Elves

“They don’t work for Santa anymore!”

I thought, “Let’s do something fun for the holiday season and watch a bad horror holiday film”. Well, I definitely succeeded but in the wrong way.

Elves’ story involves the aforementioned mythical creature, teenage girls, prophecies, incest, Nazis, and Santa Claus. We are introduced to our main female lead, Kirsten, as she and her friends gather in the woods to start a coven and pledge themselves against Christmas. Instead, they accidentally raise an evil elf creature who spends the rest of the movie stalking Kirsten. It turns out her grandfather is a former Nazi doctor who worked on a project to create a perfect soldier. Kirsten is the byproduct of genetic manipulation to provide the elf with a perfect mate and start this new race of soldiers. While this is going on, we also follow a disgraced police detective as he tries to put his life back together after getting sober. Needing a job, he becomes a store Santa Claus, but starts to investigate the murder of the previous Santa and becomes involved in the events surrounding Kirsten.

This film comes up short in a lot of areas. The acting is sub-par, the music is distracting and low quality, and the effects are unbelievable. The story is complete, but comes across as dull instead of tension building. Elves is closer to a film-school project than a theatrically released film (not to insult film-school projects).

In regards to the performances of the actors, the only thing that stands out is how bad most of the performances are. One of the main characters is former detective Mike Gavin played by Dan Haggerty (The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams; Repo Jake). Dan Haggerty’s performance is extremely flat. No matter what he is trying to depict be it anger, empathy, or sadness, it comes across as if he read his script right before the director said action. There is little emotion behind any of his dialogue. It is a shame because his on-screen presence is quite charming. The lead actress, Julie Austin (Twisted Justice, Fatal Exposure), delivers a very uneven performance. At times she does a decent job at her role, but then there are times where she is stiff and seems to struggle to convey her emotions in certain situations.

The effects of the film are worse than low budget. It seems that little care was put into making things look even a bit realistic. One particular scene involving the electrocution of a victim makes it very apparent that someone was off-camera holding a strobe light while the victim writhed about on screen. The location of the light source even changed position when the camera angle changed. Blood effects looked like a combination of paint and store-bought theatrical blood.

One small positive note was the design of the elf (referred to as a troll through most of the movie). The elf is hairy and grotesque, but with it’s pointed ears, short stature, and tiny hands and feet, it still retains enough features to bring an elf to mind. Unfortunately, the design is hampered by poor puppetry including the stiff movement of the arms, legs, and neck and a lack of movement in its mouth. Most of the time it just sits there with its mouth open staring at people.

The story of the film contains some unnecessary elements. While we have a demonic elf whose goal is to mate with the virgin Kirsten, the writer decided we needed something eviler than the title character and introduced Nazis. Why? You could have easily built a decent film around simply having the elf look for a virgin and Kirsten is the first one he comes across. The extra plot devices are unneeded and hinder the rest of the movie.

The story also contains another evil character in Kirsten’s mother(Deanna Lund; Hammerhead, Land of the Giants). Expressing pure hatred towards her daughter, she seems to have completely fallen into a psychosis, which is not surprising due to events outlined in the movie. But again this creates another evil character that is in Kirsten’s life that just distracts the audience from the evil elf character.

With Kirsten’s mother, the story now contains three elements of evil that are focused around Kirsten (the elf, the Nazis, and her mother). It makes the title character seem almost sympathetic. You begin to see it as an animal whose motivation is instinct and not evil while the human characters make a conscious choice to do evil. In most situations, the elf commits its deadly acts to protect Kirsten. This really lessens any scares you would get from the elf.

Another issue with this horror film is the utter lack of horror. There are no jump scares, very little tension building, and the kills are terrible. More victims are killed by the other characters than by the elf and the few kills the elf does make are simple and silly. One of the elf’s victims becomes startled by the elf and crawls away from it. She is not injured, nor in a tight space that she couldn’t stand. Just decided that staying low to the ground and moving slowly near this two-foot-tall creature was the safest option I guess.

I know I mentioned it earlier in this review, but the incidental music of Elves is generic and forgetful. It does nothing to elevate the (attempt at) tension in the film nor is it the type of music that a theme for the creature could be built upon. It is also very repetitive. You could have mixed in something like Jingle Bells or Up On The Housetop and at least add some variety.

I usually will talk about the quality of the DVD or Blu-ray that I watched a movie on, but I can’t do that for this film. Elves has (to my understanding) never been released to any format other than VHS. So you won’t see any links to purchase this movie at the bottom of this page. I don’t want to talk about the quality of the video or sound on VHS because the copy I have is years old and has suffered the ravages of time.

Elves has very little that makes it entertaining. If you are a fan of Dan Haggerty, then maybe you can latch onto that while you watch the film, but other than that it is quite boring. By the end of my viewing, I thought that maybe I missed something and started a second watch. Nope. It was as boring the second time as the first. The only suggestion I have to make Elves enjoyable is bringing some friends and drinks and make fun of the movie as it plays.

Rating:

Jack Savage:

If Elves was bad enough to memorable, that would be something. Unfortunately, it just good enough to be forgettable.

Trailer: