Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2019) As much as I liked 1988’s Elvira: Mistress of the Dark beyond expectations, I find myself curiously underwhelmed by belated follow-up Elvira’s Haunted Hills. Maybe you can’t capture lightning in a bottle twice, or maybe there’s a limit to how much of Cassandra Peterson’s very specific charm one can absorb. Or maybe it’s an inferior follow-up, choosing to take the very contemporary Elvira to a historical setting, cutting corners and speaking roles in an attempt to deliver on a small budget. (Mistress of the Dark wasn’t an expensive production by Hollywood standard, but at least it had the means to tell the story it wanted to tell—there’s a sense in Haunted Hills that it’s a film that compromises a lot.)  The story is familiar, what with Elvira ending up at a haunted east European castle where her likeness adorns the wall: obviously, this is a take-off on well-worn horror tropes except with the Elvira blend of sassiness and sexiness. It works, but not always—some of the dialogue is forced (even in dubbed French, which usually smoothens out those issues), some of the attitude is overdone and the plot itself can’t sustain scrutiny beyond being a snark-delivering mechanism. It keeps going surprisingly long after it should start wrapping things up. Elvira herself is the reason to watch the film or not, and the point of the story should be to place her in situations where the character can do amusing things. Alas, Haunted Hills only does the bare minimum—it’s amusing without being as likable as the earlier film. Elvira spends so much time spouting anachronistic jokes that she should have been in a contemporary setting. The rest is merely piling up lame jokes over familiar plot points and while it’s entertaining, it’s not quite enough.