The plot is ludicrous. In Over Her Dead Body, a gigantic angel ice sculpture crushes dead-eyed Kate (Eva Longoria Parker) on her wedding day. Her fiancé, Henry (Paul Rudd), begrudgingly consults a psychic a year later to see if Kate's ghost will let him start dating again. His psychic, Ashley (Lake Bell), falls for him. Kate decides that's not going to work out for her selfish dead ass, and begins harassing the ghost-whispering Ashley to leave her man alone. And because I knew all this going into the theater, I was filled with foreboding even before the previews started rolling. But thank god for lowered expectations, 'cause this pithy piece of fluff is downright funny.

Lake Bell as the crunchy, ditzy psychic/caterer is a master of physical comedy. Her delivery is stilted, strange, and mesmerizing as she's entertainingly duped by the otherworldly pranks of Kate. She's like a hot, lanky '40s screwball throwback, falling over chairs, burning off her eyebrows, and running around a gym naked in full-on panic mode. In fact, the whole cast (with the glaring exception of the shrill Longoria Parker whose dead, dead eyes fill me with fear) is downright likeable. Even Jason Biggs as Ashley's business partner isn't as big of a lummox as usual.

All in all, Over Her Dead Body is one of the better rom-coms I've seen in many a moon. It's rare when you get genuinely funny moments in a genre that's notoriously skimpy on them. Treading familiar ground, writer/director Jeff Lowell manages to squeeze some honest laughs out of a story that could have easily been hackneyed. If only he could've added some spark into those lifeless Langoria eyes... (Seriously, does she have pupils? How can she see anything? Isn't that what CG is for?)