Elvira’s Haunted Hills
The show must always go on for hard working entertainer Elvira and her sturdy maidservant Zou Zou, on the road to Paris to take part in a titillating revue but finding themselves short of coin and waylaid in the Carpathian Mountains where they are fortunately rescued by a passing carriage, the handsome and well-spoken Doctor Bradley Bradley conducting them to the relative safety and comfort of Castle Hellsebus.
Lady Ema Hellsebus surprised by the additional guests, vocally so, there is a reason for her shock, Elvira appearing to be a doppelgänger of the late Lady Elura, tragic first wife of Lord Vladimere who died ten years before leaving him devastated, a wreck of a man brought low by the curse which afflicts all those of the Hellsubus bloodline, causing them to do strange and unnatural things, their family tree a twisted chronicle of doom and despair.
Was it thirteen years after the time that the Mistress of the Dark haunted Fallwell, Massachusetts that she arrived in Romania, or was it over a hundred years before, Elvira’s Haunted Hills released in 2001 but set in 1851 and unlike many productions taking place in that landscape forever associated with horror and Dracula actually filmed on location in Eastern Europe, adding tangible production value to the modest budget which Stateside shooting could never achieve.
A riot of Gothic romance clichés directed by Sam Irvin and co-written by Elvira herself, Cassandra Peterson, and her long standing friend and frequent collaborator John Paragon, Elvira’s Haunted Hills is heavy on slapstick and pratfalls but staggers forward thanks to an ensemble determined to make the best of the mediocre material, Mary Scheer as the scheming Lady Ema, Heather Hopper as the doomed Lady Roxanna and in particular Scott Atkinson as Doctor Bradley.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show‘s Richard O’Brien seeming somewhat lost in the crucial role of Lord Vladimere, he at least finds comfort in the props he is given in what is structured as a pastiche of the Roger Corman’s Poe sequence, most obviously House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum though with O’Brien at one time donning a pair of dark glasses resembling those worn by Vincent Price in The Tomb of Ligeia and even the opening credits of swirling colours echoing the abstract atmospheres favoured by Corman.
The screaming and swooning tiresome almost as soon as they begin, Elvira’s temporal displacement is simply accepted rather than addressed, though while substantially the same character she is noticeably less kind than previously portrayed, and yet with a few punchy one-liners and knowing in-jokes such as the badly dubbed voice of Gabriel Andronache’s handsome stable hand Adrian and an unexpected musical number there are moments when Elvira’s Haunted Hills almost redeems itself.
Elvira’s Haunted Hills is available on Shudder now
