Elves (1989)

Just perfect...

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Sometimes, I watch movies in the middle of the night, after working long shifts of meetings, copywriting and brainstorming. Whatever brains that still exists in the mush and at this late hour are often exposed to sheer lunacy via films that I find on YouTube. When I awaken, my first thought is often, "Was that movie real or a nightmare?"Elves is one of those films.Kirsten and her friends innocently take part in an ant-Christmas pagan ritual in the woods, but then she cuts her hand and awakens a demonic elf who ends up being part of a Nazi plot to create the master race that Hitler always dreamed of. Yep, instead of the pure Aryan Nietzsche paradigm, the Fuhrer dreamed of a world where human and elf hybirds would populate the glove.Through one of those moments of perfect horror movie luck, Kirsten is the last pure Aryan virgin on earth. Nope, this isn't a post apocalpytic film. That's just the way things are these days. Her grandfather was once a part of all of this, but he's since reformed. Oh, he's also her father, because inbreeding was a big part of keeping the bloodline pure.But hey, Kirsten has no idea that any of this is going on. She's just trying to get through the hell of holiday retail, working in a department store. That's where she meets Mike McGain (Dan Haggarty, TV's Grizzly Adams), an alcoholic homeless ex-cop who takes over for the store's Santa Claus when the original is killed by an evil elf. Yes, I just wrote that sentence, perhaps the most batshit crazy one I've ever assembled in all my years of writing.Mike starts living in the store, living off of the food he steals from the snack bar where Kirsten works. One night, he saves Kirsten when the Nazis come to the store and kill all of her friends.Will Kirsten survive? What does her mom think about all of this? Have you ever wanted to see a movie where an elf electrocutes a woman in a bathtub? What the hell is an elfstone anyway? These and several other questions will and won't be answered.This is a film rich with purely inane and insane dialogue, including a lecherous, cocaine using Santa that states, "Santa said oral!" and our heroine bemoaning that her only friend is a cat. There's also a great scene where Mike goes to see a professor during a holiday dinner and the man describes how elves and Nazis are having this big ritual and incestual sex bloodlines in front of his children.Geek note: Mike goes to the library and asks what the Dewey Decimal System Number is for the occult. The answer? 666. Nope. The real number would be 130, the code for books on parapsychology and the supernatural.Is this film any good? No, it's horrible. And I loved it. It's my holiday gift to you and I'm so happy to share such a patently warped film with all of you.

This schlock-ridden beauty is a christmas horror gem of the it's-so-bad-it's good variety.The plotline is gold.Nazis have genetically engineered the master race gene into elves buried in an american forest. The man behind this plot impregnated his own daughter, as part of a scheme to create the perfect human- specifically designed to procreate with these elves. Hence, his granddaughter is the focus of an ancient prophecy come to fruition...as she is to breed with the elf at midnight on christmas morning, to bring forth the antichrist and master race- who will rule over the entire world.But she has no idea about any of this...until, well, her friends start getting murdered by nazi occult priests and the elf itself.Up to this point, she's just a rad 80's chick, upset with the outrageousness of this square world...shooting the shit with her girlfriends and getting up to no good. At least when she's not working.One night, she and her girlfriends break into the department store where she works. They plan to party...but are are interrupted with this whole fiasco, before they get a chance to let loose.Now, her, Santa, and her little brother must take on and destroy the elf, before she gets raped and knocked up with the antichrist by it.This film is cheesy as hell, but the elf is kinda cool (though, also totally lame), and its full of awesomely quotable one liners. There's even some tension in there! Meaning, it's pretty much everything you want in a christmas horror this holiday season.Recommended.6 out of 10.

After performing a ceremony in a graveyard, a group of teenage girls find themselves being stalked by a race of elves summoned by a Nazi scientist looking to create a master race by inbreeding one of them with the elves and must find a way to stop it.This here was quite a decent enough effort. One of the better elements for this one is the fact that there's quite a pronounced and distinctive atmosphere present here that runs throughout this one. Starting with the manner of how they manage to resurrect the creatures in the first place with the chilling cemetery scene in the opening sequence, there's a strong series of suspenseful stalking scenes throughout the first half showing the elves point-of-view scurrying along after their potential victims leading to some decent shots of them close to the ground which makes their creation a little more believable. That leads into the somewhat enjoyable action scenes here with the creature taking out the loner in the break room at the department store, the creature's first attack on the house where it stalks her family members which is written off as a dream and the more action-film centered attack on the friends at the department store which turns into a fine gunfight within the aisleways which is quite a nice feature which helps to make this one quite action-packed and pleasing. Likewise, the final half features quite a lot of enjoyable action here with the race to get away from the creatures and the Nazi agents leading into the solid finale in the woods which is a nice blend of surreal imagery and fantasy-based action that makes for a nice overall time to this and ends this on a fine note. The other good part here is the fact that this one did manage some nice effects work on the creature and the various kills here which aren't quite graphic but has a nice look to them. These here make this one quite fun, although there are a few flaws with this one. The film's biggest issue is the fact that it doesn't really know what it really wants to be as this one really seems to feature quite a scattered overall plot line. The notion of the girls' troubled home-life works nicely, but it doesn't match up to anything that comes later on, the sudden inclusion of the action-film scenario with the department store shootout is completely odd to randomly throw into the film and the utterly bizarre storyline about the occult Nazi experiments is handled with such ludicrous explanations and reasoning that the whole thing feels underwritten and half-baked. Forcing him to go running around to the various authority figures on the subject to get the whole story out makes no sense when it could streamline everything by making one person be the expert or at least have the team gathered together at one spot would've made much more sense beyond the sheer lunacy of the whole situation. The other problem with the film stems from the rather lax and stifling pacing that doesn't really have a lot of action throughout here as there's quite a lot of times featuring nothing of any real interest as it lets the mystery play out here which really keeps the action out of the first half for the most part. These here really hold it back.Rated PG-13: Graphic Language, Violence, Brief Nudity, drug use and violence-against-animals.

Bad "Gremlins" rip-offs were all the rage in the mid to late 80's. Foremost among this ignoble bunch of 80's formula schlock horror swill are "Hobgoblins," "Spookies," "Ghoulies," "Munchies," and "Leprechaun." But this stupendously stinky low-budget direct-to-video dud somehow manages to go that extra shabby mile so it can qualify as the single most supremely shoddy "Gremlins" cash-in copy to ever crawl its shameful way onto celluloid.The strictly by-the-numbers plot revolves around an obnoxious virginal teen bimbo (the highly annoying and less than endearing Julie Austin) who's just turned 17; the stupid adolescent brat accidentally awakens a bogus-looking, none-too-frightening monster which was created by the bimbo's crippled ex-Nazi grandfather. The unsightly dwarf creature has to mate with the bimbo so that a new Aryan race can be created and subsequently start a Fourth Reich. Also involved in the asinine story are a gaggle of pistol-packing neo-Nazi scumballs who bleed foamy liquid when shoot (this odd trait is never explained) and a groggy Dan "Grizzly Adams" Haggerty as a boozy, chain-smoking, yet still heroic department store Santa.This groan-inducing cinematic abomination strikes out something terrible on all the essential film bases: we've got bland, unbecoming performances from a noticeably disinterested cast, chintzy production values, a confused, hard to follow (and swallow) messed-up script, flat direction, sluggish pacing, and a very terrible inexpressive plastic beast that isn't even an elf -- it's a lousy troll instead (boo! hiss!). Despite a few severely fumbled should-be nifty murder set pieces -- a lecherous department store Santa gets gruesomely castrated by the troll, "Land of the Giants" TV show star Deanna Lund as our teen heroine's nasty bitch stepmother winds up eating some seriously lethal amps when the troll tosses a radio in the bath tub she's soaking in -- this thoroughly atrocious clunker is nonetheless well worth avoiding altogether.