Death Becomes Her [Robert Zemeckis, 1992]:
More so than the excessively deconstructive and indulgent Back to the Future Part II (1989), this macabre screwball fantasy occupies the same place in the filmography of director Robert Zemeckis that the similar unhinged and aggressively non-commercial Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) did for his friend Steven Spielberg. It's an example of an otherwise fairly "safe" or mainstream filmmaker abandoning good taste and sensibility to instead indulge in the unbridled quirks and eccentric influences that had been suppressed from his previous efforts. Tonally, Death Becomes Her isn't a million miles removed from the director's earlier Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), but it's pitched at a markedly more adult audience potentially attuned to its specific influences.
The screenplay by Martin Donovan and David Koepp is referential to everything from old dark house horror serials of the 1930s (with its mysterious female antagonist, its hints of exoticism, its elixir of life and its scenes of Bruce Willis evoking something of a Dr. Frankenstein-like mad scientist) to the camp melodrama and toxic sparring of All About Eve (1950) or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). There's a barnstorming musical number which begins the film (again, as in in Temple of Doom), a lot of allusions to film noir and the works of Alfred Hitchcock, a sequence modeled on the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and a general tone that feels very much akin to a series Zemeckis was producing during this period, Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996). It's also a kind of farcical body horror about death and the deterioration of the human body, making it almost a zombie movie, though no character ever uses the word.
The special effects, which were groundbreaking at the time of the film's release, are still exceptional, but it is that morbid, Tales from the Crypt style humor and the willingness of the entire cast to commit to these wild tonal shifts that really impresses. Meryl Streep and the aforementioned Willis in particular are fantastic and deliver some of the funniest exchanges, but they're well supported by Goldie Hawn and an enchanting Isabella Rossellini. There's also a very funny cameo from film director Sydney Pollack as an emergency room doctor. Zemeckis can be an odd filmmaker to grapple with given the many faces and facets of his career, and Death Becomes Her is an odd fit even for him. It doesn't quite connect to his run of 1980s blockbusters, nor to his subsequent turn to serious dramas with Forrest Gump (1994), Contact (1997) and Cast Away (2000). In some respects it feels closer to a film he produced but didn't direct; another horror/comedy: The Frighteners (1996) from Peter Jackson.
