Death Becomes Her [1992]

Although marketed under the relatively tame tag of 'your basic black comedy', this is actually a demented evocation of '50s comic books like Tales From the Crypt that brings out the nasty streak usually submerged in the works of Back to the Future/Who Framed Roger Rabbit? director Robert Zemeckis. It opens by establishing a warped triangular relationship between a fading movie star [Meryl Streep], first seen in a horribly tasteless '70s Broadway musical version of Sweet Bird of Youth, a talented plastic surgeon [Bruce Willis], who sinks to becoming a morgue beautician during a nightmare marriage to Streep, and an authoress [Goldie Hawn] jilted at the altar by Willis who becomes a grossly fat and insane slob before metamorphosing into a svelte super-success. Envious of Hawn, Streep is driven to consult a perhaps diabolic beauty specialist [Isabella Rossellini], who claims to be 71 years old and swans around a Frankensteiniean castle in cast-off silent movie siren costumes, and given a potion, which Hawn has also taken, that brings her eternal youth and beauty. However, while the women are fated to remain young and gorgeous, they are also cursed to survive death and, after violent confrontations, Streep is left with a broken neck and Hawn with a shotgun-hole through her stomach, wherupon Willis is bullied into providing cosmetic and embalming services to keep them in their preserved state.

The first two-thirds of the film is wonderfully-played and caustically-written, with Rossellini inhabiting a Universal horror movie estate amid a caricatured Beverly Hills, and a platoon of make-up and effects people providing a succession of astonishing and seamless illusions, as Streep's neck elongates and twists so she literally faces backwards or Hawn walks around with a circular see-through hole in her midriff. The pace falters somewhat in the climax, set at a paarty attended by a host of dead celebrities [Elvis, James Dean, Andy Warhol, etc] who pop up for repetitive joke appearances, but picks up for a very tart coda set thirty-seven years in the future. A major league answer to such low-budget zombie comedies as Re-Animator and Braindead, this benefits from setting its astonishing [and expensive] imagery amid a plot worth talking about and from generously risk-taking unsympathetic performances from the trio of well-cast and intriguingly horrible stars.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Fear [issue unknown]

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