorma Taccone is no novice when it comes to mixing the ridiculous and the sublime, as he did in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Ditto to combining broad comedy with silly PG-13 style action-violence, as the MacGruber film and TV series demonstrate. It makes sense that he delivers the year’s funniest vomiting scene in the midst of a scene where the death of two prominent characters seems nearly inevitable. What other director helming just his third film could rival Raimi in delivering a memorable and funny regurgitation setpiece? However, his handle on the truly gruesome is shakier. It isn’t a total wash. There’s frequently a bluntness to his approach that snags gasps followed by chuckles. Too often, though, the gory violence feels too nasty for the other balls the film is juggling.

Oddly enough, the most glaring instance of the film losing a leash on its tone is relatively bloodless. It is also far uglier than even death by lawn mower, trading over the top gore for hoary humor clichés as the movie pauses to deliver a tight five on prison rape. The scene’s denouement, which hinges on an unexpected appreciation for Dan’s film work, is well done. However, it lands with a thud because the scenes immediately preceding it are so ghastly and misbegotten.

Taccone and company are more successful in balancing moments of creeping sentimentality and reconciliation. Segel and Weaving deserve a lot of the credit for this as well. Their antipathy for one another feels honest and long-simmering. However, it also feels enough, based on years of missed signals and self-loathing, that the movie can withstand them, often wavering when it comes time to finish off the other.

Segel gets to mix in some of the same sad-sack vibes of his heartbroken Sarah Marshall character with the nastiness he employed in the forgotten (damn you, direct-to-streaming) Windfall. Weaving, on the other hand, plays a different kind of comedic hand than we’ve seen her use before. She has the resiliency of her Ready or Not protagonist, but in a far harder-to-root-for shell. As they indulge in their middle-class War of the Roses, Over Your Dead Body wisely doesn’t take sides. More importantly, it is agile enough to show us that both protagonists, despite their anger, are aware they’re hardly in the right themselves. As uneven as the movie can be at times, the duo gives it credibility and energy.

What seems like the end feels a bit too clean and uplifting. However, the feature wisely lingers, delivering a postlude that curdles as it explores characters’ ambitions and the endless pursuit of all-mighty fame. It threads the needle nicely. It’s a sour note, but one that allows for the possibility of partial redemption and a version of happily ever after. Taccone, Kocher, and McElhaney do sometimes struggle with the merger of bloody violence and acerbic humor. However, when it comes to mixing those spiky jokes and second-chance romance, they find a far more satisfying balance.

Over Your Dead Body is a mess. In many ways, that’s part of its charm. It gives the feature a sort of form-following-function quality. Calling Dan and Lisa messy, after all, is an understatement if anything. The film doesn’t shy away from violence or absurdity as it forces its leads to confront their own vicious impulses and ridiculous grievances. If not for the deeply unfortunate decision to build an action/humor setpiece around the threat of same sex sexual assault, this critic would have a far less ambivalent attitude towards recommending it. Still, with heavy caveats, I will say that I like dark, mean, and funny, and this one delivers on all three.

Over Your Dead Body packs up the car and heads to the cineplex on April 24.

Over Your Dead Body Trailer: