Awfully Good: Elves

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Elves (1989)

Director: Jeffrey Mandel
Stars: Dan Haggerty, Julie Austin, Deanna Lund

A teenage girl is stalked by a demonic elf that was created by her Nazi grandfather to mate with her and bring about the master Aryan race AND the Antichrist.

God bless us, every one!

ELVES is my new favorite Christmas movie. It has everything you could want in a holiday film: Nazi occult experiments, Santa Claus doing lines of coke and getting stabbed in the penis, incestual overtones, and killer biblical elves.

Hey you guuuuys! Happy holidays!

Actually, scratch that last part. Despite the title, there’s only one elf and it’s one of the funniest-looking cinematic creations since Impie from SORORITY BABES IN THE SLIMEBALL BOWL-O-RAMA. It looks like an orc reject from Lord of the Rings, with a rubber costume so amateurish the creature spends the entire movie with its mouth gaping open like the Rivendell village idiot. The fact that they actually put this thing in front of a camera shows how desperate the filmmakers were and how cheap their production was. And it sucks in concept as well, not just execution. Despite being a supernatural being with “magical powers,” the elf is barely two feet tall with no discernible skills or abilities. Watching this movie is like seeing people getting attacked by a really ugly toddler over and over again. To kill, the elf has to use knives and guns and at one point digs up a girl’s dead cat and rubs it against her bedroom window, seemingly out of spite. And it does all this with its one moronic facial expression.

Though initially met with skepticism, when “flashing your chest” became an accepted form of currency, it completely saved the U.S. economy.

The heroine of this yuletide tale is Kirsten, a Scrooge-like teenager who’s the founder of the Sisters of Anti-Christmas. You can’t really blame her for her lack of Christmas cheer though, considering her family makes the Mansons look like the Brady Bunch. Her wheelchair-bound grandpa is an abusive Nazi. Her wicked mother closes her bank account and keeps all of her money. And her little brother is an F-bomb dropping 6 year old who watches her shower and comments on her “f*cking big tits.” Kirsten’s only friend in the world is her pregnant cat Agamemnon, but her jealous mom drowns it in the toilet out of spite. So when the film opens with Kirsten and her girlfriends performing a pagan anti-Christmas ritual in the woods one night, it’s understandable. It’s just unfortunate that Kirsten accidentally spills some of her blood on the ground and awakens an ancient elf hellbent on having non-consensual sex with her.

The Cigarette Holder-Toothbrush… For when you don’t want to lose those attractive tar stains.

Thankfully Kirsten is not alone in this ordeal. Her savior comes in the unlikely form of Mike McGavin, a homeless, recovering alcoholic, former cop played by “Grizzly Adams” star Dan Haggerty. The character of Mike McGavin is amazing for many reasons, but most noticeable is his ability to continue smoking cigarettes no matter what the situation. Confronting neo-Nazis, running from demonic elves, brushing his teeth—he puts the Marlboro Man to shame. McGavin is working as a mall Santa, but gets the chance to play detective once again when Nazis invade the mall to kidnap Kirsten and he has to figure out how to save her. Haggerty gives one of the most laid back performances I’ve ever seen, which is amusing when he’s supposed to be a badass and delivering lines like, “How many teeth you got? [punches face] Now how many you got?”

The Children of the Corn saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus.

To get to the bottom of this whole pointy-eared demon thing, McGavin tracks down an elf expert who tells him that the creature is actually biblical and one of the animals God saved on Noah’s ark. The man, who clearly has a doctorate in the elven sciences, seriously says, “There are two schools of thought” on the connection between elves and Nazis. One is that the Nazis were experimenting with elves as “assassination teams” because they were the perfect soldier due to their small size and magical powers. The other is that they were a “genetic engineering experiment”—each elf carried in its sperm the genes to produce the master race and rule the world. It just needs to mate with the chosen virgin on Christmas Eve. Around this time, Kirsten coincidentally discovers that her grandfather is actually her father as well and that he drugged her mom and had sex with her to create a child of “pure genetic information.”

In case you haven’t been following along, let me recap: Kirsten was inbred by Nazis for the sole purpose of one day having sex with an elf from the Bible, which would in turn bring about Hitler’s master Aryan race. That’s the plot of this Christmas movie.

Bathtub Elf is always there to make sure you clean behind your ears. Always.

However, before mother and daughter can reconnect over all the ickiness, the elf electrocutes Mommy Dearest in the bathtub. McGavin finds her fried corpse in the bathroom and for some reason tells Kirsten and her brother, “She’s gonna be okay!” They then run in to Grandpa Nazi, who reveals that in addition to creating the Keebler Fourth Reich, interspecies elf sex also unleashes the Anti-Christ! Luckily, Kirsten’s dad/granddad feels some guilt in his old age and gives her a magical Elf Stone that can end this once and for all. But being a Nazi, he’s still sort of a dick and doesn’t tell what she needs to do with it.

Gertrude wasn’t as attractive an Emma Frost as January Jones, but at least she was a better actress.

In the final scene, Kirsten and her pervy brother get chased in to the magical Nazi Elf Rape Forest by an anti-Semite who sounds exactly like Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Mike McGavin is busy at the house smoking and fighting off Nazis. But mostly smoking.) The Nazi declares his undying devotion to the Chosen Virgin until he is shot… by the gun-toting elf for no reason! Kirsten realizes she’s a complete idiot and forgot the Elf Stone, so she sends her bro back to the house to retrieve it. We’re then treated to a painfully awkward sequence where the elf begins to seduce Kirsten in preparation for the final consummation, offering her a cockroach and moving his fake rubber hand up her leg. Eventually the brother returns with the stone, and in the most randomly inappropriate one-liner in movie history, Kirsten yells, “Die you little f**got!” before stabbing the magic rock in to the ground. The siblings then wake up the next day in the woods, thankful that it’s all over. (Just like the audience.) That is until the ending credits are shown over an ultrasound of a fetus, suggesting that somehow the elf DID impregnate Kirsten. Perhaps by osmosis. I guess elves can do that.

Sandra had made the Really, Really Naughty List.

ELVES is hard to find, but if you’re an Awfully Good fan, it’s definitely worth tracking down a copy online and adding it to your annual Christmas viewing repertoire. You won’t find a more insane movie to celebrate the holidays.

Enjoy a bevy of classic lines, from “Santa said oral…” to “I had a rough day at work… Santa got murdered!”

This collection of greatest hits includes elf kills, bathtub electrocutions and the greatest explanation of Nazi-Elf history you’ll hear today. (NSFW)

Kirsten’s mom sheds her clothes in the bathtub just before getting electrocuted. Hope you like your boobs extra crispy!

Makes a great double feature with Will Ferrell’s ELF! Buy this movie here!

Take a shot or drink every time: