I watched...
What, you were expecting a SERIOUS post for day 13? Oh, sorry then.
Anyways, most of you should be familiar with Elvira, the buxom horror movie hostess played by Cassandra Peterson for nearly 30 years. If you're not, do a quick wikipedia or youtube search. She was fairly amusing, and I do like what she and the likes of the MST3K crew did with bad films (note: I can see the hate I'm going to get for even mentioning both in the same sentence). Well, it turns out they made a movie based around her in 1988. Yeah, I didn't know there was one either. Kind of wished I hadn't found out to be honest.
The film opens with Elvira quitting her job after the new owner of the TV station she works for sexually harasses her. While wondering about what she will do now since her show will most likely go kaput, she soon discovers that her great aunt Morgana has passed on and is set to leave her with (hopefully) a nice fortune, one that Elvira hopes will help land her a nice gig in Las Vegas. She arrives in the uptight town of Falwell, Massachusetts (no doubt a dig at JERRY Falwell), and her attitude & appearance causes quite an uproar among the quite conservative townsfolk.
I'm not quite sure how to really rate this film. It's stupid. Like, really stupid. And yet, I couldn't quite bring myself to hate it, despite it not aging well at all past 1988. Heck, most of the jokes or gags in here feel like they could have thrown a laugh track behind them and nobody would have noticed. The characters are bland as all hell, especially love interest Bob (who looks like if Lou Ferrigno ate Jose Canseco). The main villains are right out of the "Big Book of Cliches," though I do have to wonder if the character of Patty could be the aunt of the "Mondays" woman from Office Space. It takes the film about 50 minutes to remember that there's an actual plot, which involves her evil uncle trying to steal a book of spells that belonged to her aunt. There's a lot wrong with this.
But like I said above, I really didn't hate this. It's almost SUCH a product of the 80s, that it's almost too cruel to pick on it. Peterson plays her character so obnoxiously over-the-top, that somehow I didn't find her annoying. Then again, it could have been her magnificent...talent, that kept me from turning it off. Even the film's end sequence (which proves that EVERY year in the 80s, you had to get at least one or two films with musical numbers) is sort of charming, even if it does make you want to claw your face off. Heck, maybe that bitchin' suitcase she carried with her at the beginning just made me say "fuck it, I don't care what else happens in this film now. Elvira, your suitcase won me over."
I'm just not quite sure why I didn't completely hate this.
Maybe it's the boobs.
Yeah, it's probably the boobs.
Tomorrow, I try to solve a pesky roach problem with MIMIC.
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