Grave Undertakings

The British have a special flair for making great sport of homicide, corpses, funerals, and the sundry trappings of sending off dead folks in proper form and pretense.

From the droll way hangings, murders and the like are dealt with in classic Ealing Studio/Alec Guinness comedies like "King Hearts and Coronets" (1949) and "The Lady Killers" (1955) to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore trying to off their uncle, Sir Ralph Richardson in "The Wrong Box" (1966) to several of Alfred Hitchcock's movies , especially the stranger's body that won't stay buried for long in "The Trouble With Harry" (1953) to the shocking but amusing and casual way a spouse is replaced in a coffin with a pile of stolen money in Joe Orton's grim and satirical 1966 play Loot, there seems a special place in the English imagination for seeing the potential for comedy in morbid matters. More recently, there was the end-of-the-world zombie comedy "Shaun of the Dead"(2004), the one and only film about Undead Flesh-Eaters and the world of retail sales I would recommend without reservation.

Such a tradition continues in the form in a fun little film called Death at a Funeral . It is directed by the American ex-Muppet guy, Frank Oz, but its British to the core. It starts out with a bereaved man receiving the coffin bearing his dead father from the undertakers and finding out its the wrong dad. There follows a series of incidents at the "showing of the casket" involving mourners up to their necks in blackmail, drug overdoses, kidnapping, attempted murder, suicide, premature internment, unauthorized nudity, elder abuse, abuse by elders of young people, et al. And for the capper, a woman reveals she's...pregnant! And that's only about half the things that go awry in this funny film.

If you like your humor with a touch of the macabre, but not too much so, see this one.

Above: Martha (Daisy Donovan) realizes "something's strangely amiss" about her boyfriend Simon (Alan Tudyk) as they attend solemn proceddings in "Death at a Funeral".