ROMANTIC COMEDY
This one stinks so badly that moviegoers may find themselves checking if there's a dead skunk rotting away under their seat. No, that stench is coming directly from the screen as Over Her Dead Body—a romantic comedy lacking both love and laughs—lurches awkwardly along, each scene more numbingly flat than the last.
Desperate Housewives' Parker plays Kate, a control freak who dies on her wedding day after being crushed by a falling ice sculpture. Cut to one year later when her still-grieving fiancé (Rudd) finds himself attracted to a wacky psychic (Bell). A jealous Kate then returns as a ghost hell-bent on breaking up the two.
Winningly frothy films have been made using plots even more contrived than this one, but Over isn't one of them. First-time writer-director Jeff Lowell mistakes pratfalls and fart jokes for sophisticated humor and keeps piling them on. Parker knows her way around a venomous line, but she sports fake eyelashes so distractingly exaggerated that it looks as if two furry black caterpillars had taken up residence there. Rudd skulks through his scenes as if on his way to a better movie, while Bell (TV's Boston Legal) so overemotes that you're tempted to throw a giant bucket of ice water on her just to calm her down.
