It's incredibly difficult to make a solid and compelling whodunit slasher/Giallo with imaginative kills and an unexpected climax. It's even more difficult to make a spoof of the slasher/Giallo genre that is both genuinely funny and intriguing. That means it's practically impossible to accomplish a successful combo of both, and you'd have to be a real genius director to do so.
Is Pupi Avati a genius director? Well, almost... He did make one of the greatest Gialli in history, with "The House with Laughing Windows", so if anyone could pull it off, it would be him. Avati's attempt at spoofing the genre with "All Deceased Except the Dead" perfectly fits the clichéd description of hit and miss. There are many great aspects, most notably the mystery plot and the guessing for the killer's identity, and admittedly also a surprisingly large number of gags and dumb situations are fun. Unfortunately, though, entire parts of the script that are clearly meant to be comical are painfully un-funny and downright embarrassing, and the film is at least twenty minutes overlong.
All the great and necessary ingredients are there. An old dark mansion, filled to the rooftop with eccentric and perverted members of a family that are gruesomely offed one by one, by an oddly squeaking killer entirely dressed in black. To turn all this into a comedy, just throw in a completely incompetent private detective, a clumsy anti-hero, and a few outcast characters like a dwarf and a cross-eyed butler. There are plenty of murders, and some of them are fantastic (like the booby-trapped hairdryer), and even the denouement holds a clever twist in store. So, in short, if Avati had thrown most of the slapstick overboard and purely focused on the whodunit plot, it would have been his second Giallo-classic in a row.
