| Elvira's Haunted Hills | |
| Director: | Sam Irvin |
| Producer: | Mark Pierson |
| Music: | Eric Allaman |
| Cinematography: | Viorel Sergovici |
| Editing: | Stephen Myers |
| Distributor: | The Elvira Movie Company |
| Runtime: | 90 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Budget: | $1.5 million |
Elvira's Haunted Hills is a 2001 American comedy horror film directed by Sam Irvin and written by Cassandra Peterson and John Paragon. It is the second film starring Peterson in the title role (credited as Elvira), after the 1988 theatrical release Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. The film also stars Richard O'Brien and Mary Scheer.
The film opened on the July 5, 2001 weekend at the Laemmle Fairfax Cinemas in Los Angeles[1] after premiering at the International Rocky Horror Fan Convention on 23 June 2001. It was released direct-to-video on 31 October 2002.
In 1851 in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Elvira and her maidservant Zou Zou (Mary Jo Smith), on their way to a can-can revue in Paris, get kicked out of an inn for a slight monetary discrepancy. After making their way out of the village, they are rescued by Dr. Bradley Bradley (Scott Atkinson), who takes them to stay at Castle Hellsubus, in the hills high above the village. While there, Elvira meets the residents—and discovers that she happens to resemble the deceased former wife of his Lordship, the Count Vladimere Hellsubus.
The film was independently filmed and privately funded; Peterson and her then-husband Mark Pierson mortgaged their house and the apartment building they co-owned to raise $1 million, with donations from relatives providing the rest of the budget. It was filmed in Transylvania, Romania, and promoted at film festivals and horror/sci-fi conventions. The film parodies the Roger Corman-directed Edgar Allan Poe films of the early 1960s and is dedicated to the memory of the then-recently deceased Vincent Price.[1] The film also parodies British horror films from Hammer Studios. Mention of this is made on the featurette contained within the DVD of the film. Scott Atkinson's character is clearly evocative of Price, who starred in many of the Poe films.
Elvira's Haunted Hills holds a 69% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 12 reviews.[2] In an unfavorable review, Ty Burr in the Boston Globe rated it as "A sloppy slapstick throwback to long gone bottom-of-the-bill fare like The Ghost and Mr. Chicken."[3]