Dead

 He's a straight-arrow supercop who may not be that straight after all. He's a sweet-natured slacker who can see ghosts when he gets high. They fight crime!

 And that's enough of these early internet proto-memes; Am I showing my age or what?

 I first found out about Dead, a New-Zealand horror comedy (what else could it be?) after reading up a bit about last year's lovely Loop Track. As it turns out, co-stars Hayden J. Weal and Thomas Sainsbury had written a movie together previously - they're both in front of the camera as well, but Weal directed. I'm glad I checked it out, it's a good time.

 Tagg (Weal) is... Dead - the seventh victim of the very serial killer he was trying to catch. That obviously qualifies as leaving unfinished business, so he comes back as a ghost eager to catch the killer and avenge his own murder. Luckily, he happens to know a medium...

 Sainsbury plays that medium, Marbles, introduced in a stunning (and very funny) sequence that cuts across a few of his "jobs" as he counsels people who think they're haunted. Marbles patiently relays messages between a widow and her recently dead husband, confirms to another woman her husband doesn't seem to have lingered on after his death, and tells another man that the ghost of his hairdresser has 'curdled' in the downstairs loo ("Do you have another bathroom? Well, use that, I reckon"). He doesn't even charge the last two customers.

 It's an impressively written scene - funny, heartfelt, beautifully edited, and it does a great job both establishing the rules of this movie's ghosts and the character of Marbles (basically: what if Michael J. Fox's character from The Frighteners was an amiable stoner with a heart of gold?)

 Tagg's ghost zeroes in on Marbles, and conscripts him to help in his post-mortem investigation. The case spreads out to encompass Tagg's intense sister (Tomai Ihaia, very funny in a too-small role), Marble's mother (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) and a few other colourful characters.

 Sadly, the first act is by far the best. Somewhere around the middle things get more than a little contrived, and although the script straightens away most of the coincidences, it never really recovers. That, combined with its very low-key humour (there are some good jokes, but unevenly spread, and even the best are more likely to get a chuckle than a laugh) conspires to make the movie feel like a little bit of a misfire.

 But it'd be a mistake to focus on that. There's a lovely (if trite) message about the importance of grieving and letting go that's fairly well integrated into the story, the buddy comedy works very well - as in Loop Track, both Weal and Sainsbury are fun to watch and have good chemistry together - and the film's gentle sense of humour makes it easy to root for the movie even as it gets lost in the woods for a while with a subplot about a predatory creep played by Cameron Rhodes.

 Asides from some pretty effective makeup effects (which dress up ghosts who are too far gone as zombies), the script cleverly lays things out in a way that its supernatural elements can be portrayed with very affordable effects (color correction, mostly, to show when Marbles is under the influence). Weal's direction is professional enough, except for a couple of sequences that try to show Marble's drugs taking effect.

 Shame about the plot, but at a breezy ninety minutes, that's not a deal-breaker. It's the characters that make this one worthwhile.