everyday is halloween

 elvira: mistress of the dark [1988]

what a goofball movie.  what a lot of lo-blo sex & boob jokes.  what a treasure is cassandra peterson!  peterson's creation elvira is a hyper sexual independent strong woman who dresses like robert smith of the cure wearing almost as much makeup as the venerable singer.  see, elvira, is a television horror host.  she makes all sorts of sexy wisecracks such as when she hurt noggin & she is asked how's her head elvira lets loose this zinger, no complaints yet.  

har har!  okay, the stupidity of the joke is part of the comedy.  peterson is no dummy.  elvira is a dame, as in the old pulp novels, but she is also no dummy.  rather, she can punch out creeps with the best.  which she does plenty of times in this movie.  which goes like this.

elvira is a horror movie hostess in some mid-market TV station whose new fat fuck cowpoke owner attempts to sexually assault the mistress of the dark.  fuck that shit.  elvira stabs the creep using her stiletto heels & tells the boss he can keep his crappy job.  she's lighting out for the wilds of las vegas where she has a gig waiting for her.  she's gonna make it big in las vegas!  the only catch is that she's got to help produce the show & finance it too to the tune of fifty grand.

problem is, of course, she doesn't have that kind of dough.  lo!  she receives a telegram informing her of an inheritance from a great-aunt elvira didn't know she had.  what could she have inherited?  our hero most travel to fallwell, mass. to find out.  which she promptly does in her tricked out black hot rod.  elvira's threads, makeup, wheels, uncompromising sexuality & her wit gets a lot of attention along the way.

of course the township of fallwell [get it!] is a conservative backwater where the local teens are forced to watch only g rated movies at the local theater.  it's stultifying!  elvira being her own kickass self [kickass is her california license plate] stirs up the local populace but she gets all the town's kids to live with a bit more punch.  the kids love her.  elvira falls for a local hunk who owns that local theater.  when she gets her inheritance elvira finds she gets her great-aunt's house, dog & recipe book.  no cash.  no dinero to help fund her show in las vegas.

but there's a catch.  elvira is even more special than she knew.  the honorific mistress of the dark covers a lot of ground.  & the town wants to burn her because they think she's a witch.  that's when elvira's three inherited things reveal their deeper purpose.  

does this flick have a happy ending?  why yes of course.  elvira is the mistress of the dark.  but not too dark.  she unbuckles the town's trousers so to speak & the folk come to love her too.  in the end.  so what about the standard horror movie tropes that would make this a really bad halloween movie.  there's lots of fog, a haunted house, creatures of all sorts, witches, warlocks, magic spells but most of all it has cassandra peterson as elvira who is TV cheesy horror movie host squared.  she's a delight to watch even when you are cringing at the one-liners & yet another boob joke.  as the old folks used to say, they don't make 'em like that anymore.  i hope.

boo