Tag Archives: leprechaun

REVIEW: Leprechaun: Origins (2014)

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Leprechaun: Origins: UV – WORST MOVIE I SAW IN 2014

This is not a Leprechaun movie. It just isn’t; I don’t care what anyone says.

You sit down to watch a Leprechaun movie with certain expectations which are not to be radically fucked with. You definitely expect a wisecracking leprechaun, you expect some cartoonish kills, and you expect overly-obvious commentary on human greed. Leprechaun Origins ignores all of this. The movie doesn’t even make fun of the Irish. Disgusting. And I don’t want to watch the same movie over and over. I appreciate some innovation. But this is an insult.

Let’s start with the “leprechaun.” Instead of a charming troll-like psychopath, the “leprechaun” in this movie (who, according to the credits, is played by WWE’s Hornswaggle, but there is no way to be certain) is a feral animal incapable of human speech. He doesn’t wear any clothing and he doesn’t do any fucking magic. He sees in infrared like the Predator and he looks like a mixture of a goblin from Lord of the Rings and a baby gorilla. About 95% of the shots of him are shaky-cam jump-scares with some messed-up filter so you don’t even get to really see how fucking worthless he looks.

This drove me fucking berserk. I kept waiting for him to morph into the leprechaun, or for there to be some big reveal that he was the leprechaun’s pet or something. Never happens. You have to wait 38 minutes for him to even show up and then it’s just him chasing four vacationing teens, occasionally snagging one and mauling them.

How about the kills? Say what you want about the Leprechaun movies, but their kills are the epitome of creative splat-stick. Warrick Davis pogo-sticks a guy to death, magically inflates a woman’s breasts until she explodes, launches someone into outer space, impales someone with a bong, and does a bunch of other evil shit that seems dreamed up by a brain-damaged eight year-old. This “leprechaun” just bites and claws people.

What about gold? Remember, the Leprechaun’s murderous lust for gold is the MacGuffin in the old films. There are maybe a combined 20 seconds of gold in this movie. The leprechaun wants it. He sees in infrared, but the gold pops out.

I seriously think WWE was making a monster movie and they just bought the rights to the Leprechaun movies and slapped the Leprechaun name on this crap at the last minute, editing in some bullshit about gold after securing the rights.

To make you feel better, click here for a one minute clip of all the kills from the original Leprechaun movies.

REVIEW: Unlucky Charms (2013)

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Unlucky Charms: F-

Charles Band is the founder, director and lead writer for film production company Full Moon Features. After viewing Unlucky Charms he is also very high on my list of people to punch in the face. This cinematic crap fest sets special effects back about 20 years, while simultaneously bringing us a a jumbled mess of a story and the lesser of the O’Connell brothers, Charlie O’Connell.

The movie starts off with some midget with a fake beard named Farr Darrig sitting in front a green screen consoling a small child. Soon he is joined by 3 other midgets all wearing terrible masks, and we learn that they are 4 mythical creatures that can be called upon to do the deeds of whomever holds the ancient “4 charms”. Well it turns out that the person currently holding these 4 charms is some bitch named Deville who is deathly afraid of getting old. To solve this problem she holds a fake reality TV casting, where 3 strippers and a fat chick get to battle it out to see who becomes the model of Deville’s newest fashion line. However the reality show is just a front for her actual intentions which are to use the 4 demons to steal the girls’ souls so she can stay young.

Once these shitty plot points are established, the demons go around killing the poor strippers with special effects that looked like rejected scenes from the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers. All of this is pretty ho-hum until the director pulls a fast one and enacts one of the worst plot twists in history when the demons suddenly gain a sense of morality and decide that killing the strippers is wrong and they should instead kill Deville.

Now not only is it stupid that evil entities all of the sudden become moral beings, but it also limits the amount of kills in the movie to 1, and it means that I did not get to see Charlie O’Connell killed either, which is 90% of the reason I kept the movie on past 11 minutes.

On the plus side the chicks are hot, even the fat one in a chubby way, and we see some boobs and get the pleasure of watching another O’Connell embarrass themselves on the silver screen.

Overall do not watch unless you are under 12 and can somehow not access porn on the internet.

REVIEW: Leprechaun Back to tha Hood (2003)

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Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood: F-

The fucking Leprechaun movies never end. If howling obscenities at the television actually made shitty movies better, then I turned this into Oscar material the last time I watched it.

This time, the Leprechaun is in the hood again, because one time wasn’t enough. Some friends take his gold, against the advice of the “wise elder” character, and the Leprechaun hunts them and systematically kills them. There’s more weed, rap music, and jokes. The Leprechaun impales some dude with a bong. The whole movie comes off as a repackaging of whatever jokes/ideas they didn’t use when the Leprechaun was in the hood last time.

This franchise is so fucking dead, it boggles the mind. This movie was like watching someone dig up the corpse of their grandmother and move her hands around to make her knit one last sweater. When the movie wrapped up with another cliffhanger ending, I was so depressed that I called in sick to work and got in bed at like 7pm. But I wasn’t really surprised; there hasn’t been any real catharsis in a Leprechaun movie since the first one. The only reason it doesn’t get a UV is because I somehow watched the whole thing.

REVIEW: Leprechaun in the Hood (2000)

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Leprechaun in the Hood: D+

One year, for my birthday, someone got me this movie on DVD. Now whenever it’s my birthday, I tragically think of Leprechaun in the Hood instead of thinking about good things that make me happy.

“Aw yeah, bro, the Leprechaun is in the ‘hood! This shit is gonna be hella dope!” No it is not. If you were that guy who said that at some point: I hate you. The Leprechaun franchise isn’t quite revived with this film. I don’t know how to put it. The near-dead series is awkwardly resuscitated after being out long enough to get serious brain damage only to revive as Leprechaun in the Hood, which is a movie about the Leprechaun in the Hood. The comedy is cranked several degrees and the Leprechaun now kills black people instead of white people. For maybe a combined five minutes, this movie tries to be a horror flick.

Last time we saw the Leprechaun, he was a disembodied, enlarged version of himself floating around outer space. Now we learn that that shit didn’t matter and what really happened was that Ice T captured his ass. Three aspiring rappers get the Leprechaun all pissed off and he stalks them through Compton because they stole his magic flute. There’s a lot of people holding their guns sideways and rapping because the writers didn’t want you forget that we are “in the Hood.” There are about three times as many one-liners and “jokes” as the other four films combined and after the end credits finally fucking begin, you get to see the Leprechaun rapping, which is totally funny if you are totally lame. It is about as amusing as one of those Hallmark cards that play music when you open it.

If you have come this far with the series, you should just watch this so that you understand how bad things have gotten. If you watch it with some friends whilst drinking copious amounts of malt liquor, you’ll be okay.

REVIEW: Leprechaun 4: In Space (1997)

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Leprechaun 4: In Space: D+

I know what you’re asking yourself right now, but allow me to counter with a question of my own: Why wouldn’t the Leprechaun be in space? Huh? Think about that, smarty-pants.

The Leprechaun’s evil has reached intergalactic proportions in this shitfest of a film. He kidnaps a princess from another planet whom he plans to use as a hostage in order to become king of her home-world. Then, some space-marines come along. You know. Space-marines. Like in Aliens and Starship Troopers. They murder the shit out of the Leprechaun, but he manages to sneak onto their vessel in a completely logical manner: When an overzealous marine is urinating on his corpse, the Leprechaun transmigrates his essence into the guy’s penis, which he later violently bursts from once he returns to the ship. That’s right: a dick-stowaway.

By the way, don’t google “dick-stowaway.”

Now that the “in Space” part is taken care of, we can sit back and watch the Leprechaun formula mindlessly unfold. Everything that happens in spaceship sci-fi movies happens; someone gets sucked through the airlock, someone’s spacesuit is ruptured, someone is an android, a self-destruct sequence is initiated. At one point, the Leprechaun genetically mutates one of the crew into a human-arachnid hybrid. He is doused in liquid nitrogen and shattered by a bullet a la Terminator 2, similar to how your will to live should be feeling at this point in your viewing of this abysmal mess.

The rip-offs of the Alien movies are fucking shameless. If space-marines, bursting from a human body, spaceship self-destruct, and hidden androids weren’t enough, the Leprechaun is zapped with an enlarging ray, becomes a 40-foot tall version of himself, and, just like the Queen at the end of Aliens, the protagonist blasts him through the airlock into space after a showdown in the cargo bay. Someone should blast this movie into space. But then, aliens might find the movie and assume it is a representative of our collective culture. Then they would understandably kill us all. Thanks a lot, Leprechaun 4!

The Leprechaun explodes in space and his disembodied hand flips off the space ship at the end of the film for one last fucking lame zinger. Really, he is flipping off the audience as if to say “At no point during the making or execution of the film did we respect you, the audience. Hey audience: FUCK YOU.”

REVIEW: Leprechaun 2 (1994)

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Leprechaun 2: D+

The Leprechaun is unexplainably not dead and the events from the first film might as well have never happened. In fact, this could just be the first film; the plot is almost identical minus some lame prologue.

The audience learns that the Leprechaun is allowed to choose any woman he likes as his bride provided he can make her sneeze three times on his 1,000th birthday. When he fails to score a bride in the first scene, which takes place 1,000 years ago, he vows to marry a descendant of this guy who fucks everything up for him. 1,000 years later, he finds a descendant to the bloodline and decides to make her sneeze and marry the shit out of her.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can roll out the exact same plot/pace/tone from the first Leprechaun film; with each minute, it becomes clear that you are watching a clone of Leprechaun 1 and at no point will it ever stray from the design you have already experienced in that movie. There is more of the same comical carnage. There is more of the same iconic classical Leprechaun-lore contorted to fit into a horror film. They don’t even pretend to give a shit about film making with this one; it reminds me of a stand-up comedian telling the same jokes over and over.

Why doesn’t the movie get an F or UV? There is the establishment of a new trend to appear in this film and the Leprechaun films that follow: the “be careful what you wish for when you get three wishes from the Leprechaun because he will twist your words around to kill that ass” model of kill. This setup becomes a favorite for writers in the coming years and, I suspect, helped to inspire the Wishmaster films (which started a few years later) in which EVERY fucking kill is ironically rooted in “be careful what you wish for” and “ZING, you got your with but you are fucking dead.” This setup is a double-edged sword; these kills are fun because the character flaws of assholes in the movie wind up getting them murdered but they also make the kills super-predictable because you can spot the fatal flaws a mile away once you start watching the movie.

One guy wishes for the Leprechaun’s gold, which the Leprechaun joyfully teleports into the guy’s stomach, stretching his shit out like someone in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Then the dude wishes for the Leprechaun to take his gold back, so, of course, the gold is promptly ripped from his stomach, killing him. ZING! The Leprechaun pogo-sticks on some dude’s chest until he dies, which is awesome. There is shape-shifting, bad one-liners, midgets, and just as much mayhem as the original film. It is still pretty charming, but it doesn’t take much guts to make a horror sequel that so closely mirrors its predecessor, so that’s also why it’s a cut below Leprechaun 1; it took some balls to make the first film, but anyone could follow the formula and cash in on the same basic model of splatstick with minimal (or virtually no) innovation.

I can’t even believe that this shit got a theatrical release, though. What were they thinking?

In Leprechaun 1, they had to use magic and a huge fucking explosion to defeat the Leprechaun. In Leprechaun 2, they attack him with a crowbar and he dies. Aaaaaaand there’s another single gold coin cliffhanger.

REVIEW: Leprechaun (1993)

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Leprechaun: B

Watch Jennifer Aniston and her loser friends get terrorized by an evil Leprechaun. All the ingredients and talismans from classic Leprechaun-lore are there including the 4-leafed clover, rainbows, and pot of gold. Even though this movie about a demonic Leprechaun probably only exists because the writers were scraping the bottom of the how-can-we-make-this-fairytale-character-who-isn’t-in-a-horror-movie-yet-scary barrel, it is a classic and entertaining splatstick. If you’ve never heard of the films, the Leprechaun is a crude and slightly racist midget who loves LOLing at torture and death. He has magic powers which he uses to murder people in ironic and Looney Tunesesque scenarios.

Some 1980’s bro finds a pot of gold in Ireland and the Leprechaun hides in his luggage and makes his way back to the States. He murders the guy’s wife and drives him insane. The bro uses a 4-leafed clover to trap the Leprechaun in a box. Some 90’s bros accidentally free the Leprechaun from his prison ten years later and he immediately begins a killing spree motivated by his misplaced gold.

The kills are cool and the cartoonish tone that the movie takes makes it fun. You laugh while people are injured and killed and the Leprechaun drops numerous puns/one-liners. The comedy is mingled with the horror aspects of the film in a very successful way; there is serious gore, but also a Leprechaun cackling while riding a tricycle. At one point, he even smashes into Jennifer Aniston’s vehicle in a little Leprechaun car. Before he can reclaim all of his ducats, the Leprechaun is killed by a 4-leafed clover / gasoline explosion combo. His little skeleton is proof that he’s been killed. There is a lame cliffhanger involving a single gold coin.

The cult success of this film inspired several sequels and (unfortunately) multiple imitators that tried to capitalize off of the adored elements of the film. All of a sudden, there was a Rumpelstiltskin movie, a “Wishmaster” movie, tons of elf/fairy horror films, and (incredibly) more Leprechaun horror films not associated with this character or franchise.