“You’ve got fucking big tits and I’m going to tell everyone I saw them!” — 7 year old boy to his sister.
Three edgy teenage girls who call themselves “the sisters of anti-Christmas” convene in the woods to “bemoan Christmas as a petty, over-commercialized media event.” One of them asks, “What’s ‘bemoan?'” The ringleader replies: “It means I didn’t get any good presents last year.” I unironically love shit like this.
One of the girls cuts her hand when a candle holder inexplicably shatters. Spooked by the strange occurrence, the girls freak out and run, but not before dripping blood on what’s presumably the burial spot of a demonic elf… or something. Honestly, I’m not sure exactly what’s going on in the preliminary scenes, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is there is now a monstrous elf lose in the world. Calling the monster a puppet would be too kind. It’s more like a barely articulate torso, which the special effects crew merely shoves into frame from time to time.
Before we go further, I have to point out that the den mother’s little shit of a brother spies on her in the shower. When she catches him, he says, “I’m not a pervert, I like seeing naked girls!” Later the boy is attacked by the troll in the middle of the night. When the mother tries to convince him it was only a nightmare, he responds with poetic delivery: “No, it was a fucking little ninja troll!” The mother decides it was the family cat who scratched the kid, so she drowns the pet in the toilet.
Enter Dan Haggerty—yes, Grizzly Adams. He’s a recovering alcoholic, ex-homicide detective who just so happens to have a bit of knowledge of the occult. He falls into the role of a department store Santa after the previous one is repeatedly stabbed to death in the nards. To make matters worse, Grizzly Adams has just been evicted from his camper trailer. Soon after, he discovers a clue the homicide detectives missed and follows the trail.
Meanwhile, the teenage main character and her airhead friends decide to have an after-hours party in the department store, which is coincidentally where Grizzly Adams is sleeping nowadays. They invite their born-to-die-in-a-movie-like-this boyfriends who arrive shortly before three Nazi goons appear, who’re hunting the elf for reasons you won’t fully understand until later on (if it at all).
Not only is the plurality of “Elves” bullshit, it’s hardly about the singular elf, either. The film is so thoroughly messed up on a technical level, the laughs are frequent. My biggest complaint is the film’s insincerity: there are several hints that indicate the filmmakers were trying to make a bad movie, including a Chinatown parody, an obvious Mommy Dearest reference, and the pulpy integration of Nazi mythology (“The Fourth Reich,” as Grizzly Adams calls it). It’s not quite as obnoxious as modern attempts at self-aware cheese, which makes it entertaining enough to watch with an audience, especially when the wheelchair-bound grandfather professes… eh, best not to spoil it.
I love Elves. Haggerty may not have been the best actor, but he’s got a unique screen presence, which makes me wish he had ended up in more movies like this. Sure, it’s a gimmick, but gimmicks can be fun, too.
Several internet sources claim this film is rated PG-13. There’s no way the version I saw would get a PG-13 rating, so there may be a censored version floating around. There’s a good amount of blood, a close-up of a cokehead getting stabbed repeatedly in the crotch, full frontal nudity, and a kid who cusses roughly as much as a comic on Def Comedy Jam. If any of those elements are absent in your copy, you might as well just turn it off and find a better source wherever you can. Who knows, maybe the full movie is on YouTube?
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