ou’re fired!” After film editor Tom McClane (Michael Kallaanvaara) has a violent, mental break from reality while locked in the editing room, eventually stuffing a grenade into his mouth and pulling the pin (creating quite the splodge against a colorful poster of “Cherry 2000”), the sleazy head of the splatter and gore department, Samuel Campbell (Olof Rhodes), is in need of a new employee. And though mild-mannered, intellectual Edward Tor Swenson (Johan Rudebeck) works in a completely unrelated section of the building, he’s recruited to take on the job.

In its recent $100 million deal, European Distributors has acquired the “Loose Limbs” slasher movie series. But thanks to the country’s censorship laws, it’ll need to be trimmed up a bit so that it’s not too offensive. Assigned to cut out the most heinous sequences, Ed is sent to an isolated, dimly-lit rental home (an ideal haunted house) for some peace and quiet as he meticulously pours over hours and hours of extreme carnage – fictional though it may be – which soon gets under his skin … and into his tattered brain. “These films. They give me the creeps.”

Soon enough, Ed’s grip on reality begins to crumble, allowing for some hallucinatory scenes of bloodshed to sneak into his life. These generate modest jump scares and some shots of gore – essentially little teases at the more exceptional thrills to come. And that’s what “Evil Ed” is all about; it’s an ultra-low-budget, experimental (Swedish) showcase for a wide array of special effects – ranging from gushing fluids to grisly costuming to unwieldy prosthetics to gruesome props to gooey puppetry.

Since it’s meant to be a comedy, however, a pervasive, goofy tone lessens the over-the-top bloodletting (even if it’s still ludicrously excessive). Unfortunately, the humor is of the most juvenile kind, which doesn’t work to complement or counter the atrocities as much as it just makes everything sillier. This is especially true of supporting characters and of Ed’s behavior; rather than adding a few one-liners or exaggerations, many of the minor parts are grossly cartoonish or amplified to nonsensical degrees. This goes doubly for the music and musical cues (and a handful of sound effects). It’s a shame, really, since the mix of chills and laughs should have been a winning formula (in many ways, it’s a shoddy copy of “The Evil Dead”), what with the decent quality of the makeup and monster imagery. “You shouldn’t take things too seriously.”

Instead, with its overly simple premise, the pacing suffers. There aren’t really heroes or villains – just random personas crossing paths with the maniacal Edward for the sake of further fodder for butchering. It would be a fitting mirroring of the slasher pictures that fry his mind, but the narrative here isn’t clever enough to make the most of that. Amusingly, “Evil Ed” boasts a couple of nicely shot stunts and quirky edits, while the brutalities get to escalate with a change in scenery to a psychiatric ward. Yet it could have gone so much further in its comical weirdness, its eccentricities, and even its slaughtering; in its efforts to stretch out its limited content into feature-length, it forgets to embrace the more creative moments, resulting in a project that isn’t nearly wacky enough, bloody enough, or even salacious enough to be an exploitation game-changer.

– Mike Massie