I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t follow football, but I completely understand its popular appeal and know the Super Bowl is the highest rated television spot each year. This epic battle between the best teams in the realm comes to its crescendo on the first Sunday in February every year. Although I don’t get particularly excited about the outcome, the crazed enthusiasm for the game reminds me of a treasured film from the vault which I would toss into the arena with the successful mainstream REMEMBER THE TITANS any day. I’m talkin’ about David Webb Peoples’ 1989 glorious postapocalyptic sports flick THE BLOOD OF HEROES.

Sometimes you want a horror movie that will make you think—one that makes you question your beliefs, rattles your soul and keeps you wide awake well after the credits roll.

As with many of you out there, the fright films of the 1980s hold a very special place in the sewers of my heart. One thing that’s great about being a cinephile is the fact that no matter who (or what) you are, there’ll never be validity to your claim to have “seen it all,” and there will always be long-forgotten gems to discover. Some might be criminally obscure and take a great effort to uncover, while others might simply have been at arm’s length all along, but for whatever reason, you just never get around to grabbing them. 1988’s PIN fell into that category.

OK, I just wrote up a Fango Flashback on SANTA’S SLAY, which I jokingly called the best Yuletide horror film ever. (I actually like it, but it isn’t even in the same category as GREMLINS or Bob Clark’s BLACK CHRISTMAS.) So what’s the worst Yuletide horror film? Or, better stated, the best worst Yuletide horror flick? Nope, it ain’t the BLACK CHRISTMAS remake, JACK FROST (not the Michael Keaton flick) or DON’T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS. In my humble opinion, the answer is obvious: ELVES. It’s a 1989 low-/no-budget Christmas flick that has a chain-smoking Grizzly Adams, only one elf (what a misleading title!), Nazis, a cat being drowned in a toilet, an Elf-virgin-sex-Antichrist storyline and a coke-sniffing, lecherous department store Santa being knifed in the crotch by the titular Elves...I mean, Elf. Did I mention Nazis? Like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and TROLL 2, ELVES needs to be seen to be believed.