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As the film lurches onward, antics and wisecracks abound--most delivered by Alice (Winger), the eldest daughter in the Collins clan and a stiff-jawed, athletic control freak who unleashes her pent-up rage on anyone who ventures near. She arrives with her semi-catatonic husband and three small, silent children in tow. A legitimate fear of being snapped at keeps the kids quiet, and hubby seems to live in a constant state of vapid bemusement, driven further into passive introversion by a steady diet of shrewing.

His tractability just begs for seconds, which Alice dishes out as gamely as she slops her anger-laden casserole onto her caged relatives’ vulnerable plates. The difference is, while the feckless husband kowtows, the rest of the family simply orders lobster take-out.

When Alice meets Judy, her younger sister’s stridently self-designated “life partner,” she quips that she hadn’t realized they were all bringing their “sex toys.” Alice and Lucy's is the prickliest relationship, primarily thanks to Alice’s homophobia, which—far from being internalized—rears its droll head continually. Alice (or Malice, as Lucy refers to her with good reason) incites fisticuffs when she rebuffs Lucy’s accusation that she puts everyone in boxes. People do that themselves, Alice argues, she merely labels them, “like the rebellious teenage lesbian box that you’re still stuck in at 35.”

In another scene, the early-rising Alice grumbles that she’s not one to lounge around “having pillow fights with my topless girlfriend,” an episode that, I'm sorry to say, takes place off-screen, if not solely in Alice’s imagination (although in one of the deleted scenes, Lucy and Judy make out languidly on the couch).

But Alice has a secret of her own that, when it is discovered, reveals her relenteless homophobia to be merely a mask for her own sapphic feelings.

Lucy and Judy’s relationship anchors the movie and provides most of the punchlines, enthralling Skip and his hellraising prepubescent twins. On the morning of the funeral we learn that Skip and his boys have hidden in Lucy's closet the night before, hoping to catch some hot lezzie action--oddly, the joke plays out with no acknowledgment that Skip is spying on his own sister.

This is the kind of crude line Eulogy routinely crosses that most films don't, for good reason.

But this isn’t supposed to be a realistic comedic drama. The movie does take a serious turn late in the game, with less success, but much of the more somber material wound up in the deleted and extended scenes included with the DVD. Even if it is self-consciously quirky and stronger on caricature than character, Eulogy is rife with fairly funny sitcom fodder. Fluff? Yes. But as long as you welcome the absurdity, it is also very entertaining.

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