A franchise of diminishing returns.
8. Leprechaun: Origins (2014, dir. Zach Lipovsky, 90 minutes)
Some Irish locals trap four American tourists in a cottage as a sacrifice to the Leprechaun (Dylan Postl). But we don’t actually see our guy until fifty-four minutes into the movie. We don’t get a good look until sixty-seven minutes in, and the whole thing only runs seventy-eight minutes (with a twelve-minute credit scene to reach an honest hour and a half). This is disappointing from a franchise that always had good creature design. Here he is hidden in close-ups and shadows. A huge tonal shift from the earlier entries. Director Zach Lipovsky, who uses a Predator cam for POV shots, admitted he isn’t a fan of the franchise. It shows. There is one good scene where one of the Americans swings at Lep but axes a friend in the face instead.
7. Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood (2003, dir. Steven Ayromlooi, 87 minutes)
Four kids from Los Angeles find Lep’s gold, and this time, he doesn’t have any magic powers to help him kill them. Still, he manages to de-leg a cop, tear the heart out of a gangster, and murder a stoner by shoving a bong on his dick. Lots of iMovie transitions. Not much to remember here, except for the kid who wants to replace “nigga” with “ninja.” My ninja.
6. Leprechaun 5: In the Hood (2000, dir. Rob Spera, 90 minutes)
Ice-T steals Lep’s magic flute. Years later, an upcoming, progressive rap group steals the flute from Ice, releasing Lep, who comes out of hibernation quoting Martin Luther King: “Free at last, free at last…” They try to kill him with a clover-laced joint. There’s a Coolio cameo that seems to even confuse the characters. This is a bad movie. “Lep in the Hood, up to no good.”
5. Leprechaun Returns (2018, dir. Steven Kostanski, 92 minutes)
Six college students——one of them the daughter of Jennifer Aniston’s character from Leprechaun——build a self-sustaining eco home on the site of the original movie. Lep (Liden Perco) bursts out of the local retard, whose ghost guides Jen’s daughter throughout the movie. The makeup effects are good but stiff, so Perco doesn’t get much room for facial acting. His lines are also quite bad (“I love the smell of me gold in the morning”). Still, a return to form (and tone) after Leprechaun: Origins. There’s also a great kill, a sprinkler to the throat, which has the blood going tst, tst, tst as it sprays around the room. When Lep is blown up, the pieces turn into mini-Leps who reassemble like Voltron. Which volume of Irish lore did that come from?
4. Leprechaun 4: In Space (1996, dir. Brian Trenchard-Smith, 95 minutes)
Lep is on board a space ship run by a half robot half German and a scorpion man. Like Freddy Krueger in The Dream Master, he is revived by piss. Unlike Freddy, he comes back by bursting out of some guy’s dick (a theme; see Leprechaun Returns). Before getting ejected into outer space, Lep de-legs one guy with a lightsaber and smashes another’s face into the shape of a pizza pie. There’s also a princess who comes from a world where breast baring is a death sentence, like the kiss between Michael and Fredo in The Godfather: Part II. The effects aren’t bad, one step above Troma or Full Moon Pictures. Director Brian Trenchard-Smith finds the right tone for the material.
3. Leprechaun 3 (1995, dir. Brian Trenchard-Smith, 90 minutes)
This time around, Lep’s powers include possession, and his mark is a college student passing through Vegas. There’s a great kill where Lep inflates a woman’s lips, boobs, and butt until they explode (a theme; see Leprechaun 4: In Space and Leprechaun Returns). Another memorable scene has some dude fucking a fantasy woman who turns into a headless robot (with boobs). Despite his advantage, Lep can be killed if you…burn his coins. Which are not shillings, no matter how many times he says they are.
2. Leprechaun 2 (1994, dir. Rodman Flender, 85 minutes)
Lep, who is now for some reason vulnerable to “wrought iron,” gets new skills in the sequel: he has telekinesis and he can make his victims hallucinate. The former comes in handy when he wants to strangle someone with a telephone cord but doesn’t have a free hand. Leprechaun 2 has some of the best kills in the franchise: face into a fan, gold teleported into belly, decapitation by espresso steamer. Also, we get to see Lep’s tongue, which is absolutely revolting. He’s a little OCD about those coins, no?
1. Leprechaun (1992, dir. Mark Jones, 92 minutes)
In an opening that plays like Irish blackface, a farmer steals a pot of gold from a Leprechaun (Warwick Davis). The leprechaun murders his wife, and then the farmer uses a four-leaf clover to trap him in a crate. Ten years later, the local retard——who is written as if retardation were equivalent to eternal childhood——accidentally frees Lep. Lep terrorizes the new occupants of the farmer’s house and also Jennifer Aniston. The movie seems like another attempt to recreate Freddy Krueger (his hand even goes through a telephone) but it misses a lot of opportunities for puns. It also asks for significant suspension of disbelief on Lep’s skill in reproducing the voices of other characters. This without a Scream 3 voice box. Still, Davis is so committed to the part that he sells the whole thing. The kills are also quite inventive: Lep pogo sticks someone in the lungs, and he is really rather literal about that whole “eye for an eye” thing. There’s also a nice moment where he slams his hand on a grill and then pries it off with a spatula. And it provides the first of two characters in the franchise with the line, “Fuck you, Lucky Charms.”
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