Review #368: Elves (1989)

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #10 - Elves (1989)

Watch it here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dluvUGMCt5Y

Before I get to the plot, I have to say: this is a WILD movie. I don't think I'm going to rate it super high but in some ways it might be the best movie I watched all year. There is a scene in this film where a goblin/troll/elf thing shoots a nazi with a gun. Have you ever seen that in a movie? I haven't! I don't think they intended anybody to jump up and cheer at that part but I really wanted to.

Anyway. Elves is almost certainly a made-for-TV-movie, and if it isn't, it sure looks and sounds like one. (Considering the amount of T&A in here I would bet money it premiered on Cinemax.) The first half really failed to grab my interest, but the second half- hoo boy, the second half brought it right back around.

Elves begins with our teenaged protagonist, Kirsten, taking some friends out to the woods in late December to try and perform a feminine-focused witch spell using some books she found in her creepy german grandpa's study. None of them know what they're doing and Kirsten accidentally cuts her hand, spilling some blood on the ground and unknowingly awakening a small humanoid creature that looks like A24's Cheddar Goblin, but is called lots of things in this movie ranging from "goblin" to "troll" to "elf" to "ninja". Kirsten gets in trouble for going out late at night, so to get back at her mom, she and her friends make plans to sneak into Kirsten's workplace (a department store) after-hours and camp out with some cute boys in the display tents. But her plans in the department store get ruined by two things: first, a homeless ex-detective named Mike that recently got hired as the store Santa is also trying to camp out there, and second, some of Kirsten's creepy german grandpa's Nazi buddies have come looking for her for unknown reasons- a fight breaks out, Kirsten's friends get killed, and the weird goblin/elf thing may have gotten in on the action.

That's the first half of the movie, and frankly, I was having trouble following that. But then, after narrowly avoiding being killed by a goblin elf thing and some nazis, homeless Santa Mike does some investigation and finds out that the Nazis believed in elves, and in fact were trying to use the elves as part of their grand plan to create the Master Race. Meanwhile, Kirsten finds out that her creepy german grandpa is also her creepy Nazi father- he impregnated his own daughter as part of this plan to create a perfect vessel for an elf baby, before quitting the regime a few years ago. So the Nazis want to make this goblin elf thing have sex with Kirsten so it can impregnate her with its magically-altered Master Race sperm, thus causing her to give birth to the antichrist as spoken of in the book of Revelation. But Kirsten figures out some way to stop the goblin (something to do with stabbing a crystal into the hole the goblin crawled out of?) and then the movie ends.

So yeah, this movie is bananas. I don't know what was being smoked or snorted while this script was written but whatever it is, someone deserves an award for this film. And by "deserves" I mean "surely never got" because come on, this thing is bananas.

I don't know if I can really recommend this movie because there's a ton of chaff in here and it looks and sounds bad, but I did have a LOT of fun marvelling at the latter half. Maybe check it out if you want some cable TV-level melodrama with some boobs and guns thrown in.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Boobs With Swastikas On Them

Factual Error: When Mike (the homeless detective Santa) goes to the library to find books on the occult, he is referred to section "666". In an American library, which uses Dewey Decimal Classification, books on parapsychology and the supernatural would be reserved in 130. 666 is actually for ceramic and allied technologies.