Elves (1989)

directed by Jeffrey Mandel

USA

89 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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"Are you asking me if I believe in elves? No... but God did."

Every year I get worse at watching Christmas movies. Sidetracked by other stuff, too busy (somehow I seem to always take on more projects than usual around the holidays), bored by every Christmas movie on offer, or just plain unwilling. I could have even seen this at a local bar/theater, but it's cold outside and I work weird hours. So I Elved at home, and I'm not really sure I fully understand what I experienced.

Elves is a movie that makes me philosophical about the nature of the American film industry as a whole. I watch a lot of Japanese movies (obviously), and I definitely don't want to fall into the trap of thinking everything made in Japan is automatically better, but it really does strike me that even the shittiest Japanese movie I've seen seems to be at the very least watchable in a way that bad American movies are not. A bad Japanese V-cin horror movie from 1989 made on a beer-money budget by a bunch of teenagers feels like it has more life in it than Elves. It seems like there's a proliferation of American movies that, like Elves, look like real movies on the surface, but are just so deeply bizarre in terms of plot, pacing, character writing, and acting that it amazes me people actually managed to cobble together enough money to get this done and make it look professional and still managed to be so bad at it.

The story here is that a teenage-ish girl unwittingly finds herself part of a plan put into motion before her birth to have an elf impregnate her and produce a race of superhumans that will carry out Nazi orders and bring the Fourth Reich to bear. Elves, the film posits, were the "little creeping things" designated by God to have refuge on Noah's Ark at the time of the flood. (Yes, I am serious.) (None of this explains why the movie only seems capable of showing one elf at a time.)

Fortunately, Julie Austin, who plays Kirsten, is one of the movie's 2 decent actors (the other is Dan Haggerty doing down-on-his-luck MacReady) out of a cast of people who seem only vaguely aware that they're in a movie. Elves was actually a lot more watchable because of her and Haggerty; you can kind of get away with a movie being bad if one or two of your actors take it seriously. Kirsten's life sucks so bad it's almost not believable: abusive mom, grandfather who turns out to also be her father, pervert mall Santa and a neurotic boss making her job miserable, weird little brother, et cetera. But she is one of the more likable characters, which is fortunate since she's also the protagonist. She does tank her respectability by calling the elf the F-slur in what should be her climactic moment, but I guess you can't set your expectations too high for this sort of thing.

I watched this as a really bad VHS rip on YouTube, which added to the charm but also made it flat-out difficult to see anything. What I could see of the practical effects left something to be desired. The elf was puppeted well, but something about its static facial expression (gargoylish; laughable) made it look goofy instead of menacing or even really interesting. I did enjoy that the movie immediately turns into a peyote trip when the elf finally gets killed, that was fun.

All in all I think I definitely would have been better off watching this in a bar. There are one-off quotes that are absolutely hilarious out-of-context, such as the one I opened this review with, but on the whole, watching this alone in your house totally sober is just you, alone in your house, sober, watching a bad Nazi elf movie. Whether or not that sounds like a good time is up to your individual taste, but for me, if I'm watching a bad Christmas movie, I want it to at least be fun, and this just kind of bored me.

Trigger warning for animal cruelty.