Coventry Review of Elves

Elves (1989)

"What are you? Is that Elf yours? How many teeth have you got?"

[4/10 · 21 June 2020]

I think we have another winner... The plot of "Elves" definitely has earned a spot in top 10 most bonkers and randomly senseless plots ever penned down for a horror movie! It's a Christmas movie, and for once it doesn't revolve about an escaped lunatic killer in a Santa Clause suit! Instead, writer/director Jeffrey Mandel (who?) cooked up a Christmas goulash with bizarre ingredients like evil doctors, sickening family confessions, shopping mall Santa heroes, gratuitous cat-killings and a hideous two-foot tall Elf creature! That's right by the way; the film is called "Elves" (plural) even though there's only one elf (singular) on display. Close to Christmas, 17-year-old Kirsten and her two not-too-clever friends unwittingly summon a demonic little Elf-creature in the woods. Little do they know that Kirsten's crippled grandfather once was a Nazi scientist who designed the plans for the creation of a superior master race. The elf creature has to breed with Kirsten on Christmas Eve. Luckily, she works in a department store where the homeless and chain-smoking replacement Santa Clause is the only one who can rescue her from the claws Nazi-elf! "Elves" is terrible and inept, but simultaneously hilarious and easily one of the most entertaining "so-bad-it's-good" movies I've seen in a long time. Each and every single character in this film is insane, like the loathsome mother who hates her own daughter so much that she drowns her beloved cat in the toilet or Grandpa's crazy accomplices. Even though the tone of the film is nonsensical and fairly light-headed, there are a couple of vile and misplaced gory sequences. The acting performances from the entire cast are atrocious, but main star Dan Haggerty is the worst of all. He speaks in the same tone of voice throughout the entire film, whether he's calm or excited, and he looks as if he's sorely missing the time when he was a depicting a hermit living amidst the grizzly bears. His character also has some of the dumbest lines in cinematic history, like for example when he's beating up one of the Nazis and asks him - in between two smashes - how many teeth he has left.