I guess on paper, “The Landlord” seemed like a great concept for a horror comedy. Emil Hyde’s movie starts off simply enough with a sitcom premise with a horror twist about a man living with two demons. The man has to rent out an apartment to keep the demons fed. The demons who reside in his flat have a knack for possessing and devouring the tenants and he has to go back to renting the flat all over again. This can be set up for some raucous laughs and clever twists on the concept, but sadly “The Landlord” is a lethargic and brutally tedious horror comedy that never scary or funny.
It tries for both genres on multiple occasions and it fails gloriously in entertaining the audience with its lack of real grasp on its premise. When it gets bored with the set-up in the first half hour, “The Land Lord” meanders in to a ridiculous crime thriller and dramedy about a new tenant protagonist Tyler takes an instant liking to who is running from her past and gains his affections, while Tyler’s sister has local dealings with demonic gangsters that eventually catches up to her and puts her family in jeopardy. This is all a mish mash of genres and sub-plots that are thrown up in the air and never land with enough competence to make an entertaining or remotely decent horror yarn. The performances are just amateur sometimes bordering on cartoonish, and most of the performers here can never really deliver the forced comedy writer Hyde tries to convey quite often.
Tyler is supposed to be a very sympathetic hero and is never as likable as Hyde wants him to be. All the while his exchanges with both demons that involve rigging on human body parts, and a lame segment about charades to learn an incantation the demon can’t utter all fall flat, and Hyde seems intent on padding the run time as much as humanly possible. So we endure a scene in a rundown motel, flashback sequences that are meant to offer exposition but are just painfully awkward (thanks to bad child actors), and moments involving the demonic gang members that never really make for compelling asides. The narrative has the potential to be quite spooky and morbid with some gruesome gore, but Hyde wastes that with poor production qualities and a story that can never focus on its original concept involving demons who demand a lot from their caretaker who keeps them fed, and keeps the tenants coming for their meals.
Not even great make up effects for the demons can make up for the terrible acting by all, and Hyde wastes great promise on a movie that is just a sheer waste of time and never takes advantage of its horror or comedy trappings at any time. “The Landlord” very well could have been a cult classic, but as such it’s really nothing but a space filler with other direct to DVD horror titles. I had a lot of hope for Emil Hyde’s horror comedy about a landlord and his demonic tenants begging for new meals in the form of tenants, because there is a lot of material to be mined for a horror classic. But as it stands, it’s a lot of wasted potential with terrible performances, a meandering story, and a tedious mesh of genres that add up to a clear waste of time when all is said and done.