Elvira’s Haunted Hills(2001)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

One night, Vladimere (Richard O’Brien) is awoken by the angry voice of his late wife, Elura (whom Elvira [“herself,” a.k.a. Cassandra Peterson] strongly resembles), so he wanders out into the hallway and sees Elura in spectral form giving him a look of displeasure. He screams in terror, awakening his wife Ema (Mary Scheer), his psychiatrist Dr. Bradley (Scott Atkinson), his niece Roxana (Heather Hopper), Elvira, and her servant Zou Zou (Mary Jo Smith), and they all come out into the hall. However, by the time they do so, Elura has disappeared, and Vladimere almost tells them what he saw, but ultimately opts not to, instead writing it all off as a dream. He then goes into another one of his trances and starts speaking gibberish, but Elvira snaps him out of it by kneeing him in the groin. After Elvira helps Vladimere back to his feet, he takes notices of the large diamond ring she found in her room and put on her left hand and is very startled by it, and he soon explains to Elvira that that ring is Elura’s wedding ring and that she was buried with it on. He immediately comes to think that Elura is alive, and seeking proof of this, he goes out to the graveyard to dig up Elura’s coffin and see if her body is in there, and everyone else comes along with him. To everyone’s surprise, the coffin turns out to be empty, and moments later, Roxana suddenly falls down (apparently) dead. Ema suggests that they make use of the coffin and put Roxana into it, so they take her and the coffin into the castle and do just that. When Vladimere remarks that he wishes that he was in there instead of Roxana, Ema says without thinking that she wishes the same thing. Then, when everyone but Vladimere turns their attention away from Roxana for a few moments, Vladimere watches as a fly lands on Roxana’s nose and she flicks it off with her right hand. Disturbed, he shuts the coffin’s lid on her.

Later on, Elvira sneaks out to the stable to meet with Adrian (Gabriel Andronache), the handsome stable master, and they have sex. As she sleeps afterward, she has a dream where she first witnesses Elura having sex with Vladimere’s brother, Nicholai (Remus Cernat), then sees their tryst getting interrupted by a mysterious cloaked figure, who beheads Nicholai with a sword before grabbing Elura and walling her up inside one of the castle’s walls, just like in a bad dream that Elvira had at the start of the film except that SHE was the one getting walled in. The terrified Elura then screams for Elvira to help her, startling Elvira awake. Suspecting that Elura did not die of suicide like she was told and wanting to investigate the source of her dream, Elvira goes back into the castle and takes Vladimere’s key off his body while he is sleeping next to Roxana’s coffin, then heads towards his secret passage behind the fireplace so she can use the key to open the door to the dungeon that lies at the end of it. Roxana suddenly rises from her coffin and pursues her, but she gets locked out of the passage once Elvira has entered it. Elvira gets into the dungeon and finds Zou Zou gagged, chained, and locked up in a cage suspended from the ceiling, having been kidnapped by the mysterious cloaked figure while Elvira was with Adrian.

As she goes to free Zou Zou, Elvira tells her that, based on her dream, Elura was buried alive down here somewhere and she thinks she knows who did it. However, Vladimere – having awoken and followed Elvira here – suddenly surprises her, and he asks Elvira how she and Zou Zou got down here because this dungeon has been locked for a hundred years. Elvira doesn’t believe him, though, and she accuses him in a roundabout way of having been down here before, but he tells her that he has never set foot in this place once. As Elvira points out that he was the only person with a key to this place, he explains that this place is where his murderous great-great-grandfather, Lord Lucian Hellsubus, committed acts of unspeakable torture on numerous innocent people. Just then, they hear wailing coming from behind a bricked-up section of wall nearby, and Elvira tells Vladimere that she recognizes this brick wall as the same wall from her dream. She thus picks up a sledgehammer and partially smashes it open, and behind it, she finds Elura’s skeletal remains. She then accuses Vladimere of being the one who killed her, and Vladimere – who has gone under his trance again – stares at Elura’s remains and says that he had to kill her because she was going to leave him and the castle, and no one in the Hellsubus clan can ever leave, as he earlier told Roxana. He then admits to Elvira that he had planned on burying Roxana alive as well because she wanted to leave with Elvira, and that her “death” was actually just a bout of catalepsy, a condition that completely parallels the look of death that she inherited from the Hellsubus family line. He also admits that burying people alive is another thing that the Hellsubus family does. Then, thinking that Elvira is Elura, he declares that it is now time for him to send her back to Hell, after which he starts chasing her. However, when he does get a hold of her, she knees him in the testicles again, and the force of the blow renders him catatonic.

Elvira then hears the dungeon’s door opening, and after she hides from view, she sees Ema and Dr. Bradley entering the room together. As she looks at Vladimere’s body, Ema confesses aloud that, like Elura before her, she has cheated on him, and Dr. Bradley himself is her paramour. Bradley then checks Vladimere and sees that he is unresponsive, and Bradley remarks that, with him now insane (which they have been trying to get him to become), they are now in complete control of the Hellsubus family fortune. Elvira tries to sneak past them and get back up the stairs, but she steps on a creaky stair and gets caught.

The next morning, Adrian enters the castle telling Elvira that he has her carriage ready to take her to the nearest train station, and when she doesn’t respond, he starts to look around for her. By this time, Ema and Bradley have tied Elvira to a stretching rack, and as they start to use it, Elvira’s screams cause Vladimere – who is sitting right next to her – to emerge from his catatonia. However, whatever sanity that he had left is now completely gone because he now thinks that Ema is Elura and Bradley is Nicholai. He first knocks Bradley out by wrapping his hands around his neck and repeatedly slamming the back of his head against the wall, then he locks Ema in an iron maiden. In an attempt to save herself, Ema points at Elvira and yells that SHE is Elura, so Vladimere takes Elvira into another room and ties her down to a stone table with a giant pendulum axe swinging above it. As it starts to lower down onto her, she screams and cries for help, and Adrian thankfully hears her cries and follows them until he finds and opens the secret passageway and then the dungeon. However, he has trouble breaking down the door of the room that Elvira is in, so Elvira uses her ingenuity and saves herself by having the pendulum axe cut the rope over her breasts when it gets down low enough. She then gets off the table, but when she tries to run away, Vladimere stops her and tells her that she will never escape him. At that moment, Elura possesses Elvira’s body, and after telling Vladimere that HE will never escape HER, she starts fighting with him. He soon gains the upper hand, but before he can do any serious harm to Elvira/Elura, Roxana appears and jumps on his back and starts clawing at his eyes. As they struggle with each other, Elvira regains control of her body, but soon after, she watches as Vladimere throws Roxana off him and down into a nearby pit, where she is crushed to death on some gears. Vladimere then stumbles around bleeding from his eyes until he lays stomach-down on the table to try to compose himself, but moments after he does so, the pendulum axe fatally bisects him at the waist.

Adrian then finally gets in and embraces Elvira, but another earthquake starts up that is worse than any of the ones before it, so they hurry in the direction of the exit, freeing Zou Zou along the way. Bradley regains consciousness and makes his way out as well, abandoning Ema in the process, and he heads upstairs to gather up all the family jewels that he and Ema earlier found before he makes his escape. However, after he gets them, he falls into a fissure created in the main stairwell and then gets fatally sandwiched between the two parts of the stairwell when they suddenly come back together. Meanwhile, Elvira, Zou Zou, and Adrian get out of the castle and get a safe distance away from it, but then Adrian hears Ema crying out for someone to save her, and he tells Elvira that he must go back in and rescue her because he is her illegitimate half-brother. Unfortunately for him, he gets crushed by falling stones just after he re-enters the castle. Moments later, Elvira and Zou Zou watch as the castle breaks apart and sinks into the ground, and afterward, Elura’s spirit appears in the sky and thanks Elvira for freeing her.

As Elvira and Zou Zou are walking down a lonely road that night, a carriage comes passing by them, so Elvira flashes her breasts in order to get the carriage to stop so they can hitch a ride (despite having just vowed to never hitch a ride in a strange coach again, given that that is how they ended up at Castle Hellsubus in the first place). An English gentleman (Jerry Jackson) gets out and offers her and Zou Zou a ride, and the ladies agree to come with him. As they go, they tell the gentleman all about their experiences in Castle Hellsubus, but he replies that they couldn’t possibly have visited that castle because it was destroyed 100 years ago. As a horrified look comes over both their faces, we see that Vladimere is the coach driver, and he starts to laugh maniacally.