Over Her Dead Body
New Line Cinema, 94mins, PG-13

Written and Directed
by Jeff Lowell

God is a sonofabitch, or at least can be sometimes. In our modern, “café Christianity” theology where everybody but, say, Hitler and Pol Pot get to go to heaven, it's easy to figure that even some of the most loathsome characters in
film might go to that big mall in the sky. This is Hollywood, and Jeff Lowell has managed, within a standard and somewhat unoriginal romantic comedy, to get what might be the most original depiction of Hell in modern cinema.

Kate(Eva Longoria Parker) is what they nowadays call a “bridezilla”. She's a mean, nasty perfectionist who'smicromanaging everything even on her wedding day. Her fiancée Henry (Paul Rudd) tries to calm her down, breaking the taboo of the groom seeing the bride before the ceremony, and this is a foreshadowing of what we all know is going to happen, and that happens cute, when the ice
sculptor (Stephen Root) is told to take back his creation because it hasn't any wings. She dies cute and winds up in the antechamber of…we're not told but it looks like upstairs…or is it?

She's immediately met by an “Angel” (Kali Rocha), who starts giving her the standard spiel, but Kate demands where her wings are, the Angel disappears, leaving our protagonist clueless as to what to do next. This is a clue people!!

Cut back to earth a year later. Henry is still moping over his lost love and his sister Chloe (Lindsay Sloane) is really concerned, so she takes him over to Ashley (Lake Bell), who's a psychic and asks her to contact You-know-who for him, something Henry, being a bit of an atheist, thinks is totally BS. So does Ashley's business partner Dan (Jason Biggs), who may or may not be gay, but
that's for later.

Obviously, the magic has to work, and when Ashley makes contact, she doesn't
know what she's in for, especially since, between the magic and the contact, Ashley has fallen in love, and with the help of Chloe on the out-and-out fraud
front, has gotten Henry to fall too. Kate mistakenly thinks that it's her job to protect Henry from Ashley. CATFIGHT!!!!

This is silly comedy, not a heavy drama. The writing is intelligent, the pratfalls mostly work, and everyone is having a good time. There's nothing wrong with that. It's entertainment for goodness sake! Now, what about the depiction
of Hell?

That's the best part, it's very subtle and at the very end. You may not notice it at all.   It took me an hour after I got home to figure it out. You'll have a good time, but this is not a great film by any means.



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