Death Becomes Her
Hey, Do You Remember...?
Christopher Schrader
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 22 September 2017
⏱️ 113 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Critics and general audiences weren't quite sure what to make of Death Becomes Her when it was released in the summer of 1992, but this ultra-dark comedy has definitely picked up a cult following in the ensuing decades. The performances are great, the effects still work, and the film's cynical sense of humor plays a lot better now than it did when we were kids.
So what happened here? Why wasn't it more widely embraced at the time? Is this a misunderstood masterpiece or are there other aspects of this that prevent it from being as good as it could be?
Topics include: the overhaul the movie got after a disastrous test screening, whether or not those changes contributed to a largely unfocused first act, Bruce Willis' incredible against-type performance, an added dimension to Lisle's backstory from a previous draft of the script, Sydney Pollack's scene-stealing cameo, great examples of why director Robert Zemeckis is a true pioneer of special effects, how the movie ultimately manages to overcome a lot of its shortcomings, and much much more!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, do you remember death becomes her? |
| 0:07.0 | Hello and welcome to Hey, do you, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose tinted glasses to see how it holds up. |
| 0:32.0 | I'm Chris. |
| 0:32.7 | I'm Donna. |
| 0:33.5 | And I'm Carlos. |
| 0:34.3 | And today we're revisiting Death Becomes her. |
| 0:53.5 | Yeah. And I'm Carlos. And today we're revisiting Death Becomes Her. Death Becomes Her certainly isn't the only movie to suggest that getting everything we think we want often comes with a price. |
| 1:00.2 | But its unique mix of pitch black humor, deplorable characters, gruesome cutting-edge effects, |
| 1:06.0 | and its unrelenting mean-spiritedness made it quite an anomaly when it was released in the summer of 1992. |
| 1:12.9 | Well, maybe anomaly is too strong a word because there was actually another giant release that |
| 1:17.3 | summer with many of those same qualities. Batman returns. But while general audiences may have been |
| 1:22.8 | put off by both films, one of them was a Tim Burton movie, so it sort of came with the territory. |
| 1:27.9 | But the other had come from the director of the Back to the Future trilogy and who framed Roger |
| 1:32.1 | Rabbit, which, as you might imagine, raised a few eyebrows. |
| 1:35.8 | So while the reaction to death becomes her certainly paled in comparison to some of the other |
| 1:39.7 | entries on Robert Zemeckis' filmography, its tone doesn't actually seem that odd when you consider the dark humor in something like used cars, or perhaps more tellingly, his involvement with the television series Tales from the Crypt. |
| 1:52.3 | Unfortunately for the film, its problems began long before it hit theaters. |
| 1:56.5 | Due to the complexity of the special effects, production was arduous, to say the least, |
| 2:05.3 | and after a disastrous test screening of a rough cut, everything had to be heavily re-edited. |
| 2:09.8 | Subplots were dropped, entire characters were removed, and a new ending was shot. |
| 2:14.5 | And although it was by no means a box office bomb, there were elements of the film that most viewers probably wouldn't fully appreciate until many years later. |
| 2:18.7 | As someone who watched and enjoyed this as a child, there's absolutely no way I could have |
... |
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