The Deadtectives

 Ghost hunters are an easy target. Especially the ones with shows on TV and streaming; They're often pretty far within self-satire territory anyways.

 The Deadtectives doesn't really find an interesting take on the fairly well-populated 'fake paranormal investigators run into the real thing' subgenre, but that's fine - it's perfectly content leaning heavily towards the comedy side of the Horror/Comedy divide, and with not bringing in anything new to the table.

 The show within the movie is a long-running series on one of the 'documentary' channels (Whale Wars is mentioned in passing) where a crew of vacuous idiots go around faking supernatural events so they can 'clean' them.

 The host, Sam (Chris Geere), expertly portrays the breathless fake excitement of every other youtube host ever, only to flip to a very Joel McHale-like aggressively cynical mode as soon as the cameras are not on him. Their producer Kate (Tina Ivlev), who is also engaged to Sam, yearns for the days where they debunked myths and not milked them for money. Rounding out the team are Sam's brother Lloyd (David Newman), a tech wiz and actual paranormal expert/believer, and Javier (José María de Tavira), who's even more cynical than Sam.

 Their show is hot garbage - to the point that their agent, sick of the spineless crap Sam whips up, gets them a hotshot new producer (Martha Higareda), a flakey FX wizard (Mark Riley), and sends them south of the border to 'the most haunted casa in all of Mexico' for an extravagant season finale that stands a chance of getting the show renewed with the network.
 And so it is that the Deadtectives run up against their first brush with actual spirits: the ghosts of a father and the family he butchered. The casa is well and truly haunted, and the pater familias is perfectly willing and capable to keep on killing from beyond the grave.

 There's a little scooby-doo-style farce where the Deadtectives run into some random ghostly apparition and they blame it on the special effects guy, but that's mercifully cut short by a couple actual murders and undeniable supernatural goings-on. What follows is an agreeable, often funny timewaster that's given a tiny (very tiny) bit of gravitas by the ghostly victims, who add a touch of creepiness to the proceeds.
 The effects are good for a lower-end independent production like this, and the gore is mild but harsher than the PG13-like tone would lead you to believe. Director Tony West (who co-wrote, along with David Clayton Rogers, Mark Riley and Chris Rice) opts to film it as a traditional comedy, not as found footage, and his style, along with Andre Lascaris's cinematography, are crisp and slick.

 The script is also slick, if a bit over-familiar. The tone gets a little too loud at times, which I'm not a fan of (there's a lot of screaming, especially early on) but a respectable amount of jokes land successfully. The humour can get very broad, but all in all it's a pretty good-natured film that mostly knows how far to push most of its characters' dickishness without becoming grating. I tend to prefer horror comedies that feel a little bit less like a sitcom, but this one's all right.