THE ELF (2017)

Studio:       Uncork’d Entertainment
Director:    Justin Price
Writer:       Justin Price
Producer:  Justin Price, Khu, Deanna Grace Congo, Jennifer George Hall
Stars:     Natassia Halabi, Gabriel Miller, Lisa May, Lassiter Holmes, Viviana Ozuna, Amy Jo Guthrie, Joseph Daniel Ellis, Pat Turner, Margareta Fratila

Review Score:

---

Summary:

A cursed elf doll stalks a troubled man and his fiancée’s family on Christmas Eve.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

A supernatural creature kills a toymaker in the midst of sewing shut the mouths of several children. The creature steals a list of names from the toymaker’s possession.

Years later, Victoria and her troubled fiancé Nick visit an antique shop in Nick’s strangely deserted hometown on Christmas Eve. Victoria finds the toymaker’s empty ledger. Nick discovers a strange elf doll.

The sentient elf doll brands Nick with a supernatural sigil before running away. Nick pockets a ‘Naughty’ list of names after reading a warning about the doll’s curse and an ability to remove one name from the list.

From a shop window, Victoria spots a man shoveling snow outside even though there is no snow on the ground. On their drive to Nick’s family’s former home, Nick stops to help a man in a car crash, but the injured man merely behaves incoherently.

The couple is concerned to find the immobile elf doll waiting for them at the house. Nick reiterates that he never wanted to celebrate Christmas because of a childhood trauma. Victoria repeats her insistence that they spend the holidays with family.

Nick watches Victoria’s name appear on the list. Victoria has to rescue Nick when he becomes entranced by a traumatic flashback to being a boy. Nick moves to leave the house, but is caught off guard by the surprise arrival of Victoria’s father John, mother Stephanie, sister Tiffany, brother Jeremiah, and grandparents.

Victoria’s grandparents leave to run an errand. The elf doll kills them in their car.

Nick and Jeremiah search outside when the grandparents do not return. Jeremiah unexpectedly attacks Nick, claiming that John directed him to do so. The elf doll kills Jeremiah.

John reveals to Victoria that he learned Nick killed his father and stabbed his mother in a Christmas massacre when he was nine-years-old. Victoria still refuses to acknowledge her dad’s concern about marrying Nick.

Nick returns to the house raving about the doll murdering Jeremiah. Because of his troubled mental history, everyone assumes Nick is delusional and homicidal.

Carolers come to the door. The family is shocked when the elf kills the singers with a string of Christmas lights.

Nick privately reveals to Victoria that his toymaker grandfather was feared throughout town as the keeper of children’s souls. Supernatural creatures initiated a wild hunt led by an evil demagogue whose objective was to take these souls to bring into the underworld for sport. Townspeople became cursed unless they bargained to help the creatures. Nick realizes his grandfather sealed children’s souls inside the dolls.

The power goes out in the house. While investigating the breaker, the elf doll attacks John. John eventually stumbles back to his family and later dies in Victoria’s arms.

The doll attacks Victoria’s mom Stephanie. Stephanie takes a phone call from Victoria’s friend Sky and warns Sky that a killer is after everyone. The doll kills Stephanie.

Nick tells Victoria he can save one name from the list, further speculating that the wild hunt is meant to finish off the descendants from the toymaker’s list. Nick realizes that the townspeople encountered earlier were acting weird because they have child minds trapped in aging bodies. Because Nick’s grandfather didn’t complete the list, Nick is next to die.

The doll attacks Victoria and Nick. When Victoria turns on him, Nick discovers that Victoria is also a former townsperson who knew about the curse all along. Victoria tries to get Nick killed so that her name can be the one spared from the list.

Nick and Victoria fight over the list. The doll ultimately attacks Nick and pulls him away.

Sky arrives at the house to rescue Victoria. Before driving away, Sky shocks Victoria by presenting an elf doll as a gift.

---

Review:

“The Elf” brings to mind an episode of “The Simpsons” where Mr. Burns has Homer’s power plant pals star in a corporate video that runs off the rails.  After Lisa points out oddities in the short film’s ridiculous narrative, Homer offers the defense, “well, there were script problems from day one.”  “Didn’t seem like anyone even read the script,” Lisa responds.  Homer quickly counters, “that was the problem.”

