Review: Elves (1989)

Directed by: Jeffrey Mandel
Starring: Dan Haggerty, Deanna Lund, Ken Carpenter
Written by: Jeffrey Mandel
Music by: Vladimir Horunzhy
Country: United States
Not currently available on physical media
IMDb

When one ponders the annals of Christmas-inspired horror movies, there spring to mind certain classics of the genre: Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) and Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), maybe Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) or Krampus (2015). But you should allow a modestly sized slot in your holiday horror recollections for Jeffrey Mandel’s Elves, one of the crazier, shittier, more cigarette-centric flicks to spin terror from tinsel.

Here we’ve got our man of the mountains Grizzly Adams as a chain-smoking drifter who finds himself in the middle of a neo-Nazi plot to take over the world using … Christmas elves? Apparently, Hitler and his Jew-hating pals were fascinated by the idea of breeding two-foot-tall holiday hobgoblins with wonderful Aryan women to make a master race. I imagine it would be hard to conquer the universe when you’re so stature-ly disadvantaged, but great ideas weren’t exactly the Nazis’ forte. Beyond that premise, Elves is just brimming with wonderfully silly things executed in the most bizarre ways possible, and it’s a joy because of it.

Despite the title’s implication of plurality, there’s only one elf. It’s obvious the crack effects crew only made a single rubber mold of a bust and an arm, but there’s an abundance of the titular creature’s unchanging mug and arm flinging around in front of the camera without a care in the world for lifelike articulation. There’s an absolute pervert-savant of a kid played by precocious asshole Christopher Graham, who’s incredibly down for some of that big sister post-shower boobage. “You’ve got fucking big tits and I’m gonna tell everyone I saw ‘em!” he proclaims. We’ve got Nazis whose atrocious German accents come and go with the gentlest of breezes. Finally, we’ve got ol’ Dan Haggerty himself, floating through here, gracefully collecting a paycheck, smoking a ton of fucking cigarettes, crashing Christmas Eve dinner parties, and gently wishing a Merry Christmas to every character he comes across, no matter their relationship to him in the story. He’s as content to work as a mall Santa as he is to pummel Nazis, smoke excessively and ill-advisedly around rare old books about Christmas-adjacent occult happenings, and awkwardly barrel roll from exploding vehicles. He’s a hirsute treasure.

The silliness is punctuated by a plethora of 808 drum grooves and vibing synth arpeggios and a litany of the ludicrous dialog. (“It was like a little man, like a ninja, only like a Gremlin. It was a fucking little ninja troll!” “Are we gonna be alright?” “No, gramps is a Nazi.”) None of this preposterous garbage is the least bit artful, but it’s absolutely compelling other than a slowish chunk in the middle that’s mostly Haggerty bouncing from joint to joint to accumulate exposition. Elves is one of those movies that should have probably never been made but for the unabashedly buffoonish bliss it has wrought upon our drab existence.

Overall rating: 7.5 out of 10