The Dead Guy

The Dead Guy is a flawed yet entertaining new investigative supernatural thriller about a psychic – or “Mediumistic Communicator” – called Justice Brown, employed by the FBI to discover dead bodies. Written, directed and starring King Jeff, one can maybe tell that this is a small-scale production. However, within the 80-minute runtime of The Dead Guy, you get to know Jeff’s sensibilities as a storyteller, all culminating in an amusing and unusual picture which has both a sense of drama and a fun sense of humour. This reminded me a lot of Sam Raimi’s movie The Gift, written by Billy Bob Thornton; a film similarly interesting but at odds with itself.

Let’s discuss the style of the film, and how the general technical limitations can either detract from or add to the visual world being built. I’ll begin with the most obvious negative. The film’s use of AI in the form of voices and printed images is pretty terrible – not just ethically / artistically speaking, but also in terms of maintaining the reality of what we’re watching. At first, when our protagonist is having phone conversations with what is clearly just an AI voice, you can actually derive some comedy from the staggard nature of the ‘interaction’. But eventually, its use becomes unignorable, especially within an extended and pivotal sequence wherein Brown makes contact with two spirits in a room of his house; a room which is covered in AI-generated photographs of people. It’s just not convincing! Although, you could argue that our main character is the sort of whacky individual to print off a bunch of AI pictures and hang them on his wall, but we’re meant to think they’re the spirits of the deceased!

There’s a big reason why the implementation of AI products fails on a stylistic level, and that’s due to the rough, insular, handmade approach the filmmakers opted for in the first place. This is a choppy, grainy work – and in a way that this critic found charming and thematically relevant. The fact that only a couple of locations and setups are featured in this movie definitely reveals its limited budget; yet having said that, I don’t find that fact inherently detrimental to the quality of the piece. It’s makeshift and amusing in a B-movie, Ed Wood kind of a way. The only thing it does affect is the pacing. For instance, we must spend almost twenty minutes in Brown’s spirit room, and this could easily test the patience of the average viewer.

Audiences may find a fair amount to enjoy regarding the screenplay. This is a fun story with humorous dialogue as well as a most endearing protagonist. Despite the picture’s failings, there are flickers of genuine invention and creativity. This critic was never having a bad time while watching The Dead Guy. It’s silly and entertaining and holds resonances of the cheap yet heartfelt spirit of B-movies. You can’t help but admire King Jeff as a filmmaker here. This is a personal, homemade production which demonstrates a passion for genre filmmaking. Currently streaming on Tubi!