Elves (1989) -***

     I knew very little about Elves when it showed up on the schedule for B-Fest this year. Come on, though. A horror movie from the 80’s with that title, set during the run-up to Christmas? Got to be a ripoff of Gremlins, right? And to be sure, that is one of the things that Elves does; indeed, a few scenes here and there look purpose-designed to help the producers cut a trailer overtly positioning it as a Gremlins ripoff. But Elves is a much weirder movie than that when taken as a whole, pitting an alcoholic ex-cop mall Santa against a decades-long Nazi conspiracy with the fate of a family straight out of a lesser V.C. Andrews novel in the balance.

     It’s a night in the middle of December, and three teenaged girls are gathering in the Southern California woods for the inaugural meeting of the Sisters of Anti-Christmas. The whole thing is the brainchild of budding art student Kirsten Hiller (Julie Austin, from Twisted Justice and Fatal Exposure); her friends, Amy (Stacy Dye) and Brooke (Laura Lichstein), are both too dim ever to dream up anything so peculiar if left to their own devices. The girls aren’t just out there to bitch about the current state of the holidays, you see. No, there are going to be mystic rites performed, involving communion with a goddess of Kirsten’s own invention (the Virgin of Anti-Christmas), divinatory readings to guide the Sisters’ romantic maneuverings, and a bizarre affirmation of girls generally as the Master Race. One assumes that the program also includes readings from an age-old German-language book which Kirsten swiped from the library of her grandfather (Escape from New York’s Borah Silver), because she ran considerable risk of trouble in acquiring it. Also, nothing can proceed until Kirsten has found exactly the right spot in the forest, evidently based on some unexplained intuition of hers. Just the same, though, the Sisters of Anti-Christmas will be sparing at least a little thought for their parents’ poor choice of presents, for the insufferable behavior of the customers at the department store where they all work as café waitresses, and for the virtual certainty that the big day will once again arrive unaccompanied by even the faintest hint of snow. Or at any rate, such was the plan. In fact, though, the convocation hasn’t progressed very far at all before somebody knocks over the votive candle lighting the ritual. Kirsten gives herself a nasty cut on the palm of her hand gathering up broken fragments of the glass jar containing the candle, and the girls all lose their appetites for witchery at that point. If they’d stuck around just a little longer before going their separate ways home, however, they’d have witnessed a small, manlike creature with gray skin, sharp teeth, pointed ears, and an expression of dull brutality on its face clawing its way out of the earth on which Kirsten bled.

     Now for a quick digression on Kirsten’s home life. Dad doesn’t seem to be in the picture anymore, and in his absence, Grandpa clings feebly to his longtime role as the Hiller family patriarch. A German immigrant of exactly the age to make you wonder uneasily what he was up to back in the 30’s and 40’s, the old man rules the roost in a dictatorial manner that clashes with his obvious physical infirmity. His commandments for Kirsten seem nonsensical and arbitrary, too— unless, of course, they’re meant to conceal the kind of secrets about his past that call down uninvited visits from the Mossad. Mom (Deanna Lund, from Sting of Death and Witch Story) was clearly born on this side of the Atlantic, given that she has no trace of an accent. She’s awfully young to be the daughter of a man Grandpa’s age, which makes me curious about the absent Grandma. For that matter, she’s awfully young to have a daughter Kirsten’s age, and the girl herself will later affirm that she was born when her mother was just sixteen. Maybe that helps explain Mrs. Hiller’s undisguised loathing for her firstborn child. Then there’s Kirsten’s brother, Willy (Christopher Graham). Five or six years younger than the seventeen-ish Kirsten, Willy is an obnoxious, self-centered brat and a pint-sized pervert always on the lookout for opportunities to see his big sister naked. Nevertheless, if there’s any hint of actual love among the humans of the Hiller household, it’s directed from Kirsten toward Willy. Perhaps she feels some solidarity with him against their hateful mother, whether or not he feels any with her in return. But Kirsten’s strongest affections are reserved for her cat, Agamemnon.

     Anyway, the little gray guy from the woods follows Kirsten home, and immediately starts making the kind of noisy mischief that most annoys Mrs. Hiller. She blames the disturbances on the cat, and surreptitiously drowns it in the toilet while Kirsten is at work the next day. Mom will of course claim total ignorance of Agamemnon’s whereabouts when Kirsten asks her about the missing animal later. Meanwhile, at the department store, Kirsten gets into hot water with her plan to amuse herself and her friends on their break from the cafe by teasing the guy in the Santa Claus suit (Douglas K. Grimm, from Laser Moon and Robo C.H.I.C.), sitting provocatively in his lap as if she were one of the children lined up to give him their Christmas wish-lists. Taking her coquetry at face value, the big creep gropes his way up her skirt and whispers lewdly in her ear. Hugh Reed, the store manager (Michael Tatlock), fires him on the spot, of course— but he’d clearly fire Kirsten, too, if he thought he could get away with it. As for Santa Paws, he retreats to the staff bathroom to snort some coke and plot some revenge. What he doesn’t realize, though, is that the little gray guy from the woods has followed Kirsten once again, and was watching from amid a camouflaging display of elf figurines during the fondling incident. In what I take to be evidence of a protective attitude toward the person whose spilled blood awakened him, the creature tackles Santa Paws from below, and stabs him repeatedly in the crotch until his femoral arteries give out.

     Now Kirsten has a whole new problem, because everyone on the scene knows that she had excellent reason to wish ill on the dead man. Certainly Detective Sergeant DeSoto (Strangeland’s Michael Herst) considers her a fair enough suspect once he’s done examining the scene of the crime. The girl has one rather unlikely thing going for her, however. Some years ago, Reed used to employ ex-cop Mike McGavin (Dan Haggerty, from Bury Me an Angel and The Chilling) as a store detective. McGavin drank himself out of that job just like he drank himself out of the police department, but it happens that he was back in the store that day, beseeching Reed for any sort of work. His detective’s instincts un-dulled by either booze or poverty, Mike thinks there’s more afoot here than a girl going Ms. .45 on a masher, and while he’s in no position to help Kirsten right now, the short-term gig he gets as emergency replacement Santa Claus means that he’ll be well placed to keep an eye on her going forward. That matters, because the creature that arose when Kirsten bled all over his resting place has only just begun violently interfering in her life. Sergeant DeSoto’s suspicions are the least of her worries, too, because some of Grandpa’s Old Country acquaintances have been keeping tabs on the girl for years, in anticipation of exactly this turn of events.

     In about the middle of this movie’s third act, McGavin bursts in on a college professor’s Christmas Eve dinner to demand of him, “I want to know the connection between the elves and the Nazis.” He speaks for the entire audience at that point, and the answer— “The elf mates with the virgin to create the Master Race”— will tell you whether Elves is the kind of film that you absolutely must see for yourself, or the kind that you want nothing to do with whatsoever. Once the Hiller family’s secrets come all the way out, this becomes by far the sleaziest PG-13 movie I’ve ever seen. Its treatment of innocent bystanders is vicious. Its attitude toward every sort of institution is cynical to the point of nihilism. And its take on the then-fashionable “It’s not over yet” ending is as cruelly bleak as a full-on 70’s bummer, although it differs from one of those tonally in some way that I’m unable to pin down. (The irony has a snarkier flavor, maybe?) But for all that, Elves also has a jarring goofiness about it. It isn’t deliberate black comedy so much as a breezy demeanor suggesting that no one involved in making this movie ever thought through the implications of any given scene or plot twist. Like I don’t think we’re intended to draw the obvious connection between Willy’s perving on his sister— which is presented in the moment as merely an “ain’t little brothers the worst?” sort of thing— and Grandpa’s eventual confession of incest in the name of the Reich. I don’t think writer/director Jeffrey Mandel or his two co-scribes realized how irredeemable Kirsten’s mom looks in the wake of the cat-drowning incident, or how off-putting it is to have Kirsten herself talking, even in jest, about belonging to the Master Race in her introductory scene. And I certainly don’t think Mandel and company grasped what whiplash they were inflicting on the audience by putting Nazis, incest, and monster-rape on one side of the ledger, and Dan Haggerty galumphing around like a pistol-packing hobo teddy bear on the other. All of that puts Elves right up one of my more urine-stained and rat-infested alleys, but those with gentler dispositions should probably give it a pass.

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