Even the dead have losers. That’s kinda the saddest part here … that even when the next stage comes, it’s still a competition. And, hey, let’s face it; if you suck at life, you’re probably gonna suck at death, too. You know what they say: “(After)life ain’t fair.”
The Rookie (Gingle Wang – wait, that has to be a porn star name, right?) just died, but she’s already losing the connection to her past life. If people don’t want to remember you, they aren’t going to. As a human, The Rookie was a loser and the same goes now. This prematurely deceased wallflower has thirty days to get her scare act together or she will truly perish.
What’s a girl to do, huh? Well, The Rookie joins the Dead Talents Society contest. The winner(s) get signed by an agency to haunt indefinitely. The losers literally fade away.
Nobody explained to me how the dead make money. It goes something like this: you die … blah blah blah … scare living people … blah blah blah … $$$. Yeah, I don’t get it. What I get is The Rookie ain’t got no talent for scarin’, so she hitches up with some pro scarers to get some valuable apprenticeship goin’ on. Rookie needs A LOT of help; it’s not every ghost that can magically appear in front of a car, get run over, and still leave no impression.
All of this should have been a little more engaging. Dead Talents Society makes a valiant effort at entertainment; there’s 
even a talk show devoted to the Scarer-of-the-Year contest, which seems like a fun idea. And it is. Sort of. This is a true black comedy in that we are rooting for Rookie to exhibit a grotesque, horror-filled death in front of innocents just so her living family will give her some attention. Wow, that’s sad and desperate.
Dead Talents Society is a fun idea for a film. And I liked it more than I didn’t. however, there was still an entire afterlife of space between this film and greatness. At the end of the day, you can probably name at least twenty better films in which dead people are characters, which is a bad place for a comedy to be.
A teenager who was just newly dead
Must earn her keep or disappear instead
To generate scares
She needs someone who cares
Success measured by how much they’ve fled
Not Rated [Read: R], 105 Minutes
Director: John Hsu
Writer: John Hsu, Kun-Lin Tsai
Genre: Afterlife fun!
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Dead people?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Do you dislike blood? Cuz there’s gonna be a bit of bit.
