Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!
You watch a lot of movies, you end up watching a lot of stupid movies. That’s going to be true for each genre, but probably the most when it comes to comedies and horror movies. It’s been some time since I’ve seen anything as embarrassingly dumb as Leprechaun. Known these days at least in part for being one of the first starring roles for Jennifer Aniston, and specifically Jennifer Aniston pre-nose job (to be fair, it was done for medical reasons), there honestly aren’t a ton of reasons to watch it.
It's kind of a shame, too, because there are real horror movies that could be made about the fae that could be absolutely terrifying. Even the “good” fae creatures are often uncaring and capricious, and according to the folklore, the nasty ones are truly horrifying. What we get instead of that is Warwick Davis in heavy make-up riding on a tricycle. And somehow, there’s a Leprechaun 2 and 3, Leprechaun in Space, two Leprechaun in the Hood movies, a reboot, and another sequel.
The folklore that most people know about leprechauns is that they keep their pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, and if you catch one, you can force it to give you the gold. That’s pretty much where we’re going to start with Leprechaun, with the additional caveat that if you capture the leprechaun and take his goal, he’s going to come back at you and kill you to get his gold back. This is precisely how the film opens. A man named Dan O’Grady (Shay Duffin) comes home from a trip to Ireland, telling his wife (Pamela Mant) that they are now wealthy because he caught a leprechaun and stole his gold. Of course, the leprechaun (Warwick Davis) has come back with him. The leprechaun kills Dan’s wife, but Dan traps him in a crate and puts a four-leaf clover on it, which renders the leprechaun powerless.
We doodley-doop 10 years into the future, and the house has been purchased by J.D. Redding (John Sanderford) and his daughter Tory (Jennifer Aniston), who is very much not impressed with the house, the area, or anything else. In fact, the only reason she seems to want to stay is the sudden appearance of Nathan (Ken Olandt), the handsome handyman/painter who is working on the house with his much younger brother Alex (Robert Hy Gorman) and their slow friend Ozzie (Mark Holton). It’s Ozzie who is going to eventually release the leprechaun, who is desperate to find his gold. Of course no one believes that Ozzie saw a leprechaun, but when a rainbow appears in the sky, Ozzie and Alex follow it and eventually locate a bag of actual gold coins. In attempting to determine if it’s real by biting it, Ozzie manages to swallow one of the coins, and this will be important later.
But really, all that happens from this point forward is the leprechaun attempts to get his gold back, and since Alex has found it and lowered it into the well, he’s going to terrorize all of our main characters. J.D. is going to be injured by the leprechaun and he’ll be taken to the hospital, and the leprechaun will follow him…on a tricycle. That’s really where this movie goes. Irish stereotypes and short jokes are honestly about 30% of this movie.
And really, that’s the rest of the movie. The leprechaun is going to injure a lot of people, but the deaths are going to be conveniently limited to people we don’t really care about at all, and in many cases whose names we don’t know. Most of this is going to be predicated by the leprechaun yelling about this gold. It’s worth noting that the bulk of the people he actually kills have nothing to do with his missing gold. He’s essentially killing on spece.
Mixed in with this are short jokes and Warwick Davis doing everything he can to out-Irish the cast of My Left Foot short of pounding a Guinness and shouting “Begorah!” at the top of his lungs. It’s certainly a fun performance, but it’s also virtually impossible to take seriously. Even the kills are often silly, happen off-screen, or don’t feel like they’re all that important for the plot.
Is it a horror movie? Is it a comedy? Frankly, it’s kind of neither.
Why to watch Leprechaun: It’s every alien invasion movie you’ve seen, but with a lot more gore and body horror.
Why not to watch: As usual, everyone makes the wrong choices all of the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment