Eva Longoria Parker and Paul Rudd have trouble breathing life into the comedy-fantasy Over Her Dead Body.

AP / Dale Robinette

A woman who is killed on her wedding day returns as a ghost to try to upset the new romance that’s starting to percolate between her fiancÉ and the psychic he consults to reach beyond the grave in the romantic comedy-fantasy Over Her Dead Body.

Writer-director Jeff Lowell’s film is a modern-day spin on the Noel Coward stage and 1945 screen comedy Blithe Spirit, in which a dead woman returns to haunt her husband because she is unhappy with his second wife. This time it’s the psychic who’s haunted and bedeviled by the dead bride. But the biggest difference between Blithe Spirit and Over Her Dead Body is that the latter is not as light, nor as funny.

The film often seems to stop dead in its tracks every time the shrill control-freak Kate (Eva Longoria Parker of Desperate Housewives) materializes to bark orders at hapless Ashley (Lake Bell of Boston Legal). Ashley is not a very good psychic, which is why she splits her time in the catering business with her business partner, Dan (Jason Biggs of the American Pie movies), who is as adept in the kitchen as Ashley is at telling the future. One wonders how they got this far in life.

The puppyish and still mourning Henry (Paul Rudd of Knocked Up) is pushed into visiting Ashley for a reading at the insistence of his buttinski sister (Lindsay Sloane). But he doesn’t believe Ashley will be able to contact Kate, who has been dead a year. Ashley isn’t convinced she can really do it either, until a purloined copy of Kate’s diary falls into her hands, giving her the ammo to deliver some personal information that only Henry and Kate would know, thus convincing him that Ashley is the real psychic deal.

Soon Henry and Ashley are getting pretty chummy beyond those hand-holding sessions as they’re trying to contact Kate. Then Kate turns up for real — or at least in ectoplasmic spirit — to squash the budding romance.

Only Ashley can see Kate, but sometimes she’s invisible even to Ashley. This allows Kate to play dirty tricks on her, such as getting Ashley to upset an entire gym by running nearly naked out of the shower room. Over Her Dead Body has its share of slapstick laughs. A preview audience laughed loudest, however, at that tried and true comic device of the desperate — passing gas. Another big laugh-getter revolved around an overweight dog.

Much of Over Her Dead Body, however, is D.O.A., a marginal comedy with a romance that never quite catches fire, thanks to the slim sizzle between Bell and Rudd and the leadenness of Longoria Parker.

Biggs seems like a fifth wheel in all this, yet another gay sidekick for the heroine. Yet here Lowell has written in a little surprise — the only one in the film. It threatens to change the equation of the plot, but does not.

**Over Her Dead Body

Starring: Eva Longoria Parker, Paul Rudd, Lake Bell, Jason Biggs, Lindsay Sloane.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com