Elves (1989)
- Andrew Smith
- 21 hours ago
- 4 min read
"They're not working for Santa... Anymore"
Plot
A young woman discovers that she is the focus of an evil Nazi experiment involving selective breeding and summoned elves in an attempt to create a race of supermen. So when she gets trapped in a department store with a few of her friends and a murderous elf, she has to rely upon the assistance of a down-on-his-luck-detective-turned-department-store-Santa-Claus to see her through the night.
Elves is a pretty bonkers 80s horror film which could only have been made in that decade due to its wildly imaginative “everything but the kitchen sink” approach but wholly inappropriate bunch of ideas which someone must have greenlit during a long session smoking illicit narcotics. Even the synopsis is wild. Its sole appeal is to figure out just how every marijuana-induced plot thread is going to connect to the next one. Perhaps its for this reason that Elves is still stuck in VHS hell. To date (21st December 2025), it has not received even a DVD release let alone a Blu-ray one and so it’s particular array of curiosities can still only be viewed on scuzzy overused VHS copies or bootleg digital transfers from poor VHS sources. This adds even more mystery to the legend that is Elves.
I’m not sure whether the synopsis above ever suggests half of just how exploitative and depraved Elves gets. Not in a gore and violence sense but in seedy characters and plot threads. There’s the degenerate department Santa who likes taking advantage of his younger female helpers. There’s the physically abusive grandfather who is actually her biological father. There’s the evil mother who kills her own cat by drowning it in the toilet. There’s the pervert little brother who spies on his elder sister in the shower and then later threatens to tell everyone at school that, and I quote, “yeah and you’ve got fucking big tits and I’m going to tell everybody I saw them.” Add in some Nazis planting bombs in cars, some female expendable friends to pad out the body count and then the whole notion of a pair of elves being placed onto Noah’s ark and you’re finally starting the scratch the surface.
As a notoriously bad Christmas-themed horror, you’d assume that Elves would be some sort of low budget equivalent to Gremlins, where a bunch of mischievous elves take a break from making toys for Santa and do some naughty stuff in the big city. Only Elves doesn’t feature multiple tiny terrors – just a solitary elf who looks more like he wandered in off the set of The Hobbit than Santa Claus: The Movie. Call trading standards because the title is fraudulent! Not that only that, but multiple characters refer to it as a troll during the film. Due to the meagre budget, you don’t even get a good look at the little critter and just see head and upper body shots of it all the time – there’s zero movement in the face and looks like it’s just being moved around on a pole so it has this dumb mouth agape “mouth breather” look in every single scene regardless of what is happening around it.
Star of the show Dan Haggerty is more famous to audiences around the world as Grizzly Adams, a bear-loving mountain man who was the star of an early 70s film before hitting it big with a long-running TV programme. Haggerty actually looks like a washed-up Santa Claus with his bushy beard and hair so seeing him playing a department store Santa Claus is no stretch of the imagination. The hilarious thing is that Haggerty spends more time making sure that he’s always got a lit cigarette in his hand (given how many Camel he smokes in this film, I’m assuming he had a deal of some kind) than actually putting any effort into reading his lines. He’s the laziest horror film hero I’ve seen for a long time. Perhaps he could have smoked less and the filmmakers reinvested the clearly significant cigarette budget back into making a better elf model - probably around one million dollars by the time Haggerty has had his last drag!
On the horror and violence side, there’s not a whole lot going on. The original department Santa gets castrated early on, allowing for Haggerty to assume the role as the replacement department Santa. The worst scene of violence involves the aforementioned cat being bagged and drowned, a scene which will terrify animal lovers. It’s no surprise to find out that writer-director Jeffrey Mandel has no other credits to his name and it is easy to see why. Not just the fact that Elves is terrible, but the concepts and ideas floating around in here alone should have been a red flashing light to future studios and producers looking to hire him. On a technical level, Elves looks and sounds poor, though the years of VHS hell and dodgy copies haven’t helped it.
Final Verdict
Whilst Elves is a complete load of rubbish, the fact that it’s got so many ideas flying around means that it’s unpredictable so you’ll not get bored watching it as you have no clue as to where the film will take you next. Tasteless and trashy seasonal viewing isn’t a film, it’s a moviegoing experience of nauseating proportions.
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Elves
Director(s): Jeffrey Mandel Writer(s): Jeffrey Mandel, Mike Griffin, Bruce A. Taylor Actor(s): Dan Haggerty, Julie Austin, Deanna Lund, Borah Silver, Mansell Rivers-Bland, Christopher Graham, Laura Lichstein, Stacey Dye Duration: 89 mins |  |
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