Elvira: Mistress of the Dark
Her fans love her and the bad movie nights she hosts on her low-budget local cable station, but despite her enormous ratings Elvira is not popular with the other presenters or the new owner who immediately invokes her wrath when, like the entitled sleazeball he is, he makes inappropriate and unprofessional comments to her; finding herself out of a job, Elvira is confident she has other options provided she can rustle up $50k to co-finance a Las Vegas show.
The death of her elderly Great-Aunt Morgana Talbot unexpectedly but conveniently summoning her to Fallwell, Massachusetts as a beneficiary of the will, Elvira inherits a dilapidated mansion, a poodle named Algonquin and a bizarre recipe book, as well as the interest of her Great-Uncle Vincent Talbot and the owner of the local movie theatre, Bob Redding, not to mention the ire of local belle Patty who also has her eye on Bob and is not above turning the townsfolk against a newcomer who has no intention of fitting in.
A household name from her television show Elvira’s Movie Macabre which ran for five seasons in the early eighties as well as numerous guest spots where she always appeared in character, Cassandra Peterson took her most famous role to the big screen with Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, directed by Saturday Night Live‘s James Signorelli from a script written by Sam Egan, John Paragon and Peterson herself and originally released in 1988.
Opening with footage of the notorious B-movie It Conquered the World prominently featuring the great Dick Miller, it is clear from the outset that Elvira is a cheesy indulgence which is not to be taken seriously, the comedy broad and the targets wide, though while it is open season on the conservative family values of the uptight township named for the televangelist Jerry Fallwell it’s apparent that Peterson has no fear of sending herself up just the same.
A big fish in a small town who shakes things up when she shakes her tail and other ample assets, the jokes don’t always hit but they are fast and Peterson knows her audience, teenage boys and horror fans, or as the residents would have it, “pinko heavy metal weirdos,” yet despite the nature of much of the then-risqué material she keeps it clean by delivering every innuendo with vanilla naïveté in what is essentially a remake of Footloose without the dancing and dressed in the trappings of Hallowe’en.
The cast including Falcon Crest’s Daniel Greene, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’s Edie McLurg, Babylon 5’s Jeff Conaway, Beetlejuice’s Susan Kellerman and genre legend W Morgan Sheppard as the duplicitous Great Uncle Vince, intent on seizing the power of the Talbot dynasty to become Master of the Dark, Elvira at times feels rushed, as though there wasn’t enough time to allow the cast to get the best out of the middling material, but it knows what is most important and gets in on screen with entertaining efficiency.
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is available on Arrow now