We can’t be certain about everyone, but we can at least be sure whoever typed the end credits didn’t read “The Elf’s” script.  Otherwise, s/he would have known that the character credited as ‘Robert Conway’ is clearly called ‘John Conroy’ within the film.  Ditto ‘Marcus,’ whose spoken name is really ‘Jeremiah.’

And who is actor Les Best, who receives fifth billing for playing someone named ‘Delmar?’  I just finished watching the film not long ago and have no inkling of who this person is, nor do I recognize him from his headshot.  Whether this is a failure of the film or of my short-term memory, this gap speaks to how well “The Elf” holds attention spans.

I don’t know if “The Elf” had a full script or just an outline from which actors adlibbed awfully.  Either way, I believe that whatever was on paper, the cast only saw those pages mere moments before their scenes were shot.  That’s the most plausible explanation for why it looks like everyone is making up the movie as they go along.

Killer elf doll takes his sweet time taking down a traumatized man and his fiancée’s pancake-flat family on Christmas Eve.  That’s essentially it.  A few nuggets of nonsense offer some context to the curse, which has something to do with a toymaker sealing children’s souls in dolls, but supernatural creatures on some sort of hunt drove the town into despair before he could finish whatever he was up to.  A ‘Naughty’ list of future victims is in the mix too, with a caveat that one name can be removed somehow.

That’s a lot of someones, somehows, and somethings.  That’s because “The Elf” doesn’t even try to make sense out of its half-baked premise.  I could go into detail about silly story beats and absurd staging that has everyone disappearing inside a small house for preposterous periods of time, enabling the doll to off everyone in single file fashion.  But “The Elf” doesn’t expend enough effort to deserve detailed attention.

Instead, I’m inclined to reduce criticisms to a ‘Naughty’ list of notes.  Let’s get this over with so we can forget “The Elf” as soon as possible.

·      Shots repeatedly fall out of focus.
·      Improper lighting and an overexposed iris fill the screen with milky images, with one instance of glare being so particularly poor, you can see smudges on the dirty lens.
·      Music sounds like those tone tests you used to take in grade school to check for hearing deficiencies.
·      Ten carolers show up to serenade the family, yet only three or four voices are heard, and they happen to be the worst singers this side of “American Idol” round one auditions.
·      Sloppy makeup prosthetics aren’t the same color as anyone’s skin, including one little girl who can’t keep her eyelids still while feigning unconsciousness.
·      One actor has evidently never held a champagne flute before, presenting a glass of wine to another person as if gripping a football.
·      Painful performances come from people you’ve never seen before and will never see again.  If you do, hopefully they learn how to not look directly into the camera next time.

Dead air lingering between every line of dialogue smothers the film in excruciating silence.  To that point, “The Elf” has no sense of how to edit for pacing as every action goes on for four times longer than necessary.

The first post-prologue sequence features the main couple, Nick and Victoria, browsing an antique store for ten laborious minutes.  When they next encounter the doll back home, Nick stares at it until Victoria takes it away.  Nick continues staring at nothingness until the couple moves to the couch to stare at the doll together.  How can anyone not suspect this as stalling while characters/actors wonder what to do next?

One scene of the elf breaking out of a wrapped gift box goes on for what seems like five minutes.  Suspense evaporates in the first few seconds, replaced by sympathy that the poor doll is having such a hard time completing a simple task.  It’s like watching a confused puppy trying to escape after being mummy-wrapped in a large beach towel.

While that would be cruelly inhumane for the animal, it would be more entertaining to watch than this movie, which is cruelly inhumane against viewers.  It’s not like anyone has unreasonable expectations for a microbudget DTV slasher like this.  But it shouldn’t be too much to hope “The Elf” would play like a holiday-themed installment of the “Puppet Master” series.  In a way, it does.  Unfortunately, it’s far closer to the throwaway cash grab crap of current Full Moon movies, not the likably low-budget chills and charm of their 80s/90s heyday.

Review Score:  15

---