Elves (dir. Jeffrey Mandel, 1989)
Kirsten (Julie Austin) has a more difficult life than most teenagers. Her home life is frankly horrifying. Her mother (Deanna Lund) is emotionally abusive. Her German immigrant grandfather (Borah Silver) hits her. Her little brother has some boundary issues. Her only friend in the household, as she says, is her cat Agamemnon, who I would recommend not getting too attached to. She works at the mall, hoping to save enough money to finally escape this wretched home. She and her co-workers have styled themselves the Sisters of Anti-Christmas, and perform a lighthearted little magic ritual that unfortunately unleashes a murderous elf that is affiliated with a neo-Nazi cult that intends to bring about a Fourth Reich.
Who will help Kirsten on what is surely the worst Christmas of her life. Enter our hero Mike McGavin (Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty), who ranks with MST3K favorite Zap Rowsdower as one of his cinema’s least appealing saviors. He used to be a cop, he used to be sober, he used to have a trailer. Now he’s the store Santa, having fallen into the job mostly because of his sad gray beard and the fact that they had to fire the original Santa for groping someone. He lives illegally in a backroom at the mall, and he is somehow the only person in town remotely qualified to fight a supernatural monster and a bunch of gun toting fascists.
Is Elves a secret masterpiece? Oh, Lord, no. No, this thing is a ramshackle mess of a motion picture that doesn’t know if it’s a straightforward horror movie, a satire, or some grand statement on the survival of Nazi ideology after the Second World War. Were it not so incompetent with regard to acting, writing, cinematography, special effects, and probably craft services, it would rank as perhaps one of the bleakest Christmas films ever made. It does, however, feature a scene where someone lays down some heavy exposition about secret eugenics programs, magic rituals, and incest in front of his elementary school aged children at a Christmas dinner.
oliveresque 