Whether you want to admit it or not, the Leprechaun is a legitimate horror icon. Complain all you like, but the evidence is irrefutable: he’s had a myriad of sequels since he first showed up in 1992; he was vanquished by a final girl who went on to become famous (none other than Jennifer Aniston); the sequels have utilised various gimmicks to try and keep the franchise fresh; he’s suffered the indignity of a gritty reboot that’s missed the point; and, with 2018’s Leprechaun Returns, he even received a legacy sequel that regrettably lost six-time Leprechaun performer Warwick Davis, but managed to retain at least one actor from the original film.
No, obviously it’s not Aniston who returned to face the mean, green motherfucker, but after the atrociously pointless Leprechaun: Origins failed to contain either A) an origin, or B) anything that even remotely resembled a Leprechaun, a return to form was something the franchise needed more than the Lep desires his gold. Cue Astron-6 guy, Steven Kostanski, as he attempts to give the little Irish bugger an entirely new gold standard.
Lila Jenkins is on her way to Devil’s Lake, North Dakota in order to help greenify the house of a brand new sorority from Laramore University. However, while she’s looking forward to making new friends and studying, the area means quite a lot to ger as her mother once lived their 25 years earlier. That’s right, Lila’s mother was Tory Redding who recently passed away due to cancer and who had a history of mental illness as she frequently warned her daughter about the fact that monsters – specifically Leprechauns – are real. The classics keep coming when the cab driver who picks her up is none other than Ozzie Jones, the simple painter who also witnessed the earlier rampage of a killer Leprechaun all those years ago.
While all the foreshadowing is in place, Lila meets her new sorority sisters as the attempt to fix the wreck of a house with solar panels and a pump for the well, but unbeknownst to the high-strung Rose; the booze sodden Meredith and the supportive Katie, the well is the exact place where the Leprechaun was vanquished and after a piece of him vomits out of the watering hole and into Ozzie’s esophagus, it means that the gold loving monster is due a particularly messy rebirth. Before you know it, the girls (and Katie’s ex and his film school buddy) are under siege by a malevolent ginger beastie who desperately needs to retrieve his gold in order to recharge his ailing powers – however, mutilating the odd sorority sister proves to be an acceptable alternative.
Can Lila live up to her mother’s past and vanquish the ginger varmint in buckled shoes one more time – or will the Leprechaun finally get his bling back at the cost of a bunch of mutilated sorority sisters?
I’ll admit I kind of oversold the Leprechaun franchise a little in my opening, but while not a single entry in the comedy/horror series could be even remotely classed as a true legitimate classic, there’s something admittedly endearing about a string of movie that simply do not give a fuck. Various installments seemed to push the title character in weirder and weirder directions that saw him start off killing someone by jumping on them with a pogo stick and then soon progress into absolute lunacy as Vegas, the Hood and even space beckoned. However, ironically it wasn’t the goofiness that proved to be the near downfall of the franchise, but rather the horribly misguided, WWE funded reboot which dropped the jokes and gave us a straight take on the creature that dropped the camp. It was obvious that if the franchise was going to bounce back, a return to its sillier roots was required.
It may seem strange that I’m talking about the salvation of a killer Leprechaun franchise with such gravitas, but you can tell that Steven Kostanski takes the job of reviving the series pretty damn seriously despite the fact he’s made a career out of making dumb-but-self-aware movies. Starting out as co-director and special effects guy of Canadian filmmaking union Astron-6, movies like Father’s Day and Manborg saw that Kostanski had a talent and passion for orchestrating crazy gore gags while spoofing various horror tropes and thus seemed to be a good choice to continue the Leprechaun mantle. Surprisingly, he actually succeeded and delivered something of a franchise high point – not a high bar, I’ll admit – that ignored all of the previous sequels and acted as a direct follow-up to the original that treats its roots with a surprising amount of reverence.
OK, so to the shock of no one, Jennifer Aniston is a no-show, but continuing on with her character’s daughter, Lila, the movie creates a nice link to the first film that’s strengthened further by the presence of Mark (“Hey… it’s Enrico Pallazzo!”) Horton who returns as the gentle Ozzie.
However, what will probably be something of a make or break moment for this new pretender is the fact that Warwick Davis elected not to return as his signature character and there’s a real danger of a Jackie Earle Haley/Freddy Krueger moment. However, I have to say, Linden Porco manages to bear up well to comparisons (although my opinion may have been softened thanks to the God-awful shit poor Dylan Mark Postl had to perform), especially when you consider that to deliver an acceptable Leprechaun performance requires little person status, a passable Irish accent and the ability to be as shrill and annoying as possible. But on top of that, the movie gets to expand the Lep’s bag of tricks to cover some fun stuff. We’ve seen him play “Alien” out of someone’s intestinal tract before, but when he isn’t popping up out of nowhere for comedic effect like Bugs Bunny, he riffs of Army Of Darkness when dismembered chunks of himself each regenerate into tiny clones and continue to cause trouble. Plus we get some cool kills like a bicection by solar panel, or a squirty death by sprinkler – and just to make sure Kostanski hasn’t forgotten about the Leprechaun’s tendency to find unique forms of travel, we get a chase scene where the terrified students are chased by the Lep as he sits aboard a remote control drone.
However, possibly most vital of all, the director ensures that Leprechaun Returns retains the fact that the movie itself is in full knowledge that it’s ridiculous trash, which means even the heroes don’t take themselves too seriously as the script arms them with self aware zingers aplenty.
It’s weird to be discussing what essentially is Leprechaun 8 in glowing terms, but while the film is hardly primed to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being culturally, historically or aesthetically significant any time soon, the fact that it’s a slightly above average entry that could very well be the franchise’s last gives me a strangely nice feeling. While it would have been nice to get Davis back, Porco fills those buckled shoes well enough to shamrock and roll.
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