Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas
For this year’s eleventh entry, Grizzly Adams faces off against incestuous Nazi science to prevent the apocalypse in Elves!
A trio of young women dubbing themselves the “sisters of anti-Christmas” try to hold an ad hoc ritual in the forest, but one of them accidentally cuts herself. Her blood awakens a long-slumbering elf that proceeds to seek her out to enact a decades-old Nazi plot. The only person who can protect her is a recovering alcoholic ex-detective working as a department store Santa.
No holiday horror marathon is complete without some Santa sleaze, and that’s the best word to describe this movie. For example, the main character catches her brother peeping on her while she’s changing. He, an actual child, says, “You got fucking big tits and I’m going to tell everyone I saw.”
At another point, this young woman is sitting on Santa’s lap where he leans in and whispers, “Santa said ‘oral’” while rubbing her leg. Shortly thereafter, the weird Nazi elf stabs him to death. In the dick.
Obviously, there’s a lot to recommend this movie just on the level of batshittery. It’s not good by any standard. Dan Haggerty half whispers, half mumbles all his lines, we never get the kind of gore you’d really expect from a movie like this, and the whole thing feels silly. In fact, it feels like it’s walking the edge of being safe-for-television until the mom strips down and takes a bath. Plus, you have a lot of f-bombs and just general weirdness.
I mentioned in the Joe Bob Ruins Christmas review that he’s good at giving both the context and production details of a movie and I’d really like his take on this one. The movie leaves you gobsmacked and just asking, “how?” at each and every moment. How did any of this seem like a good idea?
The movie is profoundly stupid, nigh unwatchable, and then it throws you an incest curveball, but it’s also a movie I’d recommend for those very reasons. It has a terrible puppet, campy professors, and Dan Haggerty staggering in from nowhere to start beating a man. It’s 100% the kind of dumb Christmas horror you want to watch with friends while drinking beer and eating pizza or to have playing in the background of a holiday party. It is, of course, not something to watch in and of itself or on its own merits. It has no merits. It is, however, a treasure. Or maybe a turd. Either way, I’ll gladly leave it buried for someone else to find.
2/5 salacious Santas stabbed in the jingle sack
Elves is currently unavailable through any official platform
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