I most certainly have fun with 1989’s yuletide horror tale Elves, though not because it’s ‘good’. On the contrary, director Jeffrey Mandell’s film is awful but features so many audacious, batshit plot elements that I have to applaud it. This is the story of Kirsten (Julie Austen), a young woman who discovers she’s at the centre of a Nazi experiment involving selective breeding and a magical conjured-up elf. At Christmas. Soon, Kirsten and her buddies are terrorised by the diabolical elf while trapped in a department store, where only a renegade store Santa (Dan Haggerty) can save them. It’s terri-brill.
To its credit, the film tries to play everything very straight but come off as comical due to some terrible creature effects, lack of logic and questionable dialogue. Haggerty, star of Grizzly Adams, slums it as an ex-detective turned homeless boozehound looking for redemption. He somewhat implausibly lands a department store Santa gig but is soon investigating the murder of his gropey, sex-pest predecessor.
The antagonist is a terrible-looking rubbery thing accidentally summoned by angsty employee Kirsten and her dumb pals doing some weird ‘anti-Christmas’ witchcraft ceremony. You know what teenage girls are like. Turns out Kirsten’s grandad (Borah Silver) is a secret Nazi and he and his cronies are up to some naughty shenanigans, planning to breed Kirsten with the elf to create the master race or something. It’s never explained why this would work but then the film is completely mental and enjoyably so.
When Kirsten’s wee brother Willy (Christopher Graham) is attacked and clawed by the beast in his none-more-’80s bedroom, his mum just tells him to shut up and blames the cat, despite the boy’s protestations that he’s been molested by a ‘ninja gremlin’. Next day, just to make sure, mom catches the cat and drowns it in the toilet. As you do.
Oh yeah, just prior to all this, Willy is caught spying on his big sister in the shower, proclaiming he did it because he “just loves tits”. We also get an extended gratuitous nudity scene involving a lady being electrocuted in a bathtub that makes me question who thought this scene really needed boobs. Later, there’s an unnecessary twist involving incest, so this really is a film for all the family. You can tell this was made in the eighties when Kristen’s wheelchair-bound grandad slaps her in the face for sneaking out with her mates and it’s treated as fair enough.
The elf is really rubbish, bringing plenty of unintentional laughs and adding to the all-round feeling of entertaining crapness. The creature barely moves and appears to just be an ugly dummy attached to a big stick, so it’s good for a laugh, though it’s vicious as hell. Santa’s elf this is not.
All-in-all it’s a mess but a thoroughly enthralling one. It’s bonkers, jaw-dropping cruddy fun.
And there’s only one elf in it.
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