{Blu-ray Review} Unpleasant Dreams: Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988) on UHD

“Is there anything that could possibly shame you?”

By the time Cassandra Peterson invented the character of Elvira to host the local horror TV show Elvira’s Movie Macabre in 1981, she had already enjoyed a busy and unusual career. Signing a contract as a Las Vegas showgirl at only seventeen, she went on a date with Elvis Presley, appeared in a James Bond film, sung in not one but two Italian rock bands, worked at the Playboy Club, and joined the LA-based improv troupe the Groundlings, to name a few.

The break that would cement her legacy came when she was chosen to replace Larry Vincent, whose character Sinister Seymour had hosted a legendary weekend horror movie showcase called Fright Night until his death in 1975. Peterson made some gothic alterations to a “Valley girl-type” character she had created while working with the Groundlings and the result was Elvira, the character with whom Peterson remains synonymous to this day.

Even if you’ve never watched Movie Macabre, it’s impossible not to know Elvira. From 1981 onward, her prominently-featured cleavage and heaven bump hairstyle were ubiquitous throughout pop culture. Elvira’s likeness was featured on everything from pinball machines to perfume lines, while Peterson herself played the character in Halloween-themed commercials for Coors Light and Mug Root Beer and hosted professional wrestling events.

According to Wikipedia, “Elvira’s popularity reached its zenith with the release of the 1988 feature film Elvira: Mistress of the Dark,” recently put out on UHD from Arrow Video. With a budget of around $7.5 million, the movie was apparently a passion project for Peterson, who was offered an Elvira sitcom with NBC, but described herself as “obsessed with the idea of doing an Elvira movie.”

Peterson co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator and fellow Groundlings alum John Paragon and experienced TV writer Sam Egan, though it was reportedly NBC network president Brandon Tartikoff who pushed for the film’s plot to follow the model of the 1978 film (based on the 1968 song of the same name) Harper Valley PTA.

To wit, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark sees our buxom heroine quitting her show after she turns down the pushily amorous advances of the station’s new owner. (A recurring theme in the film is Elvira contending with sexual harassment, and often finding her forward progress arrested because she refuses to go along with it, just one aspect of this otherwise bawdy flick that would nonetheless be decried as “too woke” if it came out today.)

Desperate for money, it seems that Elvira’s problems are solved when she discovers that an unknown great aunt has died and that she is in line for inheritance. (“I never knew I had a good aunt, let alone a great one,” Elvira quips.) There’s just one catch: Elvira needs to attend the reading of the will, in the distant and extremely conservative town of Fallwell, Massachusetts – likely, if apocryphally, named as a way of poking fun at televangelist Jerry Fallwell.

The resulting culture clash when Elvira rolls into town is predictable, even if you’ve never seen (or listened to) Harper Valley PTA, and it’s not a huge surprise that Elvira: Mistress of the Dark doesn’t have enormous insights to add to its themes of the hypocrisy and repression of Moral Majority-style conservativism, even while Elvira’s horror host persona and the supernatural trappings that the screenplay adds to the mix mean that the proceedings take on the resonances of the still-ongoing Satanic Panic, rather than simply sampling from the scripts of the counterculture and sexual liberation of Harper Valley PTA.

Peterson had previously appeared in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure – similarly a feature film vehicle for a TV personality – and thought that Tim Burton would be the perfect fit for her movie, but he was tied up making Beetlejuice, and the direction by James Signorelli (of the Rodney Dangerfield joint Easy Money) is almost certainly less visually stylized than Burton’s take on the material would have been. Similarly, the role of Elvira’s “Uncle Vinnie” was specifically written for an aging Vincent Price, who passed on it because he “thought it was a little bit racy,” according to an interview with Peterson in Screem magazine.

All of that’s okay, though, because this is really Elvira’s show. Nothing else about the movie is any great shakes, but it’s all there to act as a showpiece for Peterson’s character, who peppers the film with quippy one-liners and all the double-entendres you can possibly cram into a PG-13 rating (including saving its one F-bomb for a visual gag on a marquee).

It’s a reminder that Elvira may be famous for her low-cut gowns and ample bosoms, but it’s really Peterson’s winning charm that made the character a household name. (Not that her bosoms don’t get both plenty of screen time and plenty of jokes, including one Hercules-style scene where she bursts opened locked gates with the power of her bust.)

As always, many of the jokes are at Elvira’s expense, even as she achieves her dreams, takes no guff, and makes no apologies for her outsized personality – a sticker on the bag she carries says “I brake for no one.” Also, because this was released in 1988, Elvira sort of raps in the film’s closing song.

One of the best such gags is when Elvira is manipulating the local high school kids who have become her fan club in Fallwell. The principal at their school has threatened to expel them if they have anything to do with her, one of the movie’s many subplots which go nowhere. Lamenting that their lack of support will torpedo her one opportunity to get a job, she says, “I want you to remember me by two simple words… any two, as long as they’re simple.”