To the list of things that make me feel old is realizing that a plot device that once seemed fresh is now overused. The producers of a fake ghost-hunting show coming up against the real thing has become so much same old same old. Tony West’s DEADTECTIVES (2018, Shudder, AMC+) doesn’t add much to the plot beyond a lot of unevenness and an unforgivable splash of racism.
Sam (Chris Geere) runs a spooky reality show with his fiancée Kate (Tina Ivlev). It’s all a fake, and after five seasons, the ratings are sagging. So, the network head assigns a new producer (Martha Higareda) to send them to a genuine haunted house in rural Mexico, where they encounter a murderous ghost. Sam has no idea what to do, but his brother (David Newman), whom he regularly derides for engineering gadgets with which to see and control ghosts, has some new inventions up his sleeve if he can just live long enough to use them.
This is mostly played for laughs, and Geere has some good moments of physical comedy. But it’s not his comic imagination governing the film. West and his co-writers seem to think that loudness in and of itself is funny. As one member of the team, Jose Maria de Tavira has been encouraged to yell and mug so outrageously you want to remind him people will be watching. The pity here is that he’s got a character that could have been interesting. He’s a totally assimilated Mexican American who doesn’t want to go back there. He doesn’t even want to translate when they talk to the house’s owner, who speaks no English. But that’s left by the wayside so he can clown about professing his disbelief in ghosts until he becomes one. That’s early enough not to be a spoiler, and it leads to one of the few original comic ideas in the film. To communicate with the friends who can no longer see or hear him he drags his corpse around, writing messages on the wall in his own blood. Gross, yes, but at least clever. Neither gross nor clever but just annoying is a brief montage in which the team travels to the house by bus, with West recycling offensive stereotypes about rural Mexicans. I don’t know if there are ideas fresh enough to help a film recover from that kind of hateful stupidity.
