By Ben Bussey
September 30th 1988, and US cinemas found themselves hosting two of the biggest blockbusters they’d ever seen… that’s right, I’m talking about Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. And if that opener puts you off then I’d stop reading right now, because in this little retrospective I’ll be doing my utmost to lay on enough innuendo to do the great lady proud.
I mean, I couldn’t even begin to recall the sheer number of double entendres in this movie. Elvira takes a blow to the crown and the big muscly dude asks her how her head is, to which she replies, “I haven’t had any complaints yet.” Big muscly dude says he doesn’t want to bore Elvira with local politics; she murmurs, “go ahead, bore me.” Bunch of teenage boys show up at Elvira’s house to help with redecorating; she’s on all fours looking over her shoulder at them, and tells them to “grab a tool and start banging!”
It seems entirely fitting that a fair percentage of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is devoted to teenage boys gawping over the leading lady. After all, seeing her was formative experience for a great many of us who were on the cusp of coming… ahem, I mean coming of age in the late 80s. As a young kid in Britain at the time, I didn’t see this movie until many years later, nor had I ever seen Elvira’s TV shows; as far as I know they were never broadcast in the UK (I could be wrong). Still, everyone knew who Elvira was. In a decade when the images of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger were embedded in the popular consciousness as the embodiment of the horror genre, Elvira was, I suppose, the nearest we had to a female equivalent of that. But, like every Halloween costume marketed toward women in the intervening 25 years (if not before), she couldn’t be sold on spookiness alone. She had herself a couple of pretty sizeable selling points to capitalise on, after all…
Yeah, I told you I wasn’t going to stop. Just get used to it. Trust me, if this is too much, there’s no way you could handle the low humour in this movie.
And yet… Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a product of a long-lost era, a time so far away that it almost seems like a myth. A time before Friedberg and Seltzer, and the Wayans Brothers. A time when parody movies were… get this… actually good. They had the absurdity, the cartoonish non-realism and the gutter-level humour, but they also remembered little things like telling a story that was fully rounded (not unlike… ah, you get the point. Heheh, I said “get the point”… oh god, it never ends. As your mama said to me once! Must… stop…)
Now, this movie certainly isn’t on a par with Airplane!, The Naked Gun and the like, but it takes a pretty good stab at it. Much as I did at your ma- okay I’ll stop now.
So, that whole story thing we were talking about: the hostess with the mostest is all geared up for starting her own show in Vegas, but lacks the financing to get it up (heheh!) and running. Cue convenient plot device: the death of a great aunt that Elvira never knew she had (hell, she didn’t even know she had a good one), and an inheritance with her name all over it. So off she goes to some little town in Massachusetts, only to find herself the heir to a seemingly worthless old house whose only notable extras are a poodle and an old recipe book. And to make matters worse, this is a highly buttoned-down, stiff upper lip, conservative community, whose adult population don’t look too favourably upon their outspoken, outlandish-looking new arrival.
While it’s obviously a bit of a stretch to call Elvira, Mistress of the Dark a horror movie, it does very much fit in with the classics insofar as it’s your classic outsider story, in which a judgemental society reacts with suspicion, spite and ultimately aggression to an individual who doesn’t follow their rules. Sure, the movie is obviously played for laughs from start to finish, even in its amusingly OTT supernatural climax (heheh, I said climax… yeah, I knew I couldn’t hold back for too long, as I told your ma-MUST STOP), but there is a serious message of sorts underlying it all about facing the slings and arrows of adversity, remaining true to oneself – and above all, doing it with a smile on your face, with a “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke” attitude.
Indeed, it’s rather disheartening to note just how much of this still applies a quarter of a century on, given most of the adversity Elvira faces is good ol’ fashioned sexism, constantly fending off the contempt of other women with one hand, and unwanted sexual attention from men with the other. Sadly, a great many (including but not limited to those of my gender) still don’t understand that simply because a woman may proudly display her goodies, it’s not an open invitation to go in hands-first. Of course, this is a movie that is positively bulging (heh- no, too easy) with voyeuristic moments, though no actual nudity – and it’s interesting to note that, while all the grabby guys get the full brunt of Elvira’s wrath, the teenage boys who peep through her window remain her friends afterwards. Not sure that’s entirely the best message, but hey – the overall point of “look, don’t touch” does come across. Heheh, I just said “come across,” in relation to Elvira’s tits…
(Oh, and one of those teenage boys is the D&D kid from Nightmare on Elm Street 3. As distinctive as his dialogue here is, with his near constant references to Elvira’s “gazoongas,” I still struggle not to shout “I am the Wizard Master!” every time he appears.)
Okay, so it’s hardly one of the greatest comedies ever made, but it’s not trying to be. It’s a simple, schlocky movie intended to keep you smiling for 90 minutes, and in that it’s entirely successful. And like so many unfairly maligned movies of the 1980s like Howard the Duck, it understands there’s nothing more badass than a ridiculous fantasy finale in which the bad guy turns into a monster and shoots magic light beams out of his hands. That really doesn’t happen enough these days.
One of the nicest things about it is, voyeuristic camerawork and swathes of sexual connotation notwithstanding, it’s a curiously innocent, almost family-friendly film (PG-13 in the US, 15 in the UK – the BBFC are a bit stricter about sexual references). This in some ways reflects how Elvira sought to embody a somewhat gentler time than the tits and gore-loving 80s into which she was born. I gather that even in her heyday, Elvira refused to host anything too grisly, preferring the camp and corny creature features of the 50s and 60s – and indeed, the movie opens with her hosting Corman’s notoriously crap-tastic It Conquered the World (it’s little surprise that E:MOTD is itself a production of Corman’s New World Pictures), and later sees her delight the local kids with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. It brings to mind Roddy McDowall’s Peter Vincent in the original (and best, obviously) Fright Night, complaining how the youth of the day had renounced the classic monsters in favour of maniacs in ski masks hacking up young virgins. Of course, almost three decades on those of us who were young whippersnappers in the 80s are in our own way every bit as sentimental about the horror of the era as the thirtysomethings of the day were about black and white creature features, so of course there’s no problem with having an affection for both brands; but movies like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark do remind us of the joys of a type of movie that perhaps doesn’t exist in the same way anymore.
So here’s to twenty five years of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark: a heartfelt love letter to the joys of trash cinema, personal freedom, and big boobies. Many happy returns, Elvira: thanks for the mammar – ahem, I mean memories. And, you know, thanks for the other things too.