Elves

Some movies are bad. Others are so bad they’re good. And then there’s Elves, a film that barrels past both categories into a third realm entirely: the “What were they thinking?” zone.

Let me try to explain the plot. A teenage girl named Kirsten performs an anti-Christmas ritual in the woods. This awakens a demonic elf. The elf stalks her. It attacks her brother Willie after he peeps on her in the shower. Meanwhile, Kirsten works at a department store snack counter. The store Santa sexually harasses her. The elf murders him by repeatedly stabbing him in the crotch while he’s trying to snort cocaine.

I’m not making this up.

Enter Dan Haggerty, TV’s “Grizzly Adams,” playing an alcoholic ex-cop. He becomes the new department store Santa. Through increasingly absurd circumstances, he discovers the truth: Kirsten is part of a secret Nazi breeding program designed to create the anti-Christ by mating her with an elf. Only he can stop it. Except he can’t, because he’s offscreen during the finale. So only Kirsten can stop it. Except it’s unclear if she does. But by then you’ve stopped caring.

Writer-director Jeffrey Mandel apparently collected every outrageous idea he’d ever had and crammed them into 89 minutes. The result plays like a fever dream scripted by a committee of sadists. Kirsten’s stepmother scoops up Kirsten’s cat in a pillowcase, then drowns the animal in the toilet, holding it under the toilet water with her bare hands. It’s simultaneously ridiculous and genuinely disturbing. The film earns its mean streak.

Then fifteen minutes later, two of Kirsten’s friends have this exchange:

“No way.”

“Way!”

“No way!”

“Way!”

“I said, ‘No way!’”

“Whatever.”

And later, when Kirsten’s little brother, alarmed, asks, “What’s wrong? Are we gonna be all right?” Kirsten replies in perfect deadpan: “No Willie, gramps is a Nazi.”

Bad as they are, these exchanges achieve a kind of surreal absurdism.

But the same can’t be said of the performances. Borah Silver, as Kirsten’s grandfather, tries to channel Olivier from The Boys from Brazil but his German accent keeps taking detours through Brooklyn. Even Haggerty seems lost. Perhaps if his co-stars were bears, he’d have connected better with the material.

And yet, I was never bored. The film careens from one outrageous beat to the next with admirable commitment. The elf itself barely appears, despite the plural title suggesting an army of the things. The real villains are Neo-Nazis. The elf mostly lurks offscreen, occasionally stabbing someone to remind you it exists.

That the demonic murderous elf is the least outrageous plot element speaks volumes about Mandel’s deranged vision. You can’t quite dismiss it. It’s dark without being particularly bloody. It’s incompetent without being unwatchable. It’s a movie that exists in that twilight zone between “so bad it’s good” and “just plain bad”—and I’m not sure which side it lands on.

What I am sure of: this is a film where a Nazi elf anti-Christ impregnation plot feels almost inevitable by the third act. And somehow, that’s not even the strangest thing about it.