They’re Still Not Working for Santa: Vincent Guastini and 1989’s Elves

John Campopiano |

Dec 23, 2016

“A lot of what I was doing with the effects

was based on what Rick Baker did on Gremlins.”

-Vincent Guastini

Where on earth are you going to find a Christmas film that contains Santa Claus, Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty, an evil elf, Neo-Nazis, subtle incest, chain smoking, and a ruthless mother who won’t think twice about draining her daughter’s savings account if she misbehaves? Well?

The answer, my friends, and the only answer is Jeffrey Mandel’s 1989 Christmas low budget creature film Elves. It’s a crazy little gem that I find myself re-visiting, with much joy, every holiday season.

Synopsis (from the VHS box art):
An innocent romp in the woods turns into a hellish nightmare when three young girls accidentally awaken an army of evil elves—genetically created by a Neo-Nazi mad scientist during World War II. These hideous creatures don’t work for Santa… they have a special mission: to mate with a virgin and take over the world as a pint-sized master race! Dan Haggerty stars as Mike McGavin, a department store Santa who must expose this unholy force and stop the gruesome terror before the elves destroy Christmas.

Of course one cannot have a film about elves (or, confusingly in this instance, just one elf) without an elf, and that’s where Vincent Guastini, owner and operator of V.G.P. Effects and Design, comes in.

If you’re a horror fan but aren’t familiar with Guastini’s name, you’re sure to be familiar with some of his work. In addition to Elves, Guastini worked special effects and special effects makeup on such films as Spookies (1986), Mindkiller (1987), Child’s Play 3 (1991), Virus (1999), Silent Night (2012), and V/H/S Viral (2014). Guastini also dabbled in television scares with his work as special effects makeup artist on several episodes of the fan favorite series “Monsters.”

Not a horror fan? Not a problem. He also spun his makeup magic, his effects expertise, on adventure-comedies like Dogma (1999) and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and the surreal drama Requiem for a Dream (2000).

Guastini and I got into the Christmas spirit and chatted about Elves in a recent phone interview. Below are the highlights from that conversation which, I’m sure, readers will get a St. Nick-chuckle out of. Also below are some fun behind-the-scenes photos from the set of Elves pulled directly from Guastini’s archive.

Happy Holidaze, everyone!

John Campopiano: So, Elves. Have you been aware of the fact that there’s actually a small cult following for this film?

Vincent Guastini: Well, I’ve got a friend, Mikey Rottela, who went to a screening of the film about a year ago in LA. I was working at the time and couldn’t go, but he kept saying to me, “Dude, you should go, they’re having a screening of Elves!” I just didn’t get why people enjoy that film. Now I get the appeal because it’s one of those movies it’s so bad it’s good. But I remember at the time when it came out and for a while afterward I was, to be frank with you, a little embarrassed that I had worked on it (laughs). The effects didn’t really come out the way we had planned. It’s like the effects were on the same levels of movies like Ghoulies, and at that point (early on in my career) I didn’t want to be known for doing those types of effects.

On the set of Elves; Photo by Vincent Guastini

JC: How did you get involved with this production in the first place?

VG: At the time I had a friend, Patrick Denver—son of Bob Denver from “Gilligan’s Island”—and he lived in Colorado and was somewhat familiar with my work. (I had gone out to Colorado before Elves and worked on a feature called Mindkiller). This was back when I was first starting my career in the early ’80s. That’s when I first met Patrick who was just getting into effects around that time, making somewhat crude latex masks and things like that for other local, Colorado companies. It was still early in his career, too. One of the companies he was working for, I believe, was called Windstar.

In those days Windstar was doing a lot of car commercials in Colorado, but they were also getting into making low budget feature films, primarily horror films, like Elves and alien films like Alien Seed with Erik Estrada. So, at that point Patrick went to the company and said, “I’ve got a friend in New Jersey with a shop and I’d really like him to design, construct, and ultimately build the elves for this movie you’re putting together.” He found a little money and came out to the East Coast where we started to build these elf puppets.

JC: So you were really the guy conceiving of these elf creatures and bringing them to live?

VG: I sculpted the main elf and had Ken Brilliant sculpt the bigger elf for the close-up shots. I figured that the filmmakers would want to do some close-up shots of the face and wanted to make sure the elf head could look as good as possible with full articulation and expression. I tried to be as ambitious as possible with the effects on this film. We then pieced the animatronics (done by a guy named Ken Walker) together at my shop in New Jersey and shipped that big, close-up hero elf head out to Colorado.

Giant elf head; Photo by Vincent Guastini

The main hero elf puppet that was used was actually the one I built. It was essentially half-rod, half-puppet and had cable controls. It’s the one you see mostly in the movie in conjunction with the close-ups of Ken Brilliant’s larger elf head. But, you know what, we had ALL of these other type of effects like dummies, other puppets, a radio controlled puppet, little insert heads and legs, etc. We did everything you’d do if you were shooting, for example, a low budget version of Gremlins. The one puppet they ended up using the most, unfortunately, was the one I made.

JC: Why was that unfortunate? I sense a story here…

VG: One of the cables in the lip of the elf head broke the night before it was supposed to be filmed. What happened was I was using a dremel to try and fix one of the cable mechanisms inside the face, but the dremel got stuck on the rubber and ripped the entire face off! I sat up all night trying to patch it back together. So, not only did I ruin the puppet but I also ruined the integrity of what the sculpture once looked like—and this was going to be one of our main puppets.

But I figured, “Well, I guess this will be OK. We have other puppets. This will be the sideline puppet and won’t be the main one. They can use it for quick shots.” I had patched the face good enough so that, if they did shoot it they wouldn’t be able to tell that it had been ripped apart by a drill (laughs). But, to my horror, when I finally got the movie back and saw it for the first time, my puppet was the primer puppet—the one that was most used. One of our crew members, Michael Rios, actually gave that puppet the nickname “Patches” because I had patched that face back together with latex after accidentally ripping it off. Patches ended up being the star of the movie!

Patches the Elf; Photo by Vincent Guastini

JC: It must have been exciting for the cast and crew—and even the Colorado Springs locals—to have Dan Haggerty in town.

VG: Dan Haggerty was a big idol of mine because, when I was a kid, I used to watch “Grizzly Adams” all the time. He actually ended up befriending me on the film. I remember sitting in his car listening to music. But I wasn’t really the type of guy to get high, but I knew that Dan was very much into getting stoned, so we did smoke a little pot in his sports car and we listened to CDs and all that.

So, there was this one time—and this was the craziest thing I saw him do—when he came on set in the middle of the scene, he fell and a giant cloud burst out of his back pocket and enveloped him like a shield. It was like a forcefield in one of those fighting machines from War of the Worlds. It dissipated and ended up being a decent amount of coke.

It exploded all over the set! He looked like Santa in one of those snow globes. So, we all just sat there with our mouths wide open and thought, “Well, OK, Grizzly Adams is doing snow… for real.”

Dan Haggerty in Elves

JC: Speaking of snow, did you guys actually shoot in the wintertime? It looked like you guys were working in some frigid Colorado temperatures…

VG: I believe it was, yes, because I do remember it being cold. I’m in the film, actually! I appear in a scene with Michael Rios. There’s a part in the beginning of the film when Dan (Haggerty) is heading to the mall and there’s a small band of musicians playing music outside on the sidewalk, and that’s me and another crew member. It’s a small scene of us portraying one of those bands that play music for spare change around Christmas time. (I believe I was the one playing a tuba). It was our little cameo in Elves.

On the set of Elves: (Left) Vincent Guastini; (Right) Michael Rios.

Author’s note: While conducting research on Vincent Guastini’s previous work, I discovered that he also worked on Blades, a tongue-in-cheek horror/comedy about a lawnmower running rampant and wreaking havoc on a New Jersey golf course. This Jaws-inspired homage was eventually picked up and distributed by Troma. If you must know more about Blades, check out my 2015 Dread Central interview with the film’s director, Thomas Rondinella.

Categorized:News Retrospectives