Steve (Greg Parker) is a mentally challenged, but good-natured, nerd who works at a rubber band factory and has a crush on his coworker who shatters his dreams, humiliating him in public.

Emotionally wrenched, Steve finds an old book in his basement that evokes demonic forces which turns him into a vengeful demon who embraces its victims before melting them. He meets a nurse (Kathy Karly) who tries to help him find out what’s wrong with him.

Lord of the Dead is a recycled genre story filled with “homages,” bizarre characters, and sparse bits of originality.

One of my problems with most “horror comedies” is that for me gore alone is simply not funny, amusing or shocking, but just silly, and it gets tiring after a while. I love a dark sense of humor, but why should I simply laugh at heads being chopped off, eyes gouged, or melting bodies? Even if the special effects were seamless, if out of context they will only be gimmicks, not horrific or funny, but just silly if we don’t care about the characters.

I get the feeling, watching a lot of microcinema horror pieces, that many of these films don’t have a clear idea of their mission and struggle to find the right balance of tone. Is it pure horror, comedy, or both?

Apparently, Lord of the Dead wants to be a comedy, but aside from the inspired, if over the top performance by Greg Parker, many of the occasional laughs arrive when the acting or the FX go wrong. How much of this is intentional? You can never tell. Whatever the choices were, they are not consistent on the screen.

Still, there are some nice touches throughout the film: The nurse’s obsession with washing her hands all the time, the rubber band factory sequence, and the inspired design of the creatures, even if sometimes hampered by its unavoidable low budget execution (another reason to hide the monsters and gore FX when working at this level)

However, probably comedy-horror fans will find appeal in Lord of The Dead.

The DVD contains a “Making Of” that effectively chronicles the process of creating the make-up and other FX. Even if the movie didn’t work for me, I still applaud Greg Parker because of his ambitious make-up, with different zombie and demon masks for each character, and the grueling murder scenes.

Two Stars